September 20, 2007 - Issue
245 |
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The "Black
Community" in the American Dark Ages Represent Our Resistance By Dr. Jean L. Daniels BC Columnist |
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I
am in the process of reading Morris Berman’s Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire while the cases of the The personal narratives are appealing to me because such narratives force the reader to slow down the pace of reading in order to picture a scene and the characters within. Most importantly, we can hear and see in the other’s narratives our own similar story. In our minds, we connect the public with the private, sometimes one person/one story at a time. At the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Paul D has decided to “put his story next” to Sethe’s story. Putting our personal narratives next to others is what makes some of us human. Early
in Dark Ages America, in fact, three pages in, I am nodding
frantically, as I read “ Many
Americans, like Recently, we have acquired a lexicon of words to describe either who we are or what we are doing as people of this modern era. The words empire, gentrification, commodification, terrorists, to name a few, are not nearly as disturbing as the word “busy.” It is what we tell each other when we need to establish our identity as something uniquely different from them or when we want to signal a warning similar to a pirates skull and bones flag. Warning: stay away. Don’t bother me! I am busy. Busy! In recent years, I have heard this word out of the months of so many people on the phone or in email. Please don’t stop by to say hello at a home or office! You can’t say hello before the word “BUSY” rolls toward you like a thundercloud. The focus of this nation has become, with a vengeance, the acquisition of other people’s resources and material wealth. Profit and more profit for corporations is the name of the game. Many are running down that path at break speed to catch up and keep up and not be caught without all the stuff/gadgets technology has to offer. The
busyness of Black people in the A car full of people will have one person on a cell phone, but it is hard to find a car full of people these days. Each car usually has one person and a couple of children or at best, two people, but that driver, if with children in the backseats, will have a cell phone in his or her hand. Walk instead of ride and walkers and runners all have cell phones to their ears. Everyone has a cell phone on the bus where there is no opting out of hearing at least three conversations at once. Cell phones, writes Berman, represent the “super-saturation” of the “public space” by privatization. Most people, he writes, “treat public space as an extension of their living rooms or offices; that they are disturbing the private space of those around them barely crosses their minds.” While the increasingly rudeness of young Black people is certainly disturbing, I have noted that the emphasis of this display of being occupied while riding the bus or walking is more about the object, that is, the cell phone I have in my possession, rather than the relationship I have with the person on the other end of line. Folks on the bus have to know that we have a car, but it is in the shop! We talk about the work on our desk at the office, or shout out, repeatedly, commands to inattentive children or a series of expletives to friends — but all this activity is for the ears of fellow riders who will, in turn, see us as just like those folks outside the bus windows. We no longer read or consider reading a book; we are too busy. Book reading is for folks with “leisure” time on their hands. And consequently, we are in a state of semidarkness, with little if any knowledge about the state of the community or the country. I fight against the guilt of being too available and not being “busy” enough for the busy people to consider me worthy of their time when they are not busy. This is crazy indeed. Resistance gave Black life meaning. We, as Black people, can’t substitute the experience of resistance with the meaningless pursuit of Manifest Destiny. This busyness, for us, has become a competitive, individual enterprise in pursuit of the American Dream for some and individual or familial survival for others. In other words, it is all about me or my family “getting over” and the hell with the community until someone places a noose under a tree. Then we are all about the “Black community.” Do we think other people don’t have eyes to see us running that path behind them? And how much do we contribute to the advancement of Verizon or U.S. Cellular agendum? We used to value the idea of productive work that contributed to the Black community, to its survival within the meat grinder that is American capitalism. A
few years ago, in I started ducking this word “busy” and decided to remove it from my vocabulary because it was not something I could imagine my ancestors in the field saying at every opportunity — and yet, they were quite busy. Masters and mistresses were at leisure. I imagine Malcolm X being busy, but I don’t think he told those around him that he was busy all the time. We have acquired bad habits that, ironically, make us virtually invisible to ourselves and the world. Berman’s Dark
Ages enters this dialogue between the West, the In contrast, the “social environment” is treated “impersonally” in a predominantly secular society. Meaning in one’s live is based on accomplishments, particularly as these accomplishments make visible one’s material possessions, and these possessions, in turn, determine your identity and relationship with others. As I read how Berman states and represents the West and the rest of us, I found that I could still identify with Berman’s Palestinian friend as I recalled visits many years ago to my family’s home and encountering the eyes and questions about my “change” and the “white man’s world” out there, beyond the neighborhood and community. “We” have something of this narrative of the “rest of us,” too! When
I am in the company of whites and they speak of “we” Americans or the I
have listened to this obliviousness to the history of American violence
toward other cultures different from that collective defined as “white.” And
before I can move with them across the seas to see others, I see, right
here in When Berman asks, “is it purely coincidental…that most of our imperial ventures or wars of conquest, from Mexico in 1846-48 to Iraq in 2003 involved an ‘enemy’ who was nonwhite,” I know he is addressing white readers and trying to elicit that “aha!” experience from them. Black Americans, on the other hand, have always recognized the truth about the America Dream. Reading between the lines of this general American narrative about itself, Black people in the U.S., in the West, are losing this sense of community and stand lose it entirely, becoming the American species of robots the Palestinian friend has observed, following others on the path in a mad chase for the “Almighty dollar” or just free-falling silently into the “semidarkness.” The
experience of a “conscious collective,” to use Durkheim’s phrase,
a Black “conscious collective” fighting as a community for life is
quickly being absorbed in order to accommodate the dialogue between
the West, the U.S. and the rest of us, the Middle-East, specifically,
Islam. Whose
obituary is being written? BlackCommentator.com Columnist Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The
City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at |
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