The Dirtiest Laundry

Homesteading a new racial frontier.

Last week I found myself saying something to myself for the first time. It is emblematic of my journey towards wisdom and the process of trying to be calm and benevolent under all conditions. There were other things swirling around in my head as well, but the direct provocation was found in a comment about something I wrote.

For somebody who says he doesn’t take race seriously, you sure do write about it a lot.

To that I essentially have two defenses and one confession. I will reveal it as I roleplay the conversation with ‘Samael’, the devil’s advocate.

Bowen: You should read my essay on that. It’s The Existential Dilemma of Black Anti-Racism. The first thing I say is that I hate being a raceman.

Samael: Yeah been there done that. You still call it ‘enlightened self-interest’. You’ve become notable because you’re a race writer. Do you deny that?

Bowen: I don’t wish I wasn’t American. Race is an American problem, especially now. Sometimes I wish Americans could take more cultural clues from other places, but that’s wishful thinking. I deal with the subject when it arises. It arises too much. I feel an obligation to help people get racial reasoning out of their lives.

Samael: But you don’t have to. You call yourself a Stoic, why do you pretend that you are in control?

Bowen: I write things you won’t find anywhere else. Things that appear relevant to me that nobody else is saying. That can genuinely change minds. I enjoy being that unique. I’m not trying to do it ‘as a person of color’. I do what I like.

Samael: Dude. You get paid less than a third string quarterback for the Detroit Lions. Can’t you just admit that you love the game? You cannot get to this level without having dedicated a significant amount of time and energy. What are you not telling me?

Bowen: OK I have a confession to make.

Samael: I’m all ears.

Bowen: I don’t like being black.

Samael: WHAT? So what you’re saying is…

Bowen: Shutup Samael, this is complicated. Here’s the thing. I don’t have enough time, and I have run out of patience to find a large cadre of black friends who are very much like me. There have been several periods in my life where I was fairly deeply engaged with a bunch of people like me. I found close friends and lovers, people I trusted with the keys to my house and car. What I never found, or at least cannot recall finding, were a number of people with as deep a black nationalist origin as I had. All of them seemed to go off the deep end into irretrievably convoluted rat mazes. If that metaphor sounds mixed up, you should hear them talk.

I call it self-fulfilling idiocy. The fact of the matter is, just like Tammy Faye Baker, you can find your ‘authentic’ audience and promise them the moon for decades. These are our little American autocracies.

The irony at the crux of this is that the more successful you become in America, the more sensitive you become to actual racist animus against you. But does it really kill you to suffer a little?

Samael: I think I get…

Bowen: Shutup, I’m not finished. There’s an old Bill Cosby joke about the drunk mean uncle who finally says “You’ve actually been so good this year I’m going to get you that bike you always wanted for Christmas.” And he keeps being nice and it’s weird but you keep hoping. And every time he comes over he repeats the promise. “Just go fetch me another drink. Oh thank you, you’re so good.” And then on one visit in the middle of December you tell him that mom says there’s no more brandy in the kitchen. He curses you out and says no bike.

The question is, did you ever really trust him? Do you beat yourself up? Well when you decide to be black, the goalposts are always moving like a mean drunk uncle. The mean drunk uncle is race itself. The moving goalposts are what you’re supposed to represent as the ‘proper’ black man. It’s never going to get you the bike. So you become mean and you start drinking yourself into your drunk uncle. You start testing your stupid little nephews. You get drunk and you tell them how you never got that bike.

Samael: I don’t see your point.

Bowen: My point is fuck the bike.

Samael: That’s your point? Fuck the bike?

Bowen: Yeah. Fuck the bike. I don’t have to be black. I can be anything else in the world I decide. I’m not going to have my life, my Christmas, my hopes and dreams determined by a bike or drunk uncle or anything like that.

Samael: That’s just sour grapes. Besides. You wanted that bike. Plus, you told a Bill Cosby joke. You just hate yourself because you are a failure at being black. You didn’t get the bike. You suffered. You suffered the black failure. You’re a failure like everyone else black.

Bowen: How certain are you that no bike is a black failure?

Samael: Wait. You’re the one who told the story.

Bowen: Yes it could have been a Hot Wheel track. As long as it ends in failure, the point is disappointment. Everyone has disappointment. My point is I don’t have to live up to anyone’s racial expectations. I’m the one who asked not only for the prize but my drunk uncle’s impression of me. I played the role. And from June to December I thought playing that role would get me what I want. All I had to do is put up with that old fool and keep up appearances. But you know what? There’s nothing I will ever do to play that game again.

Samael: Yeah but that pain is part of you.

Bowen: Yeah. My fault for being stupid and playing the game for so long. I own the pain and I walk away. Now I have put away childish things.

Samael: Oh so you’re going to quote the Bible on me?

Bowen: Christianity is bigger than blackness.

Samael: Well excuse me. I can see that you’re just another anti-black Christian now.

Bowen: I already told you I’m not playing that game. I’m not copping to any racial role you want me to assume. I’m doing what is consistent for me. So it’s inevitable that I fall out from whatever anybody say is my my proper role. Race. Religion. Color. Creed. Sex. Orientation. Ability…

Samael: OK OK I get it. You’re a goddamned individual.

Bowen: Yeah with paid subscribers.

Samael: You’d make a lot more money with BLM.

Bowen: I’m too honest to be a pimp.

Samael: Would it really kill you to suffer a little?

Bowen: Go away Samael. You have served your purpose.

Who Owns My Success or Failure?
I don’t know if this parses as well as I think it does. But it does have the ring of truth for me. In a conventional way, I could call it my particular complaint against racism and maybe draw some unsought sympathy for that. The thing is, like driving a stick or drinking out of a water hose, or backpacking in the Sierras, these are skills I got a long time ago that stuck with me. I’m not indebted forever for learning how to do X from teacher Y. I’m from a small town called Black. You learn what you need to achieve and then you graduate to the larger world. I can’t help it if people can’t see that town the way I did. I’m not invested in changing their POV. But I do write, and because it’s me writing, it will reflect my own life lessons. Or put it another way, is it the fear of the racist white man that makes the black woman achieve? So does she owe her success to that fear - was it only the redneck’s existence that was the author of her success? Does she live in that shadow forever?

So I like being me. In fact, I love it. I own me. And I love learning something new and adding it to me. I just hate being second-guessed with regard to what blackness is supposed to mean to me and how that somehow is supposed to determine a proper path. I don’t need it. I don’t want it. And despite the fact that I don’t intend to disappoint people, I can’t help that I might. Doing all that is just what I do, but I don’t call it ‘demanding respect as a black man in America’. That’s the game I refuse to play.

Now here’s the irony.

Any day of the week, you might do some research and find the name of some Afro-American that took advantage of The Homestead Act of 1862 and further discover that there were small black settlements all over the Wild West. I’d probably use that to diffuse slavery talk because I hate slavery talk, precisely because it’s practically all Woke orthodoxy and apologia for reparations. So what I’m actually doing is finding an interesting bit of history, I’m not trolling for a reason to reshape blackness. Still, I understand the double standard. If a nominally white person finds out something interesting about somebody who happens to be white in history is it assumed that they are trying to magnify the significance of whiteness? Only in the racialized mind, which is my point. So actually there is no irony, but I’m prepared to deal with it ironically because I question my own curiosity about what nominally black people did in history. If I weren’t writing about it today, I’d little note nor long remember, or toss it over the digital transom for my computer slave to remember for me.

In either case, I do care about this thing that goes by the name of ‘black culture’, but that’s another complex conversation. The gist of it will be that I don’t believe that cultures are owned by races. Not in in modern and postmodern economies at any rate.

Why Dirty?
Because I make presumptions about the prerogatives of the Talented Tenth, and I am somewhat hesitant in my belief that affluent black Americans are, to a significant extent, racially self-serving. Yet that is my suspicion. I’m really not out to prove or disprove it, but I presume that it is an ugly truth that I may eventually discover. I don’t know how I will take it. I might take it like the discovery of the corruption of the leadership of BLM. I might take it like the discovery of the indictments against Bill Cosby. I might take it like the discovery that black American income & wealth inequality is greater than that of American income & wealth equality. Lightly, with sorrow, or as a simple matter of fact.

The fact remains that there is truth to be told in the heterodoxy of American history and the way Americans today are influenced by racial narratives makes a dog’s breakfast of that truth. Still, racial narratives are but one form of the corrupting stupidity that pollutes our society. Yeah well fuck all their bikes.

PS. I also call ‘bikes’ Scooby Snacks. These are the treats that the Rulers dangle just over the heads of Geniuses to make them jump. These are the programs and bourgeois benefits that the middle class dangles just over the heads of the poor to make them ‘behave’.

PPS. Just last week I discovered the author T. R. Fehrenbach. He may very well be possessed of a more definitive answer to some questions I had about the Comanche ever since I read Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock a couple years back. That lead to a frustrating trip to the UCLA Library and read of Empire of the Summer Moon.

I don’t take racial theories seriously. I don’t take racial identity seriously. I recognize their serious ability to debilitate shared praxis and destroy the open society. Stoically, I’m prepared for the next Jim Crow.