‘Cultural Thinning’ and Other Costs of Progress: The Ebbing of Our Blackness….

 

The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.

 - Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Practices, Responsibilities (1973)

 

 

Our future is greater than our past.

 - Ben Okri, “Turn on Your Light” (1999)

  

My kids are significantly less Black than me, as I was compared to my forebears. Such is the path of progress, and of its cost. Of course, we’d like to think of this progress as linear and complete, but history, despite our attempts to ignore or reframe it in convenient ways, suggests otherwise.…

I was reminded of this today as I read a fascinating and important book: Prof. James W Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me. As he deftly and definitively parses and pierces the myths of our history, the Professor also prompts reflection. I’m about to tackle Chapter 5, which he’s entitled “Gone With The Wind” to frame his exploration of “The Invisibility of Racism in American History Textbooks.” Pray for me.

I’m still recovering from its predecessor, “Red Eyes,” his fileting survey of our country’s shameful and genocidal treatment of Native Americans. Yes, despite its being glossed over, I knew that our country’s ‘real history’ with respect to ‘American Indians’ was horrific, but surveying it in detail is at once frightfully enlightening, completely enraging and powerfully dispiriting: truly, with respect to our history, we Americans are People of the Lie.

When, in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, you explore and embrace the truth of who we are and how we’ve come to be, it’s a wonder that People of Color aren’t more enraged than our country is finally realizing us to be.…

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time – and in one’s work. And part of the rage is this: it isn’t only what is happening to you. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country. And their ignorance.

 - James Baldwin (1961)

Among Prof. Loewen’s themes in exploring this aspect of our history is that, as is typical, our texts do so from a particularly self-serving and Eurocentric perspective. But if we consider it through ‘Red Eyes,’ the experience of the Other – in this case, Native Americans – then we’ll see a decidedly different picture that forces us to reconsider the truth about our history and our society. As he observes:

Indian history is the antidote to the pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that European Americans are God’s chosen people. Indian history reveals that the United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this – not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not reek harm again. We must temper our national pride with critical self-knowledge.… History through red eyes offers our children a deeper understanding than comes from encountering the past as a story of inevitable triumph by the good guys.

Further, he notes that in the past half-century “the United States is beginning to let Natives acculturate successfully, albeit on Anglo terms” and yet “this poses a new threat to Native coexistence,” which is that “it is much harder to maintain the intangible values that make up the core of Indian culture.” In other words, ‘progress,’ no matter how ultimately beneficial, still comes at an appreciable (cultural) cost.

So it is in my own family, and, I suspect in yours, too: as we move into the future and away from the past, we evolve, developing new experience-based cultural components and leaving behind those that no longer serve our purpose as well even if we treasure them.

My sister Maria can bake Aunt Bert’s roles very well … but nowhere near as perfectly as my late, great great aunt. I consider myself a grill master … but I can’t even approach much less touch Uncle Web’s gift for barbecue: no restaurant will ever pay me for the recipe for my secret sauce. Even more, in this modern era of too busy lives, who’s got the time to tend the meat all day as it cooks ‘low and slow,’ lovingly basting and turning it every five to ten minutes while listening to the Tigers game on the radio?

I can cook some hella collard greens and will argue that my fluffy mashed potatoes are better than my elders’ … but I’ll never be able to delight my grandchildren with the savory experience of Sweet Georgia peaches and cream for breakfast or of fresh, hot, sweet and delightfully sticky Krispy Kreme donuts and an ice cold glass of milk or the sheer delight a cold Coca-Cola on a hot southern day as my maternal grandmother did. I can only aspire to delight them in other ways.

Which is the point: of necessity, the experience of those who follow us will be different, no matter how important we believe the need to appreciate our history and that of our elders to be. No, I’m not as Black as my parents and grandparents, whose lives were shaped (if not largely defined) by Jim Crow America. Thanks to their sterling example and advocacy, I’m a child of the American mainstream, having benefited greatly from the opportunity to experience life beyond the cocoon of the African-American community solely.

But I’m still Black, as our fundamentally and structurally racist society reminds me virtually every day. So though I’m not Black in the way of my forebears, I'm still very much The Other. In other words, I’m doing Black differently … as will my children and grandchildren relative to me. This cultural evolution – which feels more like ‘cultural thinning,’ as it does reflect some appreciable amount of assimilation – is both natural and lamentable, but inevitable if one seeks a better life in this society or any other. We want to believe that we can stay the same and have the world appreciate and celebrate us for who we choose to be and are, but this isn’t the way it works: the world doesn’t meet us on our terms, we meet on its….

Among the impacts of this meeting is that we lose parts of our history as we live into a new one. Truth be told, despite our reflexive wistfulness, meaning has always been transitory: for example, what it meant to be Black in America in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries is very different from its meaning in the last third of the twentieth and more different still than what it means today. And, more accurately, we should always speak of the range of any such cultural association, because it’s just as if not more so true today that there’s no one way to be Black as, it was two hundred years ago when, though the vast majority of us were enslaved, a few of us lived free.

Being Black will be different for my children than it’s been for me, which is actually a good thing despite my now joining the unbroken line of ancestors bemoaning the loss of critical aspects of our unique racial culture and history. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve instructed them in the ways of the Black Experience throughout American history, and especially that of the last more than half-century of my lifetime, but, admittedly and of necessity, they carry this far more lightly than I do.

As much as I may want them to appreciate, value and revere the victories that’ve afforded them such relatively privileged lives, it’s the nature of this different and better experience not to be overly burdened by a decidedly less affirming past. As much as I may decry that they ‘just don’t get it’ with respect to how lucky they are to be living in this more enlightened (but by no means completely so) time … yet couldn’t – or didn’t – my parents say the same of me?

 

It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

 - Soren Kierkegaard, Journals IV A 164 (1843)

It’s funny, but perhaps this inevitably partially unfavorable perspective on our heirs is itself a reflection of the double-edged gift of history: on the one hand, we want to respect it and carry it with us, and yet, on the other, in order to live fully into the future, of necessity we must leave some or most of it behind. Such is the tension of generational progress….

So it’s incumbent upon me to accept that my kids are no less Black than me – and thus not lesser – but they’re Black differently, which is actually a good thing. It’s the privilege of the present to live fully in it and into it, guided by the past but not confined by it. So as I lament that my kids have lost so much cultural treasure – though I’ve gotten them to eat it, none of them can cook traditional African-American cuisine as I learned to do (partially) in my youth – I also have to accept that they’ll gain so much more. So I won’t be able to define what their version and experience of Blackness is – and therefore come to peace with it in the present – and will likely question its value in some appreciable part: who among us hasn’t turned into our parents and lamented this ‘music’ these kids listen to today?

This being said, perhaps my father’s example is instructive here: even though he preferred the old, ‘classic’ stuff, he did make the effort to stretch himself and understand the new sounds of the 70s, be they R&B or rock. Now it’s my turn to stretch … though, truth be told, clearly I’m not quite as open because I just can’t get to almost any of this rap music nowadays (says the former DJ).

So, too, with my mother’s example: she pushed me out of the protective womb of our comfortable Black middle class existence into the great unknown of elite white educational institutions and the virtually exclusively white business world while being well aware of the risks of this proposition but remaining convinced of the greater benefits to be garnered. Her faith in the future and in me have propelled me ever since while largely proving her right: it hasn’t by any means been a perfect life, but it’s been an objectively blessed one and appreciably better than those afforded to her or any of the elders who’ve come before me.

It’s this understanding, experience and perspective that now compel me to (re-)gift this to her grandchildren and other progeny. I can only hope that their experience of Life, and of Blackness, is ever better than mine, though it will most assuredly be different (and not lesser). Cultural thinning, it turns out, is an illusion: while our history is important, it doesn’t define our future, though it should inform it. So our Blackness, of necessity, will evolve, which is a very good thing indeed. Though it may appear to successive generations of elders as less essentially Black, it’ll nonetheless represent an effective adaptation to an ever-evolving world.

So while I may lament that my kids will never experience the gustatory delight of Aunt Bert’s rolls, I pray that their kids will develop a similarly sacred experience in their own time. And I’m also pretty sure that they’ll likewise join me in the unbroken ranks of ancestors who shake their heads at this music these kids listen to today.…

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

 - John F Kennedy, “Address in the Assembly Hall at Paulskirche” (1963)