Black History Month is almost over, along with all its celebration and rhetorical optimism about Black people in white America.
Black people in white America.
Celebration or no, optimism or no, the subject is already desolate and hopeless. It is existentially impossible that Black people in America will someday become equal human beings and neighbors among white people. Truth is so far removed from all the celebratory platitudes the month has created that we need a five-bell alarm in order to wake up from the mirage. And here is my contribution to that wakeup call.
Let’s start with this backdrop: Virtually all minorities that came to America — Irish, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Pakistani, Hispanic — have taken on white America as their role model. The grateful minorities have adapted to American culture and served as diligent workers and reliable soldiers for America. White America, on its part, has accepted these minorities, often reluctantly, as part of its New World lore. All is well and good, and it is largely this way of adoption and integration that America’s immigration culture has successfully sustained itself.
Except one minority: Black Americans. White America has accepted all immigrants to its shores — except Blacks, the only people that came to America in chains, not with port passes.
Here is the core problem for the strategy and aspiration of Black people in America: White America is not accepting Black people, who have no other model to follow. All other minorities have their own home nations, Irish in Ireland, Indians in India, Koreans in Korea, and so on, which gave them their survival character and strategy. But Blacks have no place else to call home; America is their only home. But how do you plant your roots in a society that doesn’t accept you?
In the Recorder, we read Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a Dream” speech and its political cartoon, side by side, has Mitch McConnell saying, “Dream on!” The speech is remarkable to read today, not just because how little has changed since 1963 when it was delivered, but also how desperately MLK wanted Blacks to be part of white America: Please accept us, MLK in essence pleaded.
For Blacks, there is no other place than white America, but it doesn’t accept you. What can you do when your plea falls on deaf ears?
It’s tragic that Blacks must choose white America as their model of aspiration and hope. They have no other choice. But white America doesn’t accept Blacks as its present equals or future neighbors, and neither full unity nor complete equality between the two will ever happen under the given reality. Ever since the Emancipation, Blacks have been carrying on with their one-sided overture — essentially unrequited — with white America and white Americans. For a people who have so much to catch up on, with no home country to support them, they have been forced to imitate white America and white Americans in consumer paradise, to spend the money they don’t have, and to ask for the neighborly love and human dignity they don’t get.
By the time the slavery system was legally abolished, white Americans had been well prepared for the elaborate social-psychological system that followed, that is, segregation that branded the former slaves as de-facto slaves forever. Through segregation, well beyond slavery itself, white America’s perception of Black Americans solidified as a mindset, more than just cheap labor that slavery had provided before. It was through the twisted non-sequitur of “separate-but-equal,” however, that the Black slave’s physical chain has become white men’s psychological millstone around their own necks. Unable to accept their former slaves as brothers, now the masters have become slaves to their own misanthropy that they themselves cannot escape.
Blacks want to live as normal Americans in their consumer heaven. But, since the end of segregation, Black people’s living standards have not changed much; at one-half of the average income of whites, they are just as poor as they have always been. Surely, with the dreaded N-word forbidden, racist white manners have improved, but not the substantive acceptance. Enamored with America’s consume-and-consume society as their model, Black people are getting deeper and deeper into spiritual corruption and financial traps just like their model without any real progress in fundamentals: They are, and will forever be, separate and unequal as long as consumer capitalism is their moral guide and everyman-for-himself their social creed.
Slavery, aside from its physical cruelty, ruined Blacks differently from all other immigrants who came to America from a rather different background. All non-Black immigrants, from Irish to Hispanics, came from nations with a long feudal history and a mindset to obey orders and accept patience as their way of life. They were well trained, mind and body, for the grueling disciplines of corporate and factory systems, from old kings to new kings. Most crucially, the WASP majority found them useful for their productive functions. But this acceptance, available to all other immigrants — feudal training and white acceptance — was not available to Blacks in America. Their slavery experience planted only bitterness and distrust toward the white system, and their lack of feudal experience only aggravated their expectations and fomented impatience in their social character. Surely, they remain “American” in hope but “un-American” in reality, and, if we add white Trumpism, Black progress is only a mirage. It is impossible to tell which blade of the historical scissors for Blacks —feudal absence or white rejection — cuts them more deeply and painfully.
Even many more George Floyds or Black History Months will not push Black progress forward. The wall is impregnable to reason and the people behind it impervious to heart.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder, taught race relations at the University of Maryland before his retirement in Greenfield.