The Black Commentator - Issue 187

Many in the St. Paul-Minneapolis community were saddened by the recent death of African-American playwright, August Wilson. During his final weeks and upon his death, local radio stations honored Wilson by replaying a number of his commentaries. After listening to these commentaries, I began to ruminate about Wilson’s observations concerning the plight of many urban African-Americans. Wilson opined that many of today’s urban African-Americans were suffering from a “spiritual wounding” and a “psychological blinding.” He then went on to expand on what had prompted this observation.

Wilson indicted systemic and institutional urban racism going back to the first decades of the great northern migrations and continuing to the present, albeit, with post-industrial reconfigurations and post-modern conceptual framing. Additional commentary by Wilson suggests failures of African-Americans themselves were also causative. These include the inability to develop a leadership class that truly respects African-American culture, community and their values as well as a true appreciation of the hard lessons learned from four hundred years of African American history. Instead, what appeared to be progress in civil and economic development was in reality openings permitted by the dominant elites in order to allow the development of an opportunistic class of African-Americans interested only in self-aggrandizement. What some current observers have termed the new “buffer class.”

Wilson also noted that for poor African-Americans the spiritual woundings and psychological blindings have been stunning. The failure to make common cause in the face of unrelenting assaults to the body politic and the failure to continue to educate the young in the best values of the African American experience have been ruinous. The loss of a cohesive and progressive community direction has produced a cultural community inversion. Wilson does acknowledge the pernicious and destabilizing effects of community deindustrialization and disinvestment as well as the predictable and causative rise in criminal involvement anchored by the economy of last resort, the drug trade. He also, however, insists that in spite of these realities, the African-American community can only look to itself for its social, political and economic redemption.

To Wilson, the spiritual woundings and psychological blindings are indeed formidable internal barriers. These are much more awesome and difficult than external impediments. Indeed, the internal injuries occasioned by these woundings and blindings have been the source of ruminations by many thinkers going back many, many years. But as Wilson so aptly noted, past and current social and economic arrangements continually render the urban African-American community ground zero for all manner of psycho-spiritual injury.

Ironically, a hundred years earlier the quintessential scholar of the African-American experience, W.E.B. Du Bois, made a similar observation in his classic work, The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois attributed the injuries to the spirits and the psyches of African-Americans to the failure of Reconstruction and the devastating effects of Jim Crow laws and practices. His observations bore a remarkable similarity to those of Wilson. Although they were talking about folks separated by one hundred years, both reported an apparent injury to the spirit and the psyche of their respective populations, i.e., what Wilson had termed a “spiritual wounding” and a “psychological blinding.”

The opening decade of the 21st Century finds that same sense of historical anomie noted by W.E.B. Du Bois in the opening decade of the Twentieth Century. We may do well to heed August Wilson’s admonition that in spite of post-industrial economic and social arrangements the reclamation of a cohesive and progressive African American community direction is a necessity without alternative.

Harold Bridgeman is a writer living in St. Paul, Minnesota. Contact him at [email protected].