The US Black Movement Hits a Snag

 In this time of Donald Trump, following the 8 years of Barak Obama, Blacks in the United States have been struggling to come to terms with the gross turn of public policy leadership. Cornel West,[i] in an article published yesterday in The Guardian, has attacked Ta-Nehisi Coates, who writes for The Atlantic as a neo-liberal Black writer whose pessimism in his latest book[ii] only reinforces White Supremacy. It is possible that, if you are a White Canadian, you have never heard of either of the two. However, they are major figures in the Black world.

 So far, the tremors have had perhaps little reverberation in Canada or Quebec, but they are significant in the United States and deserve our attention for what they could mean for the future of Black lives everywhere in the struggle against White Supremacy and justice for Blacks, Women and Indigenous peoples. Coates argues that White Supremacy is a founding principle upon which the United States is built from the very beginning and that it is unlikely that the Race issue will go away. Nor will the issues that turn upon Race, issues such as grinding poverty, exclusion, lack of housing, education etc. Cornel argues that the issues are complex including analysis of the economy, militarism and a host of other factors and that we must maintain our conviction that resistance is worth the effort.

I am not an expert in Race analysis. But I have read widely and to see someone of the stature of Cornel West take on an icon of the interpretation of Black life in the United States such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, leaves me breathless. The debate must continue; other voices must be heard. 

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[i] He has taught at Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Union Theological Seminary.

[ii] We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.

MORE ABOUT TRUMP AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

More than once I have called Trump “crazy as a fox.” In trying to make sense of the “fox” part, I went back to Howard Zinn’s, The Peoples’ History of the United States. In chapter 3 he says that at the end of the 17^th century and into the 18th, the very rich were most afraid of an alliance between the poor white servant class, Black slaves and Indians. They drove a wedge through racism and through giving small concessions to small merchants and planters. They found a solution, he says in chapter 3, in racism.

 

“Racism was becoming more and more practical. Edmund Morgan, on the basis of his careful study of slavery in Virginia, sees racism not as ‘natural’ to black-white difference, but something coming out of class scorn, a realistic device for control. ‘If freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done. The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous black slaves by a screen of racial contempt.

“There was still another control which became handy as the colonies grew, and which had crucial consequences for the continued rule of the elites throughout American history. Along with the very rich and the very poor, there developed a white middle class of small planters, independent farmers, city artisans, who, given small rewards for joining forces with merchants and planters, would be a solid buffer against black slaves, frontier Indians, and very poor whites.” 

Could it be that Trump is trying to play this card today: playing poor whites and small businessmen against Blacks and Indians in order to keep attention away from the controlling mechanisms of the super-rich?  If so, the only problem is that this isn’t the 18^th century! It may work in certain sectors, for a while. But, ultimately it is doomed. Doomed because the so-called radicalized right is nowhere near capable of carrying the day and the small businessmen, the Blacks and the “Indians” are not nearly as helpless as they were back then. Trump's attempt to divert attention from the super-rich by setting other sectors against each other cannot work for long. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool them all – for long.

FURTHER: The following references are of interest:
Nancy Isenburg, White Trash, 2017
Jean-Claude Revet, "Les leçons d'histoire de Charlottesville,"  Relations, 792 (Septembre-Octobre, 2017), p. 5.  Jean-Claude is chief editor of the revue.
Scott Kine, "My Reflection on a Culture in Crisis,: the Ecumenist, 54, no. 4 (Fall, 2017). This is a book review of J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, 2016. 
 

Emptiness

Many of us spend much of our life organizing ourselves so that our time is well occupied. This becomes more evident when we reach the age of retirement. We look for things to do: volunteering, visiting friends, tourist trips, reading. Some of us find ourselves watching more television, going more often to the movies or concerts. Much of this is both enriching and meaningful. But, how many of us spend time doing nothing: I mean just being still, not even thinking, paying attention to what “comes to us?”

I have been reading some of the correspondence of John Howard Griffin. You will remember that he wrote “Black Like Me” after ingesting, in the 1960s, a chemical that turned his skin black. He then spent about a month living as a Black man. His book caused a sensation in those days of the struggle for civil rights. What is perhaps a little bit less known is his struggle with the aftermath. The chemical wore off but provoked a cancer, diabetes, severe heart problems.  He endured years of extreme pain, blindness, and amputations. Through it all he displayed an enormous humanity. He did not at all see himself as a hero. Quite the contrary he was very conscious of how he rebelled against his fate.

All this leads me to consider what is at the heart of the human condition. Most of us want our lives to be meaningful. But what about those times, years, when there is no sense that what we are living through has any meaning at all – either for ourselves or for others: Times when we are totally isolated, in pain of one sort or another, feeling perhaps even that we are a burden to others?

In the Christian tradition, there is a strain – one I often refer to – that insists that God is the ultimate source of goodness and meaning in our lives. We live for the encounter with that ultimate “ground of being,” as Paul Tillich, used to refer to it. Yet, God is also always well beyond us, a call that draws us but to which we never really “arrive.”  Victor Frankl, a psychoanalyst, survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and a friend of Griffin, referred to this journey in his book “The Search for Meaning.”

In this context, the experience of God can only happen when we have been emptied of everything else, everything that could distract us, everything that could take God’s place. St. Paul refers to this in the letter to the Corinthians when he speaks of Christ’s kenosis, of how the Divine Word did not cling to divinity but came among us as human, divesting itself of all the divine prerogatives even to the point of death and death on a cross.

It is very hard, in practice, to actually make the option for emptying, that is to say, accepting that, at some point and at some level, what life offers us is empty and emptiness, and that we opt to embrace that emptiness as the threshold to the presence of God.

I remember a priest from Colombia giving us a talk long ago about how to deal with the enormous physical and psychological violence that was consuming Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. He suggested that we might be tempted, as indeed I was and at a very deep level, to feel that God was absent. No, he said, this is precisely the time when we should be attentive to God’s presence, in that deep and very dark void. For it is only there that the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, will be found.  Easier said than done!

Yet, he was right and still is. Those who embrace that path manifest enormous strength and provide hope for others. It is a privilege to meet such people along the way of life and it is even more a gift to be able to make the same option.