What Is Black America?By Steve Salerno
28 Mar 2022
Each year as America toggles from Black History Month to March Madness, I find myself thinking of the Nigerian student who walked into my college office some years ago at around this time. This brilliant young man and aspiring academic told me of his discomfort with Black History Month, and his annual relief when it ended. He said he felt no kinship with the ancestry memorialized in the month-long fete, and not just because his African heritage diverged from the uniquely American tradition.
The larger issue for him was tonal, almost anthropological. While the month is nominally celebratory, its “American vision of blackness,” as he put it, is replete with a canonical litany of shared suffering and despair. Each day in February, once the media get their bas-relief salutes to an inventor or scholar or civil-rights icon out of the way, the attendant punditry unfolds as a nonstop handwringing exercise, the overarching message of which is that people with brown skin require sympathy, understanding, and constant reinforcement in order to survive, let alone thrive. “We desperately need your help,” was how my former student described it.
In his view, the observance—the apotheosis of the modern American view on blackness—was an inverted kind of humblebrag; exceptional achievements intended to prove the rule are purposefully juxtaposed with the everyday bleakness of the black experience. “There’s always all that talk about
how far we still have to go,” he said, lending the final phrase a parodic emphasis. He was embarrassed by the fanfare and the sudden and disproportionate surfeit of black faces paraded across TV screens, all of which he said he found patronizing, “like an extended pat on the butt for the losing team.”
“I was not raised to see myself that way,” he lamented. “I frankly don’t see why anyone should be.” And yet, each February, he felt conscripted into that ethos by his skin color, which led new acquaintances to assume he’s part of American blackness (that is, until he spoke and they heard his sonorous cadences and clipped continental diction).
I recall that young man in the context of a second student, a young American black woman. A year or two earlier, she had expressed her displeasure with my presentation of the media’s handling of systemic racism, which I framed as out of touch with demonstrable facts. She actually half-stood in her chair during class and told me I was speaking “through the lens of white privilege.” “I insist,” she announced as an awkward silence fell over the room, “that people see my blackness.” This clearly meant something to her quite beyond the color of her skin.
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Given those two polar views, I was moved to wonder: What exactly is blackness, taxonomically speaking? What assumptions am I to make about the next person of color who walks into my class—or my wider life, for that matter?
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Writing in Time in 2020, Eddie Glaude contemplated the present and future of his race in a way that seemed to affirm that (a) blackness is very much a proprietary understanding, and (b) disappointment and even tragedy are inescapable facts of black life. Glaude imposes this “experience” on all people who share his skin color, just as my Nigerian student felt that a particular idea of blackness was being foisted upon him.
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And so, it must be asked: Can we ascertain, in some epistemically useful sense, the unifying characteristics of black life that constitute the essential elements of American blackness? What would its entrance requirements be?
One expected condition is surely poverty. However, the most recent census reports that 81.2 percent of black Americans live above the federally defined poverty threshold. That was pre-COVID, which doubtless will have something to say about the figures for the past two years. Nevertheless, by this single criterion, over four-fifths of black America fails to qualify for blackness.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/03/28/there-is-no-black-america/
