A story is impelled by the necessity to reveal: the aim of the story is revelation, which means that a story can have nothing to hide.

- James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

You must certainly put him to death. You hand must be the first in putting him to death and the hands of all the people.

- Deuteronomy 13.9, New International Version 

I believe the Chicago Cubs will win the World Series—one day—and I hope this event occurs before the end of my life.  This is a belief and a hope.  Some may laugh, but there are others who pray, with fervor, for this event to happen. I share this belief with some Chicagoans, particularly those not die-hard followers of the other town’s team, but I do not pray for a Cub pennant.

As much as I hope to see the Cubs win the World Series, I do not share in the belief that God, one day, mindful of the long-suffering Cubs and their fans, will intervene, and the Cubs will do it, finally—when it is their time, established already in the Father’s divine plan.

What is not saturated with the replication of the Father motif? If we aren’t watching you, the Father has eyes on you, the faithful.  It is a “softer,” “kinder,” Big Brother (that is, if you do not find yourself under interrogation or in one of his prisons) with an assortment of “intelligence” operatives monitoring the most miniscule of activities.

It is the same imagination—human imagination—at odds with what it knows and what it does not know and finds difficult to comprehend human existence. The Old Book’s solution absolves humankind from submitting to comprehension; it provided Western would-be rulers with an already written narrative intent on effecting regime change in the name of divine retribution.

Western “civilization” perfected the “Reign of Terror” on behalf of an ideology or religious set of doctrines and dogma.  In the making of the U.S. Empire, terror played an instrumental role in indoctrinating indigenous and enslaved African populations with fear of the Father that becomes self-perpetuating over time. Surely good people abound to warn of the hell to pay if the masses of faithful, subdued in a church within a church, should attempt to stage their own emancipation from the watchful eyes of the Father.        

On this date, in this year, they tell us, chains have been removed—by the Father…

We have been brought over the river and beyond the wildness, arriving, by divine intervention, into the land of milk and honey.  

Black civic, political, and academic leaders greet each other, spending several minutes recounting each others past work in the movement, the “Old Movement,” the only movement, the one that began on a certain date and ended, if the truth be told, on April 4, 1968.  Many were the accomplishments of the old movement, remembered by faithful on the occasional celebration of Black life—past tense.

We all welcome the use of the technology available to research our days in slavery or our crossing of the Atlantic.  I have listened to these interviews. With abandonment, Black scholar and white television anchor or radio host talk about racism—in those days.  These are the brief and occasional moments in the U.S. when a Black is permitted to speak freely about racism.  He or she is free to mention white supremacy.  Free to tell those stories of brutality, of the suffering of Blacks, of the death of Blacks.  Free to name the racist slaveholder, sheriff, judge. Dead.

America hears about bygone days and shakes its collective head in empathy with those Blacks.  Also dead.

These are events have finite dates.  In these moments when America is listening, its collective resentfulness and its power to act on its resentfulness is held at bay.  More are less threatened by what remains in the past. 

When you reach 50, someone told me years ago, you will have paid your dues.  I am past my fiftieth year and each year, each month, each day since I am reminded by my fellow white baby boomers that to speak is tantamount to a death wish—ever so subtle, of course.  Subtle is a muzzle. We are like children, again, forbidden to speak to and among adults about grown up things.

Black life in the present tense does not interest America. Black life was slavery, was Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Era. The COINTELPRO Era of the 1970s resides on lists of forbidden taboos. 

America cannot remember Black people after April 4, 1968.

Willing and unwilling martyrs gave primacy to justice and to equalitarianism rather than more religious or ideological mass production of “the chosen few.” Black American cannot recall Dr. King’s secular denouncement of the Vietnam War or his outrage when America turned its back on the poor and working class or his questioning of how white American went about implementing its “integration” policies.  Instead, Black Americans greedily consumed those pre-selected bits of the martyred Reverent of “integration” and wrapped them around the Black population like a shawl. Thank you Father for these bits of freedom! (Terror never fails to work its magic).  In this covering, Black Americans believe themselves still in possession of America’s moral conscience.  But we have lost this possession of moral conscience, too, long ago, along with everything else, yet we seem to be the last to know it. 

But illusions are useful to some most of the time. 

When the one side of the One Party in the U.S. holds a convention and calls it the Democratic Convention, it cannot proceed without a Black choir—a Black Baptist choir—and a few rousing minutes of gospel music before the representatives of Big Brother resume the business of establishing an agenda for the nation.  These conventions generally open and close with the Father’s representative Black minister who recites a prayer—reminding all of that higher power to which we owe our foremost allegiance.  The Father that begets Big Brother is indistinguishable.

Why would the Democrats in the One Party wish Black Americans emancipation from doctrine or dogma?

Profitable financially and professionally, religion has delivered many Black Americans to the Promised Land where quite often, the idea of a collective moral conscience sits at bay alongside white resentfulness. White Baby Boomers and the Black clergy in the U.S. have for 40 years functioned (even if sometimes independently) as stop-gaps to Black thought, resulting in the arrested development of Black Americans.  The prohibition on any meaningful discussion of racism in the U.S. functions—like any attempt to question religious dogma or political doctrines—to remind Black Americans of the earthly and divine terror that awaits the body or soul that transgresses Father/Big Brother.

So patience…patience…

An Eddie Long “controversy” is trouble only in that it threatened to gnaw away at the illusion. Ratzinger in Rome shuffled child molesters about the world, but the abused children coming forward, broke the spell. Otherwise, we are told and have been since the late 70s and early 80s in the Black Community that the divine entity loves the wealthy. God blesses the wealthy and wants Black people, too, to be rich. 

Johnny-come-lately! But Black Americans have arrived as adapt mimes of the dogma/doctrine of Father/Big Brother. This is natural progression here in the U.S.  We can wage war, too, and can do it “better.”

Once every two or four years, the Democratic Party calls on the Black church to save them. Round up the faithful troops. And faithful the troops do come running—expecting change. Luckily for the Democrats, Blacks do not change except a good many of them expect to be as rich as the politicians running before the next election. 

That Father/Big Brother has operated for a long time in Western thought. He wanted investors in Black bodies to successfully navigate business between the West coast of Africa to the colonies and the Caribbean with the blessing of the Papacy. That Father/Big Brother wanted slaveholders to be wealthy and successful growers of cotton and tobacco. That Father/Big Brother was the entity of the Puritans whose massacre of the indigenous population opened a way through the wilderness for His “chosen” people. It is the same Father/Big Brother who dictated to Americans the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and spoke to them about “savages” in need of “democracy” in the Philippines, in Latin America, in Asia. This Father/Big Brother is on Wall Street among the bankers and in every corporate office building. This Father/Big Brother inspires NGOs and humanitarian organizations similar to those in Haiti where, after nine months, the majority of Haitians still live (maybe, if they are “blessed”) under a tent. It is the same Father/Big Brother introduced to the enslaved African in the West…

…And it goes on and on and on. Drones fall on women and children daily; trillions are allocated for weaponry by the One Party system under the divine’s watchful eye, and Black Americans, with one voice, now, Malcolm, say, we Master, are doing one heck of a job in annihilating the enemy. Some still wonder why they are “catching hell” at home!

In the Caribbean, the peoples once told themselves this myth: a group of Ibo, on departing the ship that landed them far from home, looked around in the distance and saw the already captive workers who looked like them. They looked back at the slaveholders and businessmen who came to greet the ship. The Ibo looked at the expanse of water. Suddenly, they started walking toward the water. They kept walking. Presumably, they have returned home.  In the U.S., Black Americans are borrowers of other people’s myths. Chained to those motifs of divine retribution, they wait for the divine entity to execute rescue procedures and fly them safety from Earth to Heaven. Hopefully, the divine will not pass over them again.

In the meantime, a little wealth, a little lottery playing, a little casino gambling will not hurt. 

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.