The Struggle is Real

The Struggle is Internal

Black Rage
This post is specifically addressed to my conception of the average American who is not ideologically woke but believes certain political myths. Political myths are not true or false, they work something like this:

A great myth makes a social movement serious, formidable, and heroic. But this it would not do unless the myth inspired, and was in turn sustained by, violence. In his analysis of violence—the most notorious and attacked part of Sorel’s work—Sorel begins, as in the case of myth, with the narrowed problem of violence as related to the proletarian revolutionary movement.

Burnham, James. The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (p. 93). Lume Books. Kindle Edition.

We all understand the political context of Black Rage. This is the political myth, most often placed in the context of Malcolm X, that expects and demands violence done by a few represents the will of the many. From ‘Burn Baby Burn’ to ‘No Justice, No Peace’, the threat of violent protest and the acceptance of violent revolt is part and parcel of a constant expectation of black American politics.

Psychological Privilege
For most of my life, I didn’t take psychology seriously. For me it always seemed like a bunch of in-jokes for the Woody Allen crowd. When I was a freshman at State, I had to take the 101 class and by then I had figured out that many of my classmates were just dealing with suffering at the hands of their parents. Trying desperately to figure out why they missed the love or support or healthy snacks of childhood. I was condescendingly blasé, or as they say, I was swimming in an invisible ocean of privilege.

Both of my parents were social workers. In that way, they were professional parents, helping other parents become better parents back in the days when local and state governments were erecting a welfare safety net. I can’t even remember when I came to understand what we used to call ‘broken homes’, but I recall being totally confused by kids with different last names living under the same roof in my neighborhood. I know I was born 18 months after my parent’s wedding - that is an oddment these days. Is good parenting?

I go there because I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the psychological impact of being called a ‘nigger’ in your own home by your own parents. It was something I never experienced. Even today with both of my [black] parents alive and well in their 80s, they’ll never utter the word. Some of this was reinforced by a more subtle turn of conversation in the chaos transmitted by the Spousal Unit now recently back from dealing with family matters in Detroit. There was accelerated drama in Zoom calls arranging for a death in the family, which started off as tiresome and then became unbearable. A certain amount of shit-talking was generally accepted in various branches of the family that was unacceptable in others. “That’s just how we talk to each other.” was the reason given. When I didn’t care about psychology I would just snob my way out of such chaos; I might have even made obtuse comments around ‘professionalism’.

Fragile vs Anti-Fragile
Professionalism is hardly the behavioral standard worth defending in the larger scheme of things. Nor is the professional environment of corporate work any substitute for family. We are always and everywhere subject to discord, conflict and subjugation to crap. Certainly there have been moments in everyone’s life where we are thinking “I did not sign up for this.” So it’s no wonder that people are trying to negotiate more and more respect from the workplace. My inclination is to say, quite frankly that it’s all a matter of psychological fragility. But I have a very specific reason.

If I were still a Conservative, I would probably leave the discussion here with an elision to the glory that is our [integrated] national armed forces. But it just so happens that in my life, aside from my indomitable spirit born of primogeniture, my father was not only a Marine, but a black nationalist. So there are two counts of nationalism plus the good fortune of never having been completely humiliated and dominated as a child or teen. To that, I add highbrow acculturation in my adulthood, some measure of professional success, travel and psychological anti-fragility.

I have said before that blackness is anti-fragile to racism. But my definition of blackness holds only for the best of my generation, and we are aging out. Millennial blackness is having existential identity crises and all sorts of issues. In the good old days, we used to call this attitude ‘seditty’. It was the zero-tolerance of racism held by Negroes who were rich, educated and/or could pass for white. The problem of the seditty was that they generally had zero-tolerance for their peasant race mates, yet still made much of their own racial identity. I derisively enjoy the irony of Millennials making enemies of their mates and then crying foul when they are led to the guillotine. Yes, of course there is black fragility.

On the other hand, those Negroes who had a bit more nerve and gumption (as contrasted with those who talked shit but also didn’t do shit), blackness was the move. The very adoption of the previous racial slur was all about embracing the suck. Like the martial chant, it was made real by having a mission ‘The Struggle’ in which victory would justify all prior suffering. Here we observe another fork in the road. Those ascendant in today’s rhetoric were those who put the blame on the Global System of White Supremacy. The other faction were those who adopted what is now called ‘Tiger Mom’ tactics. Most African-Americans used some hybrid form and I think it’s a good bet that you could paint a spectrum between those poles.

Of course my bias would be on the side of the meritocratic strivers if I’m honestly paying tribute to my own upbringing and attitude. Since I don’t much care for ‘the status of the race’, it’s something more than a curiosity but much less than what I once took as a generational imperative. I can only say for certain that there is a boundary that requires orbital speed to reach at which point one fully escapes the gravity of race. The metaphor is apt. It is wishful thinking to believe we’re all going to live in a raceless cosmos any time soon. But do not doubt the transformative view of ant-like Earthlings that view from orbit provides. The metaphor breaks when you compare the small number of people who have been in orbit as compared to those who have broken free of the yoke of race’s various dysfunctions and more properly see our tiny blue marble. Nevertheless, we are rare enough and race’s gravity is not a law of physics. So I don’t think I’m defying something natural and inviolate when I disregard any racial status. It’s just another social force employed by the ruling class’ currently preferred hierarchies.

In Your Head, Zombie
It bears mentioning that there is no black without white. There is no social force of racism if the majority of peasants don’t accept that they ‘are’ some race. So all of the little honkies, crackers, sambos, injuns, kikes, greasers, beaners, slopes, chinks, kafirs and sandies in your head are, after all, in your head. How are you going to cleanse yourself of all that? How can you transcend the gravity of race if you are thinking of yourself as part and parcel of some racial social force either as beneficiary or victim? You have to reshape yourself. You have to get out of the box. You have to climb out of the barrel. I’ve called it ‘personal deracination’. Sad as it may sound, you’re not going to get a lot of assistance or applause. We’re not as colorblind as we were 4 years ago, much less than before half of America traded in the idea that 2016 was the birth of the Racial Antichrist. But you know how that goes.

Some Americans have yet to recover from Hurricane Sandy. Some from Katrina. That struggle was real, but not everywhere all at once, and for all time. You can clean your house. I expect that you will. I don’t mind being disappointed; I can embrace that you suck. I can embrace the fact that you are mentally fat and sloppy in a way that is as obvious as American sloth is to snarky Europeans. You can embrace the fact that you are invested in a democratic political culture that is always trying to make something of race, even in the ways in which they specifically {avoid, spin, frame, harp on} racial issues. That culture doesn’t have to leave footprints tracking all over your mind. You need to be mentally healthy to deal. You can’t be a 98 pound weakling and fight the Race Industrial Complex, kicking up sand like a hurricane. And you can’t be suckered into reshaping your moral universe when you see celebrities rescuing the puppies of race. But you know this, I’m not shaming you, I’m reminding you.

Nobody likes to be racially profiled. Nobody. Except those clever folks who find ways to benefit from the conventional wisdom about race, which is as always, one social force working to the benefit of the Ruling Class. The escape hatch is in your mind. You have to reject The Struggle as defined by political leaders who want your vote and ascent. Now here’s the hook that few people understood about Malcolm X, but many black Conservatives did, as well as more recent black Sunni.

The platform that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, our religious leader, stands on is the platform of complete freedom, justice and equality for the 20 million black people or so-called Negroes here in America. And he teaches us that because of the seriousness of the condition that our people now find themselves in that it is absolutely impossible to solve our problems with means other than religion. And he teaches us that the religion of Islam is the only religion that will instill within our people the incentive to stand on our own feet. And instead of trying to force ourselves upon whites or force ourselves into the white society or blame the white man for our predicament and constantly beg him for what he has, he says that the only way that we can solve our problem is to unite together among ourselves, among our own kind, clean ourselves up, rid ourselves of the evils that we've become addicted to here in this society and try and solve our problem ourselves.

If you didn’t know before, this is something of a constant in black conservative thought.

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Now the difficult thing is that having accomplished this difficult task, having done the work on yourself, you have to re-make sense of yourself in the world. Again, more difficult than it was before the rise of ‘cultural appropriation’ and other postmodern conceptual constructions tweaking our notions of identity and selfhood. It’s not a bowl of cherries being a mentally healthy individual, but at least you’re not beating yourself up. You’re not punching yourself in the nose. You are not a Letterkenny Skid rebel. You don’t hate the world, hate your parents and hate yourself. You just need some adjustment.

Who has ingested racial psychological poison? That is the person who says I cannot be what I want to be until that race over there does something. This is the poison that undermines self-determination, and makes one co-dependent on The Struggle. It’s not healthy to need politics of self-esteem. We’ll work on that, OK?