Chapter Eight

SELF-REALIZATION

… WHEN TO EARTH AND BRUTE IS ADDED AN ENVIRONMENT OF MEN AND IDEAS, THEN THE ATTITUDE OF THE IMPRISONED GROUP MAY TAKE THREE FORMS—A FEELING OF REVOLT AND REVENGE; AN ATTEMPT TO ADJUST ALL THOUGHT AND ACTION TO THE WILL OF THE GREATER GROUP; OR, FINALLY, A DETERMINED EFFORT AT SELF-REALIZATION AND SELF-DEVELOPMENT DESPITE ENVIRONING OPINION.

—“Of Booker T. Washington and Others”

“Well then,” she said, hands on hips, “you need to choose.” Katherine could be fierce when she wanted to be, and she could make you feel about two feet tall in less than five seconds. She was beautiful, manipulative, brown-skinned, and angry. Biracial, like me, she had also grappled with her identity, and with a way in which to present herself to the world that was both slightly intimidating but essentially unthreatening. We found each other at a time and in a place where we both felt deeply compromised, lonely, arrogant, and very much as though we had nothing to lose.

In my three years at Hampshire College, I had cultivated friendships with both white students and black students. The friendships were separate. The social scenes were separate. The expectations were separate. This posed small problems here and there, but for the most part, I’d been able to make it work, until my last year, when there was a sit-in by the black students and students of color, complete with a list of demands for the administration regarding diversity in the student body and faculty.

My boyfriend at the time, Michael, was a leader in the sit-in. All the black students loved him for many reasons, but mostly because he could negotiate with white folks so well. He was eloquent, elegant, a poet, a writer, a man without a father, who loved his mother fiercely. He made every minute count, every conversation intelligent, and every argument fair. His anger, though, was palpable. I had not seen him in the capacity of activist during the year we had been together, and his behavior at the sit-in scared me a little.

I didn’t participate in the sit-in, but I tried to. I went to the building and told the people who were guarding the door that my boyfriend was in there, that he was the leader of this whole thing, and that I needed to see him right away. One of the student guards went inside and came back with Michael, who looked tired, fully absorbed, and remarkably sad. He took my hand and led me into the building. We sat on a bench some ways down from the biology lab turned war room, and he asked me if I could handle this.

“I’m okay. I can handle it,” I said.

“Do you want to, though? Is this really you?” He had me there.

Now, Katherine, she could handle it. She sat the whole thing out, and in the end, she questioned where I was in the protest and the overall struggle. She knew I had white friends, and although she may have had a few herself, when push came to shove, she knew where she belonged, and she judged me harshly for choosing not to put myself in that same place.

When graduation came around a few months later, the seniors were asked to select a partner to walk with in the procession. I would have walked with Michael, but he was a year behind me. Katherine wanted me to walk with her, but I wanted to walk with my friend Larc, my white friend Larc. Katherine was surprised by my choice. “In the end,” she said, “I mean, really, who do you think is going to be there for you? Do you think a white girl from Westport, Connecticut, is really going to have your back?”

I had been an easy target for Katherine throughout most of our friendship, and I could be made to feel very bad very quickly about not doing or being what I was supposed to do or be. But Larc was a good friend to me, and always had been. She called me out on my shit, backed me up when I felt alone in a room, was honest and generous with me about her own life and personal issues, made me laugh more than anyone I’d ever known, and never judged me. I told all this to Katherine, and she said, “Well then, you need to choose.” And I did.

From my experience organizing the black student union at the University of New Hampshire, I understood that my political activism needed to come from a place that felt authentic to me, whether or not my position reflected that of the rest of the flock. This has been an ongoing lesson, and one that aspires to reflect Du Bois’s wisdom, the third form born out of an imprisoned attitude: “a determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite environing opinion.” The other two ways—“a feeling of revolt and revenge” and “an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group”—had not worked for me, had made me feel like a fraud.

While these words from the essay “Of Booker T. Washington and Others” are unambiguous, it is Kathleen Cleaver, the former Black Panther party member and ex-wife of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who brought the concept home to me—the idea that there is another way to create revolution, even if it’s as simple as claiming loyalty to a white friend.

Kathleen Cleaver

W. E. B. Du Bois outlined the options you have when you are enslaved, which are essentially revolt or submission. But once you have emancipation, then you have another option, and that is what he called “self-realization,” or “self-development.” Some people referred to these terms at the time they were used, as an indication of what later became Pan-Africanism or Black Nationalism. The point being: You don’t have to respond to your oppressor; you can go down your own path.

Du Bois wrote about this notion of self-realization as part of what he calls the history of the American Negro and the evolution of his successive leaders. The specific context was in his criticism of Booker T. Washington, which is very trenchant, but it’s a broader idea as well, because he’s analyzing how our struggle for emancipation, and against slavery, racism, and segregation, develops. I think about this in terms of the development of the Black Panther party, where you can see those elements that Du Bois pointed out—revolt, assimilation, and self-realization and self-determination.

I wouldn’t say that nothing like the Black Panther party has happened over the past twenty years. I would say that the massive nature of the Black Panther party has been unparalleled. The Panther party was initially a very small group of people who came together in Oakland. At the same time, other small groups of black people in different cities across the country were also taking shape to deal with whatever the main issue they saw facing their city. On the West Coast, the key issue was police brutality. It wasn’t until all these small clusters came together to form this powerful national wave that the Panther party took effect. The government was absolutely horrified. In the 1967 articulation of its counterintelligence program, it didn’t even list the Black Panther party as an organization they wanted to get rid of. It listed the Nation of Islam, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. In 1968, the Black Panther party was their main focus.

So the way the Black Panther party and the movement around it exploded had a lot to do with other youth phenomena that were going on around the world at that time. To say that’s not happening now—well, that particular historical era is not happening now, that kind of mass movement is not happening now, but there are plenty of small groups today in different parts of the country that imitate and identify with the Black Panther party. They are not the same, not by any stripe of imagination, but they are out there trying to prompt change. There is that impetus. The circumstance in which these groups are operating is quite different, but the desire to make change is still present.

Right now, we’re at a point of dissent—dissent about globalization, opposition to racism, opposition to forms of neocolonialism, opposition to war. It’s not a progressive dissent, but it is still a form of dissent. And I have to have hope in that. What’s the alternative? I could say, “Oh, I give up. The pigs have the right way. There is no alternative.” But that’s totally insane. The world that is being presented to us right now is a world based on genocide, ecocide, and homicide, that’s unacceptable. To choose it is to choose your own destruction, and since I’m not self-destructive, I have to maintain hope in an alternative.

I don’t see self-destruction in young black people as much as I see anger, but I also see a very enlightened group of people among today’s black youth. I’m not going to say that they represent the majority, but then I also spend most of my time with people whose beliefs and human experiences are somewhat similar to mine. If I didn’t, I’d probably feel very isolated and crushed. Maintaining hope and positive energy is a process that involves being with people who believe in particular ways of participating in the struggle. Du Bois is very central in that effort, because he was like that, as well—he was constantly on the case. What Du Bois wrote in 1903 about the slave trade and about Reconstruction is still viable. So it’s not like we’re whistling in the dark here.

In terms of figures from “black popular culture” or, as I refer to them, “the victims of commerce and racism,” I see them on TV, I read about them in the papers, and I see what they do when they get the opportunity to express themselves culturally or politically. These are people who represent the triumph of a commercial, capitalist mind-set. It’s not that the people who are interested in transformation, reparations, social service in Africa, human rights, and protecting the environment are not out there, too; they just don’t get the press. The popular media does not reflect what’s going on in the country. The popular media reflects what the corporate owners of that media value.

And this goes back to the three trends outlined earlier—revolt, assimilation, or self-realization—because one of those three is always being emphasized or played out. The opposite of revolt is submission, and so what we are seeing now is submissive and assimilationist politics from anti–affirmative action types like the Ward Connerlys, or the Shelby Steeles. I grew up in the fifties. I heard people who thought like that all the time: “We’re Americans; we’re not Africans. This is the best we’re gonna get.” These are fairly conventional Negro voices of assimilation and submission, which, because they were not heard during the sixties and seventies, are being repositioned to be heard today. It’s not that these voices didn’t exist before. It’s just that now they are saying things that the dominant Right prefers in terms of its political agenda. What we’re looking at now in terms of politics is naked, rampant, predatory capitalism of the Enron variety. Under these circumstances, the centrally positioned black voices are going to be conservative.

There’s a recording of a speech that Eldridge gave at Syracuse in 1968, and at the very beginning of the speech, he says that he heard me say, “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.” I had been quoting something I’d read, but he is the one who popularized that phrase, and it became identified with him. But it’s just a slogan. It’s not a belief structure. Many of the things that Eldridge said and his way of thinking in general presented an either/or situation. For example, one of the phrases that he used was, “Take your foot off my leg, motherfucker, or I’ll blow your leg off,” which is the same type of statement. It’s an approach to dealing with reality.

The indoctrination that is out there is overwhelming, and so people begin not to understand their own ability and power. My approach is: Let’s clarify that you can make a difference. Let’s clarify that you can rethink and transform how you view the world. Let’s clarify that the world could be entirely different.