On Black Strivings by Cornel West

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#8, JUNE-AUGUST/2013

Black strivings are the creative and complex products of the terrifying African encounter with the absurd in America – and the absurd as America. Like any other group of human beings, black people forged ways of life and ways of struggle under circumstances not of their own choosing. They constructed structures of meaning and structures of feeling in the face of the fundamental facts of human existence – death, dread, despair, disease and disappointment. Yet the specificity of black culture – namely, those features that distinguish black culture from other cultures – lies in both the African and American character of black people’s attempts to sustain their mental sanity and spiritual health, social life and political struggle in the midst of a slaveholding, white-supremacist civilization that viewed itself as the most enlightened, free, tolerant and democratic experiment in human history.

Any serious examination of black culture should begin with what W.E.B. DuBois dubbed, in Faustian terms, the “spiritual strivings” of black people – the dogged determination to survive and subsist, the tenacious will to persevere, persist and maybe even prevail. These “strivings” occur within the whirlwind of white supremacy – that is, as responses to the vicious attacks on black beauty, black intelligence, black moral character, black capability and black possibility. To put it bluntly, every major institution of American society – churches, universities, courts, academies of science, governments, economies, newspapers, magazines, television, film and others – attempted to exclude black people from the human family in the name of white supremacist ideology. This unrelenting assault on black humanity produced the fundamental condition of black culture – that of black invisibility and namelessness.

This basic predicament exists on at least four levels – existential, social, political and economic. The existential level is the most relevant here because it has to do with what it means to be a person and live a life under the horrifying realities of racist assault. To be a black human being under circumstances in which one’s humanity is questioned is not only to face a difficult challenge, but also to exercise a demanding discipline.

The sheer absurdity of being a black human being whose black body is viewed as an abomination, whose black thoughts and ideas are perceived as debased and whose black pain and grief are rendered invisible on the human and moral scale is the New World context in which black culture emerged. Black people are first and foremost an African people, in that the cultural baggage they brought with them to the New World was grounded in their earlier responses to African conditions. Yet the rich African traditions – including kinetic orality, passionate physicality, improvisational intellectuality and combative spirituality – would undergo creative transformation when brought into contact with European languages and rituals in the context of the New World. For example, there would be no jazz without New World Africans with European languages and instruments.

On the crucial existential level relating to black invisibility and namelessness, the first difficult challenge and demanding discipline is to ward off madness and discredit suicide as a desirable option. A central preoccupation of black culture is that of confronting candidly the ontological wounds, psychic scars and existential bruises of black people while fending off insanity and self-annihilation. Black culture consists of black modes of being-in-the-world obsessed with black sadness and sorrow, black agony and anguish, black heartache and heartbreak without fully succumbing to the numbing effects of such misery – to never allow such misery to have the last word. This is why the “ur-text” of black culture is neither word nor a book, not an architectural monument or a legal brief. Instead it is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan – a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition. The most profound black cultural products – John Coltrane’s saxophone solos, James Cleveland’s gut gospels, Billie Holiday’s vocal leaps, Rev. Gardner Taylor’s rhapsodic sermons, James Baldwin’s poignant essays, Alvin Ailey’s graceful dances, Toni Morrison’s dissonant novels – transform and transfigure in artistic form this cry and moan. The deep black meaning of this cry and moan goes back to the indescribable cries of Africans on slave ships during the cruel transatlantic voyages to American and the indecipherable moans of enslaved Afro-Americans on Wednesday nights or Sunday mornings near godforsaken creeks or on wooden benches at prayer meetings in makeshift black churches. This fragile existential arsenal – rooted in silent tears and weary lament – supports black endurance against madness and suicide. The primal black cries and moans lay bare the profoundly tragicomic character of black life. Ironically, they also embody the life-preserving content of black styles – creative ways of fashioning power and strength through the body and language which yield black joy and ecstasy. …

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And yet being a problem is a strange experience, - peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood . . .(1)

This seminal passage spells out the basic components of black invisibility and namelessness: black people as a problem people rather than people with problems; black people as abstractions and objects rather than individuals and persons; black and white worlds divided by a thick wall (or a “Veil”) that requires role-playing and mask-wearing rather than genuine interaction; black rage, anger and fury concealed in order to assuage white fear and anxiety; and black people as rootless and homeless on a perennial journey to discover who they are in a society is content to see blacks remain the permanent underdog.

To view black people as a “problem people” is to view them as an undifferentiated blob, a homogeneous bloc or monolithic conglomerate. Each black person is interchangeable, indistinguishable or substitutable, since all black people are believed to have the same views and values, sentiments and sensibilities. Hence one set of negative stereotypes holds for all of them, no matter how high certain blacks may ascend in the white world (e.g. “savages in a suit or suite”). And the mere presence of black bodies in a white context generates white unease and discomfort, even among whites of goodwill.

This problematizing of black humanity deprives black people of individuality, diversity and heterogeneity. It reduces black fold to abstractions and objects born of white fantasies and insecurities – as exotic or transgressive entities, as hypersexual or criminal animals. . . .

This distorted perception – the failure to see the humanity and individuality of black people – has its source in the historic “Veil” (slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation) that separates the black and white worlds. Ironically, this refusal to see a people whose epidermis is most visible exists alongside a need to keep a tight surveillance over these people. This Veil not only precludes honest communication between blacks and whites; it also forces blacks to live in two worlds in order to survive. Whites need not understand or live in the black world in order to thrive. But blacks must grapple with the painful “double consciousness” that may result in “an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence.”(1) DuBois notes:

The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretense or to revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.(1)

Exerpted from “Black Strivings In a Twilight Civilization” included in The Cornel West Reader, Basic Civitas Books, 1999) pp.101-5.

(1)W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, (Dover, 1903, 1994)