Imagine for a moment that there was a part of your body, an organ, that by the very nature of the society in which you lived, existed under immense pressure. Imagine that this organ, placed in a conspicuously vulnerable position on your body, was to expand, rise, and remain erect at will. Imagine that your status in society depended upon your ability to control this organ. Imagine that if you couldn’t get the damn thing to work, the importance of your existence would be questioned.
Suppose further that some other overly oppressive race of people confined your “freedom of expression” almost exclusively to the manipulation of this organ. And then suppose that this race was always threatening to cut it off, to sever this organ from your body and leave you with nothing!
Suppose your peers started a movement to obtain your equality to this oppressive race. Suppose you took it upon yourself to prove your ability to use other parts of your body such as your heart and your mind. Suppose your great heart enabled you to endure enormous suffering and still love your enemy. Suppose your clever and resourceful mind enabled you to prepare eloquent and moving speeches and to write exhaustive and lengthy papers that gave evidence beyond doubt that you were the equal of any man.
But then suppose your enemy’s response was to spit in your face, to waterhose you, to bomb your homes and school buses loaded with your children, and suppose the whole nation in which you lived watched the abuse of your people on national television but still did nothing to end your misery. And suppose that one of the main reasons they didn’t was because they were afraid you would use this organ on their daughters. Suppose the enemy race continued to define you only in terms of this organ (meanwhile making the function of this organ a dirty thing, illegal to describe or photograph), giving even greater emphasis to your by now legendary ability to manipulate it. And finally suppose that this enemy race’s ability to manipulate this organ was assumed, by the popular culture, to be extremely doubtful at worst, unreliable at best.
Isn’t it just possible that, under these circumstances, you might begin to fantasize about this organ? Couldn’t you begin to bestow all sorts of magical powers on it that it might or might not have? Couldn’t this organ begin to represent the very essence of your struggle against the oppressive race? Isn’t it possible that you would begin to feel, since its manipulation was your one absolute strength and your enemy’s one absolute weakness, that with the operation of this organ lay the solution to all your problems? How else could you react to centuries of attack on this part of your body, this organ that separated you from nonexistence, from extinction, from nonmanhood—from death?
For hundreds of years white men had written and spoken about how the black man was “hung like an ape,” about how he fucked like an animal. The big black prick pervaded the white man’s nightmare. Why? In a male chauvinist society each man is somewhat threatened by every other man’s virility. Because white men were the oppressors and black men were oppressed, white men had an even greater cause to fear the black man’s virility.
It was really quite simple. As long as black men were virile, black people would continue to exist (assuming the women were willing) and as long as black people existed, there would be the possibility of their liberation, their taking what was theirs—the products of their labor—even of their conquering the white man.
On one level, the emotional, hysterical level and the level on which most powerless white men react, white men feared the black man’s sexual dexterity, the black man’s sexual appeal, and the black man’s attraction for the white woman. But on another level, on the level at which actual power changes hands, white men feared the black man’s penis as the starting point of black families, of the strength of numbers, of the perpetuation of the race, and the resourcefulness gained from centuries of oppression.
The Civil Rights Movement occurred when black men and black women could not be terrified into silence any longer. A black woman, Rosa Parks, set the wheels in motion. Both black men and black women had grown weary of suffering, were ready to struggle, and thought they had discovered techniques that would soon lead to their freedom. But white men would not budge an inch. Despite the Civil Rights Movement’s dedication to the methods of “passive resistance,” white men saw the speaking out of black men as a combined threat to their own virility, to their money, and their power.
Under pressure the white man enacted meaningless legislation. He continued to debate the inferiority of the black race. He gave blacks the right to vote and nothing to vote for, the right to buy but no money to buy with, the right to go wherever they wanted but no transportation to get there. And lastly he told the black man to keep his penis tucked between his legs or there would be nothing at all. With good reason, the black man grew blind with rage. He decided he would do exactly what he thought the white man wanted him to do least. He would debase and defile white women. He would also show the white man that black women had no influence over him and that they would have to pay for fucking white men for all those years. He too would make his woman submissive, but he would not be the chump the white man had been. He’d give his woman nothing for her submissiveness.
Yes, white men were perversely obsessed with the black man’s genitals but the obsession turned out to be a communicable disease and in the sixties black men came down with high fevers. Richard Wright was the first to present the white nightmare, Black Macho, as a vehicle of liberation. Then Mailer spoke of the nobility of the primitive within America’s center and described how if that primitive was ever to realize his equality—equal education, wealth, political representation, and couple it with his sheer physical magnificence, his awesome virility, and stone-age sexual morality, he would rule the earth.
Black men began to harp on the white man’s obsession with their genitals and that was the very point at which their own obsession began to take hold. Baldwin, under pressure, Jones, Cleaver, and many others began to glorify the primitivism of the black man, to take his macho out of the category of human error and place it in the category of divine destiny.
An assertion of his selfhood and sexuality, a rejection of the all-importance of fear, was very probably essential to the black man’s development at the stage he found himself in the sixties. Perhaps it was necessary for Huey Newton and the Black Panthers to make a public display of arming themselves. Their actions represented an unprecedented boldness in the sons of slaves and had a profound and largely beneficial effect on the way in which black men would regard themselves from then on. Yet the gains would have been more lasting if an improved self-image had not been so hopelessly dependent upon Black Macho—a male chauvinist that was frequently cruel, narcissistic, and shortsighted.
ldridge Cleaver describes a confrontation between the police and Huey Newton in February of 1967. Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, escorted by an armed guard of Black Panthers including Newton, had arrived at Ramparts magazine offices in San Francisco in order to talk to Cleaver:
At that moment a big, beefy cop stepped forward. He undid the little strap holding his pistol in his holster and started shouting at Huey, “Don’t point that gun at me! Stop pointing that gun at me!” He kept making gestures as though he was going for his gun…. Huey stopped in his tracks and stared at the cop.
“Let’s split, Huey! Let’s split!” Bobby Seale was saying.
Ignoring him, Huey walked within a few feet of the cop and said, “What’s the matter, you got an itchy finger?”
The cop made no reply.
“You want to draw your gun?” Huey asked him.
The other cops were calling out for this cop to cool it, to take it easy, but he didn’t seem to be able to hear them. He was staring into Huey’s eyes, measuring him.
“O.K.,” Huey said. “You big fat racist pig, draw your gun!”
The cop made no move.
“Draw it, you cowardly dog!” Huey pumped a round into the chamber of the shotgun. “I’m waiting,” he said, and stood there waiting for the cop to draw.…
Then the cop facing Huey gave it up. He heaved a heavy sigh and lowered his head. Huey literally laughed in his face and then went off up the street at a jaunty pace, disappearing in a blaze of dazzling sunlight. (Eldridge Cleaver, Post-Prison Writing & Speeches, ed. Robert Sheer, New York: Random House, 1969.)
Cleaver said Newton’s actions indicated he had “courage,” and that would have to be the obvious conclusion. But I wonder. It all sounds rather demented to me. And we now know for a fact that it was foolhardy. There were voices, such as Julius Lester’s in Revolutionary Notes, that pleaded for more restraint, more calculation. “The revolutionary is very careful not to do anything that would call for a confrontation between him and the enemy as long as he knows he can’t win that confrontation,” Lester said in 1968. “The revolutionary does nothing that will serve only to unite the enemy against him.…” But no one listened.
The black revolutionary of the sixties calls to mind nothing so much as a child who is acting for the simple pleasure of the reaction he will elicit from, and the pain he will cause, his father. Is it possible that the contemporary black man is too dependent? And can we blame that dependency on slavery?
Some accepted slavery in fear of freedom; others in awareness of superior forces; others only because they were held down by the manifestation of that force. Almost all, however, with lesser or greater intensity, fell into a paternalistic pattern of thought, and almost all re-defined that pattern into a doctrine of self-protection.…
To the slave … the very meaning of paternalism shifted to one of interdependence. If the master had a duty to provide for his people and to behave like a decent human being, then his duty had to become the slave’s right. Where the master preferred to translate their own self-defined duties into privileges for their people … the slaves understood duties to be duties.…
… the intersection of paternalism with racism worked a catastrophe, for it transformed elements of personal dependency into a sense of collective weakness … they had to wage a prolonged, embittered struggle with themselves as well as with their oppressors to “feel their strength” and to become “conscious of their responsibility and value.” It was not that the slaves did not act like men. Rather, it was that they could not grasp their collective strength as a people and act like political men. The black struggle on that front, which has not yet been won, has paralleled that of every other oppressed people. It is difficult because it is the final struggle a people must wage to forge themselves into a nation. (Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, New York: Pantheon, 1974.)
Genovese portrays the patriarchy as both harmful and beneficial. Beneficial in that it afforded the slave an opportunity to wrench from the slaveholders certain rights (i.e., the right to own his time on Sundays, to name his own children, to expect that his opinion of an overseer would be honored) as well as the opportunity to formulate a synthesis of African and American white culture. But this derived culture was harmful in that it was one of accommodation. It provided only for a situation in which the whites would be the ultimate controlling factor. Although black culture was subversive by nature, it had no way of providing for aggressive, organized, collective action, “the final struggle a people must wage to forge themselves into a nation.” This may, indeed, be the case, but I would like to suggest something else.
The black man’s tremendous struggle for education, for land, for political rights, for the right to protect his land and his children, can all be taken as signs that the black man was far from a helpless dependent at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. And for that matter, probably, the infrequency of slave rebellions in the U.S. can be taken in the same way.
As Nathan Huggins suggests in his introduction to Black Odyssey, perhaps we have been too singleminded about discovering and proving the heroism of the minority of slaves who engaged in overt resistance, while devoting too little attention to the dignity and persistence of that majority of slaves who quietly and consistently insisted upon their own humanity in a thousand little ways against enormous odds.
… looking beyond the acts of defiance, rebellion, and escape, we will find a quality of courage still unsung. It is the triumph of the human spirit over unmitigated power. It raises no banners. It gained no vengeance. It was only the pervasive and persistent will among Afro-Americans to hold together through deep trauma and adversity. Much that was in their circumstances would have reduced them to brutes, to objects in the market. It would have been easy to become what many whites insisted they were: dumb, slow, insensitive, immoral, wanting in true human qualities. But slaves laid claim to their humanity and refused to compromise it, creating families where there would have been none, weaving a cosmology and a moral order in a world of duplicity, shaping an art and a world of imagination in a cultural desert.
It is exactly this triumph of the human spirit over adversity that is the great story in Afro-American slavery…. No black American, and certainly no white American, has cause to apologize for them. Modern history knows of no more glorious story of the triumphant human spirit. (Nathan I. Huggins, Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery, New York: Pantheon, 1977.)
The black man knew that momentary acts of courage could mean the wholesale slaughter of his people, and nothing was more important to him than their preservation, not even the gratifying experience of a public manhood that whites would finally have to recognize. In this sense, the black man showed boundless courage. And it was probably the reason the move to crush Reconstruction, to bind him again to subservience, was so forceful. He was still very dangerous then, because he was still so close to that slave ship he had arrived in. But as he lost grip on a black perspective, as he lost track of his original intentions, and adopted a white perspective, a perspective from which he was seen as helpless, dependent, animalistic, he began to think the things he had done indicated that he was not a man. Once this process was set in motion, he would be allowed more and more freedom by the whites. You could say that the less he knew what to do with his privileges, the more the white power structure was willing to give him.
The black man’s acceptance of a white perspective was gradual and it was only partially accomplished at the time of the abolition of slavery. Many newly freed slaves insisted that their women not work in the fields. Their material advancement was severely set back as a result. In this case black men had forgotten their priority, independent economic survival, and substituted for it a white priority that was totally inappropriate to their situation. But for the most part black men after slavery kept their own priorities in the foreground and that was why they were so maniacally feared and put down.
Contrary to what Genovese says, the danger for the slave was not dependency itself. Rather it was the danger of becoming dependent upon a foreign and essentially hostile culture: only then would the black man superimpose the values of the larger white society upon his own quite different needs. The black man post-slavery for the most part successfully avoided that danger. But today, more than a hundred years later, he seems closer to a destructive dependency upon white culture than he has ever been before.
Can you imagine what the newly emancipated slaves would have done with the opportunities that are now available to blacks in this country? Would they have needed to parade before white police with rifles to prove that they were men? Would it be possible to explain to them why blacks destroy their own neighborhoods, rape and abuse their own women, drink too much liquor, inject heroin into their veins?
Civil Rights Movement tactics were deserted because they depended too much upon the goodness of whites. But the Black Movement turned out to be even less independent in its notion of freedom. There was a great deal more marching around with rifles and combat boots, of badmouthing and threatening whites, than there was of actual revolutionary planning and action. What did this son of a slave actually expect whites to do? Did he expect, like the boy who is throwing a tantrum because he can’t have something he wants, that Big Daddy would finally buy it for him just to shut him up? The black man had forgotten who he was. He had come to believe that his universe was really as the whites had defined it. The most important thing was no longer the welfare of his family, his people, but white racism.
White racism is the white man’s problem, not the black man’s. His task is rather—and the black man post-slavery knew it—to ameliorate the manifestations of racism, his own poverty, deprivation, and unhappiness; to remove by whatever means necessary the restraints that exist on his health, his productivity, his creativity, and the perpetuation of his culture, the way of life that will allow him to live, survive, and flourish.
But the contemporary black man no longer exists for his people or even for himself. He has made himself a living testament to the white man’s failures. He must continue to suffer, to be brutalized, and to brutalize his peers until whites are able to become the better people that will be required to deliver him from his condition. He has become a martyr. And he has arrived in this place, not because of the dependency inflicted upon him in slavery, but because his black perspective, like the white perspective, supported the notion that manhood is more valuable than anything else.
As long as he was able to hold onto his own black-centered definition of manhood, his sense of himself was not endangered. But it was inevitable, as the time that he had been in this country lengthened, that he would get the black and white perspectives confused. He is unaware that he has accepted a definition of manhood that is destructive to himself and that negates the best efforts of his past.
The Black Power Movement did yield certain gains—jobs, grants, scholarships, poverty programs, etc.—but many of these things are in the process of being lost, and weren’t worth the price that was paid for them in any case. As long as black people are dealing in jobs and titles and grants, and not factories and land and department stores, anything they have achieved has got to be subject to the whims of the dominant white power structure and beneficial only for a select few. The majority of blacks are left with only the booby prize of an outmoded manhood that mocks their powerlessness.
It is interesting to note how various black male leaders are recouping in the aftermath of their abominable failure to effect any changes in the lives of the masses of black people. Each in his own manner is trying to shift away from the disastrous emphasis on “the beautiful black man,” that is, the black man as formed by the white man’s fantasy of him, and toward an emphasis on economics. Jones, now Comrade Baraka, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey Newton have all become socialists—Carmichael stressing the importance of organizing the Third World, Baraka and Newton stressing the organization of Americans, both black and white. On the other side of the political spectrum, there’s Jesse Jackson, one of the most vocal advocates of black capitalism, of hardworking blacks who discipline their children and save their money and buy station wagons instead of Cadillacs. Then there’s a level of newly corrupt black leadership such as Reverend Ike, the quintessential slick black preacher, who proudly tells his congregation that their donations go to pay for his expensive suits and his fleet of Rolls Royces. The Muslims have dropped their racist policy and have renewed their emphasis on economic autonomy the American way. Former President Ford’s representative attended Elijah Mohammed’s funeral. Money was nearly a dirty word among blacks in the sixties but no longer, and that’s a good sign, since the definition of power in America is money.
But black leaders have emerged from the dream world of Black Power only to enter another. Before, they deluded themselves into thinking the white power structure could be defeated with bravado. Now they think that if they don three-piece suits and ties and behave in a gentlemanly fashion, they can join the white power structure. And, what is most disturbing, they refuse to realize that there is a choice to be made here. The choice is either to assimilate, which will mean the cultural annihilation of black people, or to pursue the struggle of their slave descendants for a decent existence for all black people and the continuation of their cultural and racial identity. Pursuing money, economic independence, does not mean that one has to become white.
Perhaps the single most important reason the Black Movement did not work was that black men did not realize they could not wage struggle without the full involvement of women. And in that sense they made a mistake that the blacks of the post-slavery period would have been least likely to have made. Women, traditionally, want more than anything to keep things together. Women are hard workers and they require little compensation. Women are sometimes willing to die much more quickly than men. Women vote. Women march. Women perform tedious tasks. And women cannot be paid off for the death and the suffering of their children. Look at how important women have been to the liberation struggles in Africa. By negating the importance of their role, the efficiency of the Black Movement was obliterated. It was just a lot of black men strutting around with Afros.
Black people, as a whole, seem trapped now in a curious group amnesia that is maintained, in part, by their lack of confidence in their leadership. But can anyone blame them? If leadership shows no courage in facing up to the mistakes of the past, why should anyone expect them to show courage in facing the possibilities of their future?
The middle-class black man—he may have a Master’s Degree in business, he may only have a union card—believes that he has found some alternative to being black. He believes he can sneak in and raid whitey’s piggy bank while whiteys’ back is presumably turned, live in a white community or a suffocating black middle-class community with his white or nearly white wife, avert his eye when the company he works for wants to do something abusive to blacks, drive a Mercedes, wear expensive European suits, become indignant at blacks who are inelegant enough to nod out on the subway—he believes he can do all this and not die inside, completely and irreversibly.
It is interesting the levels of delusion he has incorporated. During the Black Movement he was the one who got away with all the goods. As blacks were rioting in the streets, troubling the sleep of whites in every suburban enclave in America, there he was, prepared, educated, trained, clean cut, with a well-groomed Afro, slightly menacing but negotiable. “I have only to wave my magic wand and all those angry blacks at your doorstep will disappear,” he said. “Buy me out and I will be your black.” Or even worse, as did the poverty players, he said, “Give me some money to work miracles in the ghetto.” And either way, with or without his white wife, he used that money to escape from the ghetto, but also to escape from blackness. Because Black Macho, which had only the most perverted relation to blackness, had been a mistake, he decided he did not want to be black anymore.
He took his money and his energy and poured it back into the white community. He called it “working within the system.” And he took the credit when blacks finally settled down, or rather were drugged and beaten into silence. Those blacks were proud—or should have been proud, he thought—of what he had been able to rip off. Then it got so he could no longer go into the ghetto to visit his mother or to have an occasional home-cooked meal for old times’ sake because the “niggas” there, his former brothers, who had bought him his affluence with their blood, and their suffering, would steal the tires off his Mercedes, demand his wallet from behind the handles of their switchblades, or dribble their drug and alcohol deliriums all over his silk suit while they were talking to him.
Why couldn’t they, he wanted to know, pull themselves up by their bootstraps? How dare they threaten the peace now? How dare they hate him because of his material wealth, because he was a traitor? How dare they be so conspicuously oppressed?
Middle-class blacks insist upon believing that the white man should take care of their poor, upgrade the prisons, stop sending blacks to jail, clean up the mess in the slums, improve the schools, make their children learn. I am not saying that white government and business, since they are partially sustained by black money, are not responsible and ought not to be tapped whenever possible, but that it is time to recognize that we cannot expect very much from them in the way of initiative or cooperation in the solving of our problems. That is just the way it is. Big Daddy is no relation.
Capitalism is dependent upon the notion of a Big Daddy. Genovese was right in that sense. You are supposed to give the principal part of your production, the fruits of your labor, to someone else and he will take care of you. Carl McCall (Councilman, N.Y.) has spoken about the dearth of black leadership. He said, basically, that there were black leaders but that people didn’t know it because whites failed to give these leaders anything to give black people. That’s my idea of dependency.
And the poor black man is implicated in this as well. Yes, forces conspire against him but he allows life to happen to him, he allows others to make the decisions for him, he trusts the white bureaucacy enough to allow them to put him behind bars, to allow them to take care of his wife and children. He acts as though he and the black woman are at war, as though he might win something by her destruction. He uses the debilitating game of sexual superiority as a substitute for establishing something worthwhile. He’s got nothing else, he says. He’s got to have some fun, he says. That’s how he’s kept in his place. And just as fast as he can enter the black middle class, he begins to turn white, or what he thinks is white. Slavery is a subject he never discusses, and about which he knows little. The Civil Rights and Black Movements have become nothing more than slightly amusing cocktail party conversation. And all because he’s forgotten the hopes and aspirations of the slaves, forgotten what he’s been through and all of the lessons of these four hundred years.
By so doing he is making a choice: the complete submergence of his cultural identity. After all, he is no longer African. His blood is mixed. He has no memory of the old ways, the life on the continent, the sense of outrage at the kidnap. The other experience that sets him apart, poverty and discrimination, will have to be eliminated if he is to survive. The question is simply this: If one removes the memory of his African past, and the experience of deprivation, is there an identity unique to the American black, an identity worth preserving beyond that of simply being an American, a slightly soiled white American?
I tend to think there is, there must be. From a purely objective point of view, miscegenation and assimilation are not at all bad things and they may, in fact, eliminate poverty, discrimination, and ignorance in this country. Full employment is not a national impossibility, even under capitalism. But there is always the chance, the considerable likelihood really, that white America will use the lack of racial consciousness on the part of the black middle class as an opportunity to formalize what already exists unofficially: a partitioning off of the undesirable black element into urban reservations. Also, the black man’s skin is still black. Even conscious, planned miscegenation would take generations to make the difference invisible.
Furthermore, is there nothing worth preserving of the black experience? Our ancestors put a lot of energy into the formulation of a survival plan for displaced Africans, an Afro-American culture. Is uniformity the only cure for this country’s ailments? Can white and black Americans only live in peace if blacks negate the importance of their contribution to American civilization?
It seems to me that what makes people valuable is whatever they have to offer that is unique. Black people have their blackness. They have their music, their dance, their manner of cooking, of walking, of talking, their dress and, most important, their story which cannot, must not be discarded like some old dress that can no longer be reworked with a different hemline to meet the current fashion. There is no reason to assume that losing all of that would get rid of the poverty and oppression. And even if it does, at what price? Surely it is at least worthwhile to note that there would indeed be a price.
Finally, it is the black man who has made this undeclared choice. The black woman is simply along for the ride. His actions in the sixties and in the Civil Rights Movement have made an indelible imprint on the quality of our lives. Do we like what he has done? Are we satisfied to ride the tide of the changing interpretations of black manhood? Can it sustain us and the nearly fifty percent of black children who depend upon us? Can we afford to sit by and allow him to orchestrate our future?