Lots of other black folk, of Steele's age cohort (which is a little before my own), didn't care too much for his perspective either, and so they pretty much quietly moved his ideas aside even while the media continued to give his thinking some attention. College textbook publishers, for instance, would continue to include essays from his popular book in their readers, and, for that reason alone, I went ahead and introduced them to a generation below my own.
The problem that I had with Steele's old argument then, as I do now, was that it didn't in my opinion include a critical race analysis, meaning hardcore sociological analysis. All of his evidence was soft. It seemed to me that he could easily blame, for instance, a black kid from the hood who dropped out of school on the person having made a poor choice. And, if anyone defended the outcome of this person's life by claiming that his or her environment had played a role, adding that racism had played a part, Steele might return to choice and ignore the social impact of race altogether. Race and racism just seemed to me something that Steele thought pretty easy to overcome. Too easy, yet transcending race seemed to be his cure for all that might be ailing African Americans at the time, and, by extension, today.
Steele's book sits in a cardboard box in my basement, a victim of a purge of my library a few years back. So, I hadn't actually thought of Content of Our Character until today while I was reading Toure's Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now. Let me say upfront this blog post is not a review of his book. I will not likely write a review, and anyway I am just getting into chapter two. So far, I have been listening to Toure's argument, introduced by Michael Eric Dyson, and I recognize how hard Toure is trying to say blackness has expanded without saying that race is no longer an issue. I can appreciate all of his attempts though I don't think I'm yet buying into an idea that the two are separate issues.
In some ways, his argument is based on quantitative thinking. That is, he sees as having multiplied exponentially the number of ways black people can express themselves today as black and the ways in which we can self-identify. He begins the book with his own story of trying skydiving even after a couple of brothas clued him in on the "fact" that black people don't do that or other similar crazy activities that obviously put one's life in jeopardy. The men's message called up the old phrase, "acting
white." I have always myself hated that phrase, and I, admittedly, have heard it a few times from people who claim to love me, responding to some of my doings. Heck, I just heard it last week when I went to a concert in the park featuring a local all-white band The Whistle Pigs, who sang some Motown classics among other numbers. I'm sure for Toure, cultural hybridity, borrowing and blending, appreciating and even feeling in some way other people's experience is also part of what is creating a new milieu of increased options for identification. Honestly, the Whistle Pigs were soulful enough for my taste on a Thursday afternoon. I wasn't looking for much however that day, and I wasn't in a serious critical mode. Had I been, I would have listened more closely to the music and maybe come to the same conclusion as Alice Walker's Gracie Mae Still. "One day, this is going to be a pitiful country." Gracie Mae Still, some might argue, is stuck in the past, but, Walker seems to be saying, she feels, she knows, and that's what she sings. Something, a lot, is lost in translation not necessarily because Traynor, the young rock and roll star who covers her music cannot really feel it, but maybe because the society in which her music becomes reproduced by industry alters profoundly both the life and the music.
I was stopped in my tracks by Toure's reference to a statement by UC Santa Cruz professor Derek Conrad Murray in which the latter expressed a difference between his generation and that of his parents and grandparents.
"...we honor the history of the struggle of black people in America but we still want to construct our own notion of Blackness that is separate from that of our parents and grandparents" (22).Of course we do. Is this therefore a straw-man argument? Who doesn't want to be an individual?
But, I'm reminded of my own grandfather, whose father was a slave, a fact which teaches me just how close I am to the institution. In 1945, having been a large landowner in Mississippi, my grandfather nevertheless moved his family--wife and six children--to Detroit. I had a wonderful childhood in the city, a gift I would say came from my grandfather's decision to migrate. As a result, there are no black and white water fountains and restrooms in my memory. But I'll bet there were many in my grandparents' memories and maybe as well remembrances of their elders' literal scars from slavery. Once, while I was visiting with my grandparents, my grandfather turned on the television, and I told him that I wanted to watch "The Brady Bunch." That's right; I told him, a haughty show of disrespect that already hinted at the kind of change that already had taken place within our family. And it suggests part of the difference that Toure may be missing even while he and Murray desire and/or see another difference. Well, my grandfather wanted to watch "Sanford and Son," so we had a conflict before us. The gentle giant that my grandfather was, he ended up letting me win the short-term battle, but my eight or nine-year-old ears heard exactly what he said as he returned to his seat. "You need to know something about your own people."
I have been working on a book about our family, and I have reflected many times on what my grandfather said under his breath that day when I told him that I wanted to watch a story about a family of blond-haired little white girls, their dark-haired brothers, and their parents living the American Dream, which I and so many other kids experienced vicariously every evening after the show had gone into reruns. Who among those who grew up on "The Brady Bunch" didn't want to live in that all-American family's modern, split-level house, take a pretty picture by that long stair rail, and have Alice the Maid set out cookies after school while waiting for Sam the Butcher to bring fresh meat? Did I ever stop to ask why the Bradys needed a butcher when fresh meat probably could have been had from a nearby grocer? Did I ever connect the Brady's privilege to one that was not my own? That was not obviously the point of my watching the show. The Brady life was a fantasy for black kids and I'm sure poor white kids alike. And what's wrong with fantasizing, especially if it becomes motivation for success, or for getting a fabulous house and a maid to boot? Sitting, I thought safely in my grandparents' paid-for home on the northeast side of Detroit enjoying some '70s styled fantasy, why did my grandfather think that I needed to know about black people's lives? Was this a requirement simply because I was black? Did the "skin I was in" lay upon me such a burden? And was his the identity politics that Shelby Steele would deride twenty years later?
Maybe these questions are difficult to answer. But, I'm reminded of something that one of my grad school classmates said one day when I was still in the throes of hating Steele's perspective. We weren't reading him in our rhetoric class that semester. Instead, we were reading pragmatists--including Cornel West whose identity as a Marxist and a pragmatist confused me at the time."If you're not a socialist before thirty you have no heart; if you're a socialist after thirty you have no head," I suppose settled things for me. Anyway, in seminars, I was usually of few words, choosing instead to meditate on others' thoughts, and, as I recall it was rare for my Latina classmate Renee to say much either. But one day, somehow bringing to my mind my grandfather, she said in reference to the pragmatists: "They don't care about our pain." Obviously, I haven't forgotten her statement. I have used it in the last twenty years as a way to measure people's humanity, society's. Do "they" feel our pain? Does Toure feel his ancestors' pain? Did and do I feel my grandfathers'? Did he think that I should?
Perhaps we are most fully human when we do feel each other's pain. I think this is what Carol Gilligan et al were after in Mapping the Moral Domain, which we also read previous to the pragmatists. What Gilligan and her colleagues seemed to be asking was what should be the quality of our relationships with others who inhabit the world with us? Procedural justice, most of us in class seemed to agree, is a high principle, but is it the highest? Mama Lee Younger gives her daughter Beneatha an answer to this question maybe when she makes her daughter repeat: "In my mother's house, there is still God," But, I think this question is answered even more directly when Mama asks Beneatha if she has cried for her brother today. Even if you hate Walter Lee for his selfishness, for almost wrecking the family's dreams, he remained human, and to understand both his choices and how the society had a role in helping him to reach the place where he would err required intellectual understanding, but for Mama Lee that wasn't enough. She wanted her daughter to feel her brother's pain like James Baldwin wants brother to feel Sonny's pain, as well as to acknowledge--rather than run from, ignore, or deny--his own. After all, Baldwin's story implies, it is not that the upstanding citizen and teacher brother doesn't have pain nor that he doesn't try to mask it. His mask and the act of dealing with pain are simply different than Sonny's.
I find myself then rejecting Conrad's statement because I have found, since the death of my grandparents, ways to connect to their pain, and in fact feeling a certain misery when present generations don't feel is part of my experience Likewise, there was pain I think even in my grandfather's realization that one of the byproducts of having brought his family to Detroit was that his grandchildren became disconnected from the family's past. My siblings and I grew up not knowing much of it, and, given our consumption of reorienting media, we felt even less.
I'm not done with Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, but so far I'm lumping it in with similar perspectives that fall under the social construction theory I also had great problems with in grad school and after. It's an intellectual mythology that downplays significantly if it doesn't outright ignore hard-core social realities and, yes, pain.
I may change my mind later, but at this point my answer to Toure's question: Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? is that I am. I'm afraid for my children in the same way that my grandfather must have been afraid for me. The fear is that our very own descendants as they "construct [their] own notion of blackness...separate from that of '[their] parents and grandparents," will, as cultural critic Nelson George might agree, do so sin alma, without soul.. But, according to George, it would seem that we arrived at a place of soul-less-ness at the very time he and I were coming into adulthood, in the gap, between the late '70s and early '80s, when black folks' artistic expression of their experiences, having gained mass appeal, became highly marketed products.
