Tag: W.E.B. DuBois

Remember and Wake Up

February 3, 2018.Reading time 4 minutes.

Remember…The United States was founded on the premise of wanting independence from European powers.  It was not a question of dominance, but rather a question of autonomy, self-determination and intentional isolation.  We didn’t enter WWI until the final year of armed conflict and it took the attack on our ships in Hawaii (not Hawaii itself or other Pacific islands) for us to enter WWII.

Remember…The founding fathers of the US chose protecting their financial futures over the basic humanity of specific people; they wrote this into our founding documents.

Remember…The narrative that seeks to portray African Americans as non-human has been alive in media, educational materials, popular song, slogans and our language since Africans and Europeans started co-existing on this land. The continued violence of the word “nigger” is based on this dehumanization.

Remember…Immigration of non-Anglo Europeans (specifically Catholics) was regarded as a mortal threat to the “integrity” of the United States for well over 100 years and still resonates in the cultural segregation of our cities.  We have still only elected one non-Protestant president…and we killed him.

Remember…Native “Americans” were here first and had thriving cultures that included systems of trade, spirituality, justice, agriculture, government, etc.  European settlers could only see them as “savage” because of the color of their skin and sought to eradicate them.

Remember…The 1924 Immigration Act was heavily influenced by the Eugenics Movement to avoid the importation of “inferior stock” to the US.  Largely promoted to limit the procreation of mental and physical disability, forced sterilization and other eugenic techniques were later adopted by the Nazis.

Remember…Women haven’t yet had the vote for 100 years and men are still in overdrive legislating their bodies as if women are chattel.

“Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana

Donald Trump is not a failure or an anomaly.  He is the full manifestation of the goals of the systems that we have woefully accepted as “American”.  If we truly want to deal with the challenges he presents to all but the most narrow-minded interpreters of the United States’ history, more of us have to be willing to completely re-write the book.  This means our work is not to “fight” or “resist” him and his supporters.  Our work is to birth a reality in which the virus he represents cannot survive.  The work is not explicitly anti-capitalist, but it seeks to de-colonize the mechanisms and markers of capitalist success.  The work is not anti-white, but it does not default to whiteness as a norm or automatically place white/Euro priorities at the center.  The work is not anti-man, but it demands that manhood and maleness accepts its place in a spectrum of sexuality, gender identity and orientation as an equal and not as a final word.

Donald Trump is the culmination of the American Dream; it is time to wake the f*ck up.

-ALD

Black Panther (opens February 16, 2018) – OFFICIAL TRAILER

Wherefore Art Thou?

January 1, 2017.Reading time 8 minutes.
dubois
W.E.B. DuBois

In 1890 W.E.B. DuBois delivered a commencement address at Harvard[1] in which he tackled the issue of the impact that leadership has on society. He brilliantly foreshadows the work of Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (I and Thou – 1923). More importantly, his words ring ominously true today as we start 2017 in the United States. In the piece, he reflects on the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis:

I wish to consider not the man, but the type of civilization which his life represented: its foundation is the idea of the strong man—Individualism coupled with the rule of might

DuBois goes on to caution that:

The Strong Man and his mighty Right Arm has become the Strong Nation with its armies. Under whatever guise, however, a Jefferson Davis may appear as man, as race, or as nation, his life can only logically mean this: the advance of a part of the world at the expense of the whole; the overweening sense of the I, and the consequent forgetting of the Thou. It has thus happened, that advance in civilization has always been handicapped by shortsighted national selfishness.

Today, we are facing a New Year and a new government and sadly a new shortsightedness. The choice is stark: are we, as a society, a nation and individuals, going to be an isolated “I” or are we going to be partners in cultivating a world of “I-Thou”?

The incoming US Government administration has utilized a “post-truth”, bully posture to convince the American people that the schoolyard will be better for everyone as long as the chief punk is in charge. This has ushered in a new dark age in American idealism that finds its greatest motivation in fear…fear of exclusion from the club, fear of the other, fear of appearing weak, etc. It backs up a nouveau belligerence that has no grounding in facts or integrity. “Because I say so” has become the default bargaining phrase of the day and the “deals” that are already being struck are less about negotiation and more about coercion and self-aggrandizement. In this equation there is only “I”. The “I” of the “strong man” who only functions for himself* and the “I” of the minions responding to the source of their intimidation, each one trying to see a small part of the big bully/strong man reflected in themselves.

But there is also the dangerous “I” of apathetic immobilized malcontents who refuse to fight back because they believe the system will correct itself. These are the same people who in 1868 allowed Jefferson Davis and the rest of the Southern aggressors in the civil war to be pardoned “with restoration of all rights, privileges, and immunities under the Constitution and the laws which have been made in pursuance thereof.”[2] The result was Jefferson Davis and his “Strong Man” never being called to task for defending the institutionalized possession, abuse, rape and murder of other human beings in servitude. This laid the groundwork for the next 150 years of political apologists who still don’t understand why blacks don’t just “get over” slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow. The “I” of apathy does more damage because it is the “I” of retreat and acquiescence with the full knowledge that grave wrong is being committed. This is the same “I” that quickly defaults to assumptions of sameness as a rationale for inaction. It proudly proclaims on one hand that “All Lives Matter” and that it does not see race, but it refers to “the Hispanics” or “the gays” as if they are entirely different species. This is the “I” who will see you as long as they see themselves in you first.

But, I-Thou does not function based on sameness; it is not a filter. Instead, I-Thou is a manifestation of interconnectedness. I-Thou asks us to be in relationship regardless of our ability to agree. It says that there is no I without Thou. The great advantage here is the elimination of in-groups and out-groups and the true nourishment and safety of all. The challenge for us then today is to avoid being swept up in the wave of “Strong Man” individualism based on assumptions about how we are all the same and instead embrace the importance of being able to submit strength, individual or national to the benefit of all in celebration of our collective uniquenesses. In truth, the more the “Strong Man” abandons his relationship with “Thou”, he is not only weak, but an utter coward, afraid of his own human frailty and need. I cannot improve upon the words DuBois uses to drive home our greatest calling, particularly now at the dawn of an era that will challenge our most basic potential for interconnectedness:

What then is the change made in the conception of civilization, by adding to the idea of the Strong Man, that of the Submissive Man? It is this: The submission of the strength of the Strong to the advance of all—not in mere aimless sacrifice, but recognizing the fact that, “To no one type of mind is it given to discern the totality of Truth,[3]” that civilization cannot afford to lose the contribution of the very least of nations for its full development: that not only the assertion of the I, but also the submission to the Thou is the highest individualism.

Happy New Year!

– ALD

*I have intentionally retained the limited masculine language of “he/him/his” in this piece to reflect the original language used by both DuBois and Buber from which I have drawn my analysis.

[1] http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b196-i029

[2] http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=72360

[3] New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, Volume 7, Issue: 3, March, 1890, 361-374