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The Black Experience in America is Unique
By Peter I. Rose
Unique Americans
The black experience in America is
unique—it has no real parallel. And black Americans are
unique. Paradoxically, blacks may well be at once the most
estranged and the least foreign of all the citizens: most
estranged because of their special history, which began in
subjugation, continued in separation, and persists to this day
under various forms of segregation; least foreign because,
ironically, having been cut off from their native roots, they
had few guides but those of the master and his agents. This is
not to say no “Africanisms” survived. Of course they did.
Still, most black Americans, for good or ill, were imbued with
many of the same goals and aspirations of those of the dominant
group. Many of their cultural traits were similar too.
What they said and what they ate, what they
believed and, in some ways, the way they worshiped, were heavily
southern Americana. And so with their names. And in these names
one finds the true paradox of being both a part of and apart
from society. Names are labels by which others know you. Black
people’s names are those of whites, usually white masters. It
is little wonder that one of the symbolic gestures in the new
search to assert both self-hood and people-hood by young blacks
is to cast off their “slave names” and to adopt African
ones—or simply to call oneself “X.”
By and large this assertion did not come
about until quite recently. For years black people—named Smith
and Jones and Brown and Washington—quested often the American
Dream and sought to take their place with whites. For many, the
venture proved quixotic. Some succeeded, however, and became
black equivalents of the white nouveaux riches, with all the
material trappings to indicate having arrived. Others eschewed
such life styles and sought other benefits in the dominant
society, especially through higher education and work in the
professions. They often found smoldering bitterness and
exacerbated doubts about the rightness of seeking to integrate
in the first place.
They sometimes proved more akin to the
Arabs in French Algeria than the Italians or Jews or
Irish-Americans with whom they were so often compared. As
Raymond Aron points out:
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The French never established an
integrated society in Algeria. Ironically, the young
Algerians who came closest to being French, by education
and training, were usually the most hostile. But this is
understandable, because they were the most sensitive to
their rejection by the French ruling class.
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Persistent relegation to inferior status
and the internalization of values regarded as most typically
American (such as the idea of individual achievement through
hark work) have led, especially in recent years, to a different
sort of response on the parts of blacks compared with members of
most other American ethnic groups. Some began to argue that the
more they learned about the wider society and its members’
unwillingness to honor its own lofty ideals, the less they
should encourage their “brothers” and “sisters” to
accept its basic tenets. Since whites appeared eager to maintain
their position of preeminence, many blacks began saying that
integration was, in fact, highly dysfunctional for blacks—just
as it was in Algiers.
These observations are not to suggest that
all social scientists who see blacks as the latest immigrants
are white supremacists. But they may be quite naïve in assuming
that admitting black children to white schools, opening
neighborhoods, saying, in effect, “You’re as good as I a,”
will solve the problem. Assimilation may have been the goal at
one time but it is being severely challenged (see Chapter
Seven).
Many observers have failed to accept the
uniqueness of the black experience and have offered what in an
earlier reference to immigrants was called an either/or
response. In the present context the argument goes like this: If
black people are not to be segregated, they must be integrated.
Integration, in these terms, turns out to be little more than
liberalized and modernized version of “Anglo conformity”
(or, today, Euro-American conformity). Indeed and perhaps,
ironically, the pluralism that many wanted for others (and
sometimes for themselves) was rarely even considered as a model
for blacks, the people who by all counts would benefit most by
accepting their uniqueness.
Until recently many liberal
integrationists—in the universities, in the government, and
even in the civil-rights movement itself—saw but one side of
the problem. They recognized but failed to understand the
counter culture that grew out of reactions to barriers erected
by whites during and after slavery. And so they said, “Throw
off your unacceptable ways and become like me.” James Farmer,
the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, once put this
point of view in very clear perspective. Writing on integration,
he said:
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… we [Blacks] learned that America
simply couldn’t be color-blind. It would have to
become color-blind and it would only become color-blind
when we gave up our color. The white man, who presumably
has no color, would have to give up only his prejudices.
We would have to give up our identities. Thus, we would
usher in the Great Day with an act of complete
self-denial and self-abasement. We would achieve
equality by conceding racism’s charge: that our skins
were afflicted; that our history is one long
humiliation; that we are empty of distinctive traditions
and any legitimate source of pride. …
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Farmer would probably agree that
segregation and integration (as social policies) are at once
logical opposites and two sides of the same coin.
This interpretation, until recently, was
very difficult for many integrationist-minded people (including
some of those who have analyzed the assimilation processes
discussed earlier) to accept. They, like the segregationists,
tended to think about black/white relations in dichotomous
terms.
An illustration of this viewpoint is what
Robert Blauner has called “a dogma of liberal social
science.” The stance began with Gunnar Myrdal’s monumental
volume, An American Dilemma, in which he asserted that
the Negro is “an exaggerated American” and that his
principal values are “pathological elaborations” of those
commonly shared. Historian Kenneth Stampp referred to those who
were “white men with black skins” and Nathan Glazer and
Daniel P. Moynihan, in their study of New York City, asserted
that “the Negro is only an American and nothing else. He has
no values and culture to guard and protect.”
These ideas were put forth by others, too,
relying too, relying in no small measure on the work of the late
E. Franklin Frazier, one of America’s best-known black
sociologists. For example, here is what Frazier wrote in his
1957 revision of The Negro in the United States:
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Although the Negro is distinguished from
other minorities by his physical characteristics, unlike other
racial or cultural minorities the Negro is not distinguished by
culture from the dominant group. Having completely lost his
ancestral culture, he speaks the same language, practices the
same religion, and accepts the same values and political ideals
as the dominant group. Consequently, when one speaks of Negro
culture in the United States, one can only refer to the folk
culture of the rural Southern Negro or the traditional forms of
behavior and values which have grown out of the Negro’s social
and mental isolation. . . . |
Frazer
went on to say that “Since the institutions, the social
stratification, and the culture of the Negro minority are
essentially the same as those of the larger community, it is not
strange that the Negro minority belongs among assimilationist
rather than the pluralist secessionist of militant
minorities.”
Frazier,
in our own view, may, well have been both correct and highly
misleading. He assumed, along with many commentators on the
Black Experience (both black and white), that to have a culture,
a unique culture, one must possess a distinctive language, a
unique religion, and a national homeland. As Blauner suggests,
this view may be appropriate for what anthropologists would call
a holistic culture, complete with the institutions of an
integrated social system. To be sure, black Americans did not
possess this kind of culture. But they developed their own life
styles and sensitivities, often combinations of lower-class and
quasi-ethnic characteristics, characteristics not brought from
abroad but developed through encounters with racist America.
Black
writers such as Richard Wright, LeRoi Jones, and Ralph
Ellison—in quite different ways, to be sure—have portrayed
the extent to which blacks have to respond to the
“either/or” interpretation. In his brilliant novel Invisible
Man, Ellison wrote:
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a
spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of
your Hollywood ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and
bone, and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I
am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see
me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus
sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of
hard distorting glass.
When they approach me they see only my
surroundings, themselves, or figments of their
imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. Nor is
my invisibility exactly a matter of biochemical accident or my
epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of
a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come
into contact. A matter of construction of their inner eyes,
those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon
reality.
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In
contrast to most whites, most blacks find themselves in a
perpetual state of cultural schizophrenia. They long had, and
continue to have a sense of what W. E. B. Du Bois called “twoness.”
One ever feels his twoness,” he wrote, “an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring ideals in one dark body …”
Vernon
Dixon argues that “the application of the ‘either/or’
conceptual approach to race relations produces racial harmony
[only] when the blacks and whites embody total sameness.” And
this is an impossibility. Therefore, he proposes a new and
different approach, called by the rather cumbersome term “diunitalism,”
to which one simultaneously recognizes, the similarities and
differences between blacks and whites. Above all the analyst
(and, presumably, the policymaker) must learn to understand the
ambiguity that marks the social position and often helps shape
the personalities of black Americans, whose blackness is both
part and parcel of their relations to white society.
Source: Rose, Peter I.
They
and We: Racial and Ethnic Relations in the United States.
New York: Random House, 1974.
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