With No Further Assistance or Guidance From You

Stoic independence from the metaphysics of race.

I continue thinking my way towards a kind of post-black blackness and it’s very difficult. That’s because before I had a significant amount of what I will call extra-national success, I tied myself to a very specific kind of American blackness. That specific cultural aspect, I’ve come to realize sadly, is almost impossible to separate from not only what we used to think about race, but all the new race-think. So once again I’m trying to escape from this reductionist form of identity. As a disembodied writer that’s not so difficult, but now I’m thinking about how to do it as a speaker on tour - something which I think may be inevitable.

The title of this essay comes from the beginning of the end of a chapter in black American cultural history. It is the most memorable monologue from the play written by Ntozake Shange called “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When The Rainbow is Enuf”. People always ask why so many blackfolks have strange names. My nickel says there is strange and then there is Ntozake strange, and suddenly LeBron doesn’t sound so weird. It’s difficult for me to imagine, during the 1970s transition from the Old School to the New Jacks that there would be any junior college with enough black girls to fill one lunchroom table where there hasn’t been some production of this play. Or at the very least some reference to the word ‘assiduously’ from the poem which ends:

with no further assistance & no guidance from you
i am endin this affair

this note is attached to a plant
i've been waterin since the day i met you
you may water it
yr damn self

The impact of this play on folks in my generation cannot be underestimated, but for me it all came down to the abstract import of these few lines.

Black History Months
The difficulty in being a goddamned individual in America is that there will always be some solicitous cad trying to seduce you into agreement with his racial theory. If you don’t have a bone to pick, rejecting his attempts is easily done if you are reasonably stubborn. If you’re not, you’re likely to announce some boilerplate aphorisms and thereby excuse yourself from what you think they want from you. “It doesn’t matter if you’re white, black, green or purple..” is one such cliched escape clause. This never gets to the heart of the metaphysics of race. It takes something extra to understand how to undermine those metaphysics. You disqualify yourself the moment you declare yourself a specially allied white person in the Struggle, or as a minority person incapable of being racist. These fail because you accept the premise of belonging to, and therefore inheriting specific duties of a race of people. Funny how that works, especially among the virtue-signaling types who regularly eschew patriotism.

99% of the time, we attribute any number of positive qualities to individuals owing to what we are generally convinced to be significantly different by race. So opera is white culture and jazz is black culture. So yeah we racialize culture. I’m sure somebody out there knows what race invented sausage, or rice or beer. So the particular burden on Americans is not only the relatively simple task of paying attention to character or class rather than color of skin, but to decontextualize the value of culture and of work from any racial implications.

Now that I think about it, the way of going about this is very analogous to singing the lyrics of Amazing Grace to the theme song melody of Gilligan’s Island. Try it. You’ll never think of either the same way again. For most of my life as I learned from scratch what it meant to be attached to the privileges of class, I swapped out investment in The Struggle for the prerogatives of affluence. Part of the reason was because it worked and it was aligned with my ambition. But a significant part of it was because of the special social status associated with what we can call the Cosby Effect. For younger people, I suppose we could call it the Obama Effect. Either way, we Americans recognized the appeal of blackfolks who walked through affluent life with ease. They didn’t have problems generally associated with ghetto stereotypes and they didn’t struggle to do so. This represented a sea change in black society as well. After all, Beyonce’s grandmother could have been Moms Mabley. OK great grandmother. But what a world of difference.

I can’t say I understand the appeal of Jay-Z or Beyonce aside from their mega success as recording artists. Neither of them are black like me and I couldn’t possibly claim to want to be black like them, exactly however that is. My oldest daughter is a fan of the Queen Bey but even between our two generations there is no blackified prerogative. We are who we are, easily. I honestly couldn’t tell you what Hard Summer was without Google. Now I know. I do like Four Tet. I used to like Skrillex. I have no idea about the rest. Are they black? I don’t ask, I don’t care. In that way, decades of Black History Months have had no particular effect on my family. That’s race, not culture. You and I would love Earth Wind & Fire regardless. You and I would reach back to Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters with no regard or respect to what has happened to American Studies. So let’s sing a little Amazing Grace shall we?

Mysteries of Neuroscience
What is nature and what is nurture remains a mystery. From my perspective the human mind works in unfathomable yet discrete ways as a kind of non-crashing state machine. We haven’t figured out all of the wiring. We just know a little bit about how the alcohol works and a lot about how it feels. Like sex. Like sprinting. I have yet to read Andrew Huberman, but I’ll get around to him this year. I suspect that perhaps in 20 years or so, we’ll have mapped out brain chemistry in such a way as they approach elementary schematics. In the meantime, we can certainly make statistically reasonable estimates at our assessments of our own behaviors. About six years ago I encountered Jordan Peterson and the Big 5 personality measurements. Just this week I found a new mapping called HEXACO. Here’s mine.

As you can see, I live in a few extremistans, most notably in the fat tails of emotionality. I am the very opposite of neurotic. Perhaps that’s why I feel naturally attracted to both the Tao and to Stoicism. As well, it would be fair to call me a very sincere prude. I think it’s one of the reasons I do data engineering. There is a time, a place and a storage & indexing strategy for everything under the sun. I’m just the squirrel to figure that all out. That includes the heuristics people use to decide, with incomplete information, what to think about each other. So once again, I ask how could I possibly live in the unquestioning lee of racial theories? I couldn’t; not with psychology around even as it is being evolved by evolutionary psychology and neuroscience.

I don’t hope that we fall to the level of subjecting each other to a battery of psychological tests, even when it comes to gun control. Quite frankly these are skills we ought to develop in ourselves to get to understand ourselves and then apply them wisely to others with which we sympathize and empathize. Psychoanalyzing is a bit much and we’re probably not as good at it as we think. Then again we are not so good at scoring credit worthiness either, but we are even worse with racial profiling and we know it. Yet for a continually counter-intuitive and bullshit economy we invest in the concepts and mythologies of race. I want out. So do you. Admit it.

What we have are cultures, personality traits and virtues. So what do we lose by deracinating our cultures? We lose convenient shortcuts, coincidently the lifeblood a lot of social scientisms and political polling and pseudo-intellectual journalism. Oh yeah and Grievance Studies. Then again, I do believe that neural paths get established through habits of behavior. Still you can only take sexual intercourse so seriously. Even gerbils do that.

The Stoic Trick
The trick then is to eliminate our dependence on a kind of affinity for the racial, wherever that racial attention is coming from. If there was anything that I learned from Shange’s production, it was that so-called black women could refuse to be captured by so-called black men. This is exactly what is to be expected from art, a realization that you can be spoken to as an individual and take your own lesson from this unexpected place - from the mind of someone you never meet who might have an even stranger name than you.

I wonder if women who watched the play and memorized the poem came to the realization and perhaps admitted to themselves that they may have been suicidal, even if only slowly suicidal. What indeed is slowly poisoning us?

I leave you with Marcus Aurelius.