To Be a Negro in This Country and to Be Relatively Conscious....

Don’t push me, ’cause I’m close to the edge.

I’m tryin’ not to lose my head.

It’s like a jungle sometimes.

It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under.

- Melle Mel, et. al. (1982)     

In a mood today: I’m supposed to be writing a business-focused piece, but I just can’t get into it (yet, I hope, ’cause somebody’s payin’ me to write it and tuition’s due soon…). Made the mistake of starting my day by reading Scott Kurashige’s The Fifty-Year Rebellion, about the realities of social, political and economic life in my hometown, Detroit, in the half-century after the ’67 riots, which, because I’m a glutton for punishment, I followed up with the first few pages of Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race. Now I’m all pissed off about injustice and not as inclined as I need to be to help the owners of Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) firms realize that it’s in their economic interest to embrace the Diversity so lacking in our industry.

It didn’t help that I tuned in to the 8 o’clock service at my beloved St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and, on this first Sunday of Black History Month, initially the experience felt decidedly white, ‘honky’ even. While supposedly reading along with today’s Scripture, in my head, I was actually composing an email to my dear friend and spiritual advisor the rector to encourage a rethinking of the approach to this unique time and opportunity, both in our annual calendar specifically and in our society more broadly. Then our guest preacher, a man whom I respect greatly, began to tie the ancient wisdom to the realities of today and began to challenge us on our preference for light over dark in our spirituality as well as our society, which plays out as white over Black in the latter.

OK, thanks, Peter: you saved me from going deeper into my frustration and encouraged me to choose the path of reconsideration and potential reconciliation instead. So here goes.…

America, we have a problem: our country is virtually completely addicted to White Supremacy. So much so, in fact, that we accept what is white and Privileged as normal and force the rest of us to argue and persuade that it’s not. For example, the actual insurrection of a month ago is treated not as criminal but as a perhaps misguided expression of the deep frustration that so many of our (white) fellow citizens feel. Funny, but I remember a distinctly different framing and official reaction to the peaceful protests for inclusion just a few months before.…

Let’s be honest: do we know that we have a problem? Of course we do … it’s just that we’ve learned – or, actually, been taught – to avoid discussing it in the interest of civility (read = white comfort), so we generally don’t talk about it and then are really bad at doing so when we do. Some may consider this ironic as it reinforces the very hegemony deserving of address (and redress). Others of us see it as obstructive by design.

And this problem continues to get worse: yes, we’re justifiably proud that we’ve made some progress on the social front (though, of course, not nearly as much as we’d like to believe), but we’ve clearly regressed politically and economically. There’s no gainsaying that our politics is more broken and divisive than at any point in the past half-century and our economic inequality has reached historic levels. Should we be surprised, then, that, during a global pandemic that’s driven record unemployment for the masses, the markets – disproportionately owned by the already especially fortunate – are at all-time highs? Again, we want to believe that this is an accident or coincidental or even a fluke, but if we think more deeply and self-critically, we’ll realize that this, too, is by design.

And yet there is reason to hope: Perhaps it’s funny-sad that we were so abused during the last four years that having a functional, constructive and thoughtful Administration going about its business deliberately and with far less fanfare than we’ve experienced of late feels so weird. Further, I take it as a measure of our continuing wounds that as hopeful a sign as this may be, we’re still too afraid to embrace it fully and exhale. After all, it was just a month ago that we were reminded how precarious our centuries-old representative democracy truly is.…

But at the local level in the hometown of my youth, that abuse has lasted far longer and been of even greater negative impact: sure, Detroit’s suffering because of structural macroeconomic changes like globalization, deindustrialization, etc., but, truth be told, as Mr. Kurashige points out, much of its forced misery reflects the insidiously entrenched racism in our society, amplified by our  slavish and ultimately soul-crushing worship of and obeisance to superfluous wealth.

In other words, while a significant portion of the suffering that my friends and family who’re still there have experienced has been unavoidable, I would argue that the majority of it hasn’t been: it’s the sad and too often seemingly inevitable reflection of Race (and its distinctly American correlate formulation, White Supremacy) being used as a cudgel to oppress The Other on behalf of the (lily-white) Plutocracy.

How else can one explain the unfounded theories of education propagated by billionaires being tested virtually solely on the primarily African-American students of the Detroit Public School system and not on their (overwhelmingly white) suburban peers? How else can one explain the bought-and-paid-for, state-subsidized sweetheart deals to centimillionaires and billionaires to acquire massive swaths of re-developable inner-city Detroit land (while most often displacing the poor and elderly, who, of course, are disproportionately of Color)? How else can one explain the years-long and craven subjection of the majority-minority population of Flint to unsafe water in the interest of saving a few dollars? Etc.

By the way, taking the tragedy of Flint as an example, does anyone of us really doubt that whatever the supposed savings were will be geometrically outweighed by the healthcare costs that this egregious and criminal violation of environmental justice causes?

Further, to be blunt, show me the nice white folks on which the Michigan state government has been willing to experiment. And, because there are a (very) few, compare them as a percentage of the overall white population to that of the members of Communities of Color who were intentionally maimed to an exponentially greater extent.

Now tell me this wasn’t about race….

So then I probably shouldn’t have opened Ms. Oluo’s tome, especially given its title and the fact that I read its successor volume recently as well. Simply put, she so eloquently elucidates the realities of Race that we prefer – virtually always successfully – to avoid, at least in discussion. That Race is considered the problem of those who’re victimized by it daily rather than those who either leverage their positions of Privilege to sustain it or who remain however blissfully ignorant of its impacts speaks volumes about our true national character.

I wasn’t even ten pages in before I got all up in my feelings and had to put the book down for a minute. Yes, I’ve come to realize, the reason I value the sanctuary of home increasingly as I age is that it’s a haven away from the difficult realities of our society and especially of its addiction to White Supremacy by which even I have been affected greatly.

(’Cause, you know, even my white friends who consider themselves progressive have a tendency to remind me in most often subtle and, I would like to believe, unintentional ways that I’ve been more fortunate than the vast majority of Black folk, so, ostensibly, I have less claim to my anger.)

Rather than elucidate Ms. Oluo’s cogent and conclusive points, I’ll simply note that one of her greatest contributions is perhaps one of the most unassuming in the trove of revelation that her book truly is: the reality of Race as we African-Americans – and especially our mothers, wives, sisters, daughters and other women – live it in modern America is that it’s omnipresent and, though not typically omnipotent, defining.

Yes, it’s funny how life can be going along just great and then you’re reminded, sometimes subtly and others overtly and occasionally brutally, that you’re Black and therefore the rules are different for you (and designed to consign you to a lesser existence). It’s not that we forget so much that we’re Black; it’s that we’re too often reminded that the cost of being so hasn’t been reduced nearly as much as we – African-Americans, other People of Color and whites alike – would like to believe. So, just beneath the smile and, for the most fortunate of us, the hope and aspiration for better are the wounds – deep, lingering, covertly ubiquitous – that too often constrain if not define us.…

As I search for what I’m trying to say, in an attempt to appeal to the better angels in us all, I suppose that it boils down to these three things:

1. Affirm the humanity of all of God’s children and fight like hell against the forces that seek, too often successfully, to diminish it.
2. Acknowledge the imperfections in our communal relations, not as an intellectual exercise or as a vainglorious demonstration of one’s woke-ness, but as a responsibility to be ameliorative and collaboratively so.
3. As an aspect of our shared (read = your) responsibility to be a part of the solution, do your homework first to educate yourself and then ask me questions; don’t make it my job to explain to you how your ignorance – intentional or inadvertent – has contributed to my oppression.

There: I said it. Now I’m going to put down the concerns of the world for a while and just be, so that when I re-emerge I can be Black again and grateful both for its myriad burdens as well as for its limitless opportunities.…

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. Now, since this is so, it’s a great temptation to simplify the issues under the illusion that if you simplify them enough, people will recognize them. I think this illusion is very dangerous because, in fact, it isn’t the way it works. A complex thing can’t be made simple. You simply have to try to deal with it in all its complexity and hope to get that complexity across.

- James Baldwin (1961)