The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners

ONE TAKING THE WORDS OUT OF BLACK MOUTHS: Narcissism, Know-Nothingness, and White Intransigence "Priscilla and I, and nine others, had been charged with 'disturbing the peace,' among other charges, because we tried to order food at Woolworth. If not for segregation, and the fact that we were all Negroes, we would have been served without incident. At our trial on March 17, 1960, Judge John Rudd ruled that our lawyers should 'get off that race question.' " --PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE "[I]n 1955, that's when the gruesome murder of Emmett Till came up in Mississippi. I remember how the Charlotte Observer, which was supposed to be a liberal or moderate newspaper, condemned the NAACP, saying it was just as bad as the Ku Klux Klan in raising 'racial' issues about this murder." --JOHN DORSEY DUE JR. "Among the topics that the southern white man did not like to discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; French women; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the civil war; Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; Slavery, Social Equality, Communism; Socialism; the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro." --RICHARD WRIGHT "All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure." --MARK TWAIN Black people are not crazy. They're not paranoid. They're punch-drunk, or as Carter G. Woodson put it, "the Negro's mind has been brought under the control of his oppressor. The problem of holding the Negro down, therefore, is easily solved. When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions." White racism and white supremacist ideology, however denied, however subconscious, continue to exist. To believe otherwise, one would truly have to believe that blacks are genetically and morally deficient. Of course some believe exactly that, but the rest of America understands that the disproportionately lower status of blacks is at least in some measure a result of group interactions. Blacks are neither blameless nor helpless, but they are certainly not operating in a societal vacuum. Still, blacks can be complicit in maintaining white supremacy by playing the game on the master's terms--that is, by vying for white approval or a white apology rather than for their own autonomy, by giving in to nihilism and immorality in the face of the endless struggle to surmount inequality. "Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there; these are the extremes of the Negro problem which we met [while doing sociological research] that day," said W.E.B. DuBois, "and we scarce knew which we preferred." Surely blacks reject both propositions, even knowing that white racism still exists and that, like all self-serving rationalizations, it has adapted to fit the times. Having collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, an articulated white supremacy--whites-only signs, restrictive covenants, overt police brutality--is no more. But structuralized greed, entrenched privilege, and xenophobia, on the other hand, are alive, well, and mutating athletically to retard each new inroad that blacks make into skin or class privilege. If you can't keep something but you can't give it up, you have to render it unrecognizable; racism has been defined out of existence and repackaged so that whites could retain its perks, especially the psychological ones. It has undergone existential plastic surgery. To keep it buried alive in its unholy grave, a host of Strangelovean a