Fragmented Identities:
A Humanist Perspective on Inequality Within
the Black American Community
Identity
Politics in Neoliberal America
In the song “The Hyphen” famous actor and
director, John Wayne, sings of his disapproval of using the term ‘hyphenated
American’ as an acceptable identity in a ‘progressive’ America. He claims that
the label is divisive, an indicator of boundaries erected between American’s
differences rather than the unifying national identity in lyrics such as: “United
we stand...divided we fall. We’re Americans...and that says it all.” He goes on
to make an impassioned plea for Americans to do away with the fractured label by
claiming the hyphen blocks the road to liberty for all Americans—ultimately placing
responsibility on those who identify as hyphenated Americans to embrace their
national identity with baiting lyrics like “the Hyphen's use is up to you”. Looking
back in time to the origins of the hyphenated American label, it is evident, however,
that the hyphen was in fact a marker placed upon marginalized groups as a
derogatory and alienating device. The origins of the term reach back to mouths
of white, American oppressors a century ago, yet it is the leaders in power in
the years since who have condemned its use in an effort to promote democratic multiculturalism
and American nationalism (Outlaw, 143).
While Wayne’s lyrics may seem
progressive, they are dismissive of the the experiences of alienated peoples
and disguising nationalistic, homogenizing rhetoric with seemingly optimistic
lyrics about a utopian future where all are seen and treated equally in America.
Generations of politicians have similarly spoken out against the term, even
within different political contexts. President Theodore Roosevelt’s “Hyphenated
Americans” speech claimed “there is no such thing as a hyphenated American who
is a good American”, an off-base response to the rising tensions and xenophobia
between ethnic groups in the United States during the second wave of
immigration. Woodrow Wilson later echoed Roosevelts sentiments to an audience
fearfully facing war by saying “any man who carries a hyphen about with him
carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic
whenever he gets ready", again victim-blaming oppressed people for an
already divisive national culture. These examples are in the past, but
presently even Governor Bobby Jindal has attempted to solve the issues of
leading a diverse community in racially tense times by spreading the “We’re all
Americans” mantra in 2015. According to Lucius T. Outlaw’s On Race and Philosophy, “we are once again in an era in which ‘difference’
has been made a virtue…with an ideal of equality that presumes essential sameness”
(140).
Neoliberal rhetoric in present-day
America would have one believe that Americans have collectively embraced the
values of diversity, encouraging this new age of ‘multiculturalism’. The
external framework of equality is slowly progressing in American institutions ever
since the abolishment of slavery, the continuous fight for civil rights, laws
promoting the mantra of “equal access for all!” and liberal movements embracing
minority issues. On the surface, actions toward equality are good indicators of
a socially and politically conscious society, yet inequality is as pervasive as
ever. This is due to the fact that the main issue of inequality in American institutions
and culture is inherent to the very founding of the United States. Simply
working upon the problematic framework of American politics and culture without
examining and resolving the traumas of slavery, segregation, oppression and racism,
enables a continuous pattern of progression and regression. The innate problems
with America’s imperialist and racist past cannot be worked on without the
acknowledgment and embracing of people’s distinctive histories as oppressors
and the oppressed, particularly the histories of black Americans shamefully
censored in the modern interpretation of America’s racist past bleeding into
its present.
Some Americans prefer reclaiming the
hyphenated identity, empowering themselves through the acknowledgment of their
immigrant histories and experiences. Others find the term alienating and excluding
as the origins of the term were rooted in such sentiments. As a multiracial
woman with black ancestry, I personally prefer using black to identify myself rather
than African-American, as the latter excludes the experiences of black
Americans who might not identify as African including my own family from the
Caribbean. However, being critical of the hyphenated American identity, for the
purpose of this work, is not to make a decision on whether minority peoples
should use the term or not, but serves as an indication that there has always
been a long-standing American tradition of fragmenting the identities of
marginalized groups. Specifically, the terms African-American, black, colored,
negro and all other labels for black Americans have always carried the
traumatic history of slavery which has shaped the black American experience
today. The term, empowering for some, serves as a reference to the fragmented
identity of black Americans. A divided form of consciousness rooted in dehumanization
of slavery and through the continued violence against the black community today,
as examined in this work.
A
Consciousness Broken
In order to address the historical
traumas of slavery and racism in America, the veils of multiculturalism, diversity
and national hegemony must be lifted in order to view the truth of the black
American experience. In The Souls of
Black Folk, activist W.E.B Du Bois addresses the segregated black mind and
body. He defines the black American experience of having “a second sight in
this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but
only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world”, of seeing
oneself through the hatred and pity of the oppressive surrounding world (10-11).
Double-consciousness is the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the
eyes of others” as “one ever feels his two-ness,-an American, a Negro; two
souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” and
continuous conundrum of existence plagued by the histories of both halves of
the black American identity (11). Du Bois describes the constant struggle for
liberation for black identities and how one can become whole while existing as
both American and black. He questions how one stops being a conundrum, a
problem, when one’s very existence enables one’s problem-hood—at some point,
there’s a significant break in the reality of black experiences and the reality
of the intolerant American sociopolitical structures.
State-Promoted
Violence
The fragmentation of self—the split
between the human consciousness alive in the mind of the individual and the
dehumanized, abused, destroyed social self—creates an experience that is
neither one of the living nor dead. The external self—the body that lives in a
segregated society, the body that is abused by institutionalized racism, the
body that is viewed as inhuman—is therefore perceived by the oppressed
individual through the eyes of others. There is an internal awareness that the
external world does not recognize the human experience of African-Americans.
This system stems from a colonial history of slavery and exploitation in
American, and follows the process of decolonization today. The documentary film
Concerning Violence, based on the
essays of Frantz Fanon, describes the colonial world as a world cut in two,
with decolonization serving as the means for two forces opposed to each other
to meet in a “murderous and decisive struggle” between oppressed and oppressor.
The documentary explores the rise of the
police officer as a forerunner of state-promoted violence. The film credits the
pseudo-positions of power officers once represented in the colonial world as
the influence of relentless police brutality today. Police are described as “spokesman
of the settler and ruler of oppression”, the tools through which colonial
conditions are propagated today. As a force, they enable the violence against
black minds and bodies, serving as “bringer[s] of violence in the mind of the
[oppressed]” by perpetuating the traumatic abuse of black Americans. Though the
legality of colonization no longer supports the dehumanization of marginalized
groups, colonial conditions remain and are inflicted through government enabled
violence as reflected in the high rate of police brutality against minority
communities. This continued abuse from the time of America’s founding shows
black Americans that they are still viewed as easily exterminated by the
American government, perpetuating the double consciousness associated with
their abusive treatment.
Segregation
of the Church
Of the segregated institutions within the
United States, religious institutions and practicing Christianity have served
as a form of empowerment for black Americans. Black communities reclaim
Christianity in churches and community centers that catered to the well-being
of their communities, outside the racism of white churches which often appropriated
Christian doctrine to promote discrimination. As explored in the documentary The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin
often references to his father’s occupation as a priest and the role of the
church in his own life. He observes the great liberation expanding Christian
doctrine to include black lives, yet the darker insinuations from his father
that the “assumed saved were black” in an effort to deal with the evil white
oppressors represented and “deal with life” as a black man. The role
Christianity played in mobilizing black voices and creating spaces for black
intellects and leaders is incredibly important in the consciousness of black
America.
In Cornel Wests’s book The Cornell West Reader, he gives
several reasons why black people adopted Christianity in the chapter ‘Race and
Modernity’. First, “the evangelical outlook…stressed individual experience,
equality before God and institutional autonomy”, all deeply personal yet
important values for black Americans to access as a community, liberated from
the white oppressor’s erasure of black autonomy (62). Second, as Frederich
Nietzsche highlights in The Gay Science,
Christianity is “a religion especially fitted to the oppressed”, as it
highlights “slaves’ search for identity” and exodus out of their homelands, comforting
and empowering the abused and neglected (62). Third, the adoption of
Christianity allowed for black people to create safe spaces to exercise political
and organization leadership “free from hierarchical control, open and easy
access to leadership roles and relatively…uncomplicated requirements for
membership”, essentially loosening all the barriers and roadblocks preventing
black activism and leadership from reaching the larger American institutions (63).
to explore black consciousness and create a sense of culture that had
previously been denied by white oppressors. Christianity had once been a device
for colonizers to use against Africans and natives in order to suppress and
control, yet the segregation of black churches evolved into an institution
through which black Christians exercised political rights and expressed
cultural freedom in safe, black-run spaces.
Fragmenting
the Mind
Through analysis of black experience in psychiatric
institutions, there is a clear pattern of mental illnesses manifesting in
generations of black Americans. In extreme cases, fragmented minds mutate into
illnesses and manifest in later generations of the oppressed as explored by
writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in The
Wretched of the Earth. Fanon’s book is a psychiatric and humanist
perspective on how systemic oppression manifests into mental trauma. While his
perspective is that of a black French man working in Algeria, his analysis of
black trauma in Africa as a result of colonialism and imperialism are
applicable to oppressed people throughout the world. Fanon describes his experiences
working in a psychiatric hospital while reflecting on the “many, sometimes ineffaceable,
wounds that colonialist onslaught has inflicted”, a form of violence “fighting
against a true liberation of mankind” which must be expelled from the national
cultural and institutions (249).
By writing his observations of the many
psychiatric cases, cases of violence and depression are juxtaposed against one
another. These cases convey the line of contradiction between wishing for
oblivion, for a swift death that will end the fear and abuse of generations of
black Americans, and the desperate attempt to murder all of the black person’s
abusers. The ensuing psychiatric disorders are the ways in which abused black
men adapt to the traumas of loss and violence inflicted upon black communities.
Just as physical wounds and verbal abuse carried on through generations of
black Americans, empowering activists and communities to rise up against physical
violence, the wounds of a traumatic history are only slowly being healed today through
discussion and acknowledgment of the important role mental health plays in
inequality.
Traumatic
Experience Breaking Consciousness
So what is the breaking point of black consciousness;
at what moment does the conscious of the abused individual break into two? The
twoness is always present for the American and black souls don’t exist
simultaneously, forever contradicting and always present in the minds. James Baldwin
refers to this haunting memory of trauma passed from earlier generations echoed
throughout much of his work, most notably Notes
of a Native Son, in which he writes “we cannot escape our origins, however
hard we try, those origins which contain the key – could we but find it – to
all that we later become” (27). For black Americans born into inequality, the
realization that people are not treated equally comes at the moment their
parents can no longer protect them from the discriminatory eyes of the world,
from the injustice promoted by segregated institutions. The veils of equality
and nationalism are shattered in the realization of the physical and mental traumas
endorsed by state-promoted, spiritual and psychologically perpetuated violence
against black lives.
Lessons
from the Past for Future Activism
Looking
back at the writings from countless black authors and intellects, the hauntings
of a traumatic past and violence inflicted upon black communities for centuries
manifests in the fragmented identities and doubled consciousness of black
Americans. The recognition of the lasting affects of colonial conditions, which
impact institutions and the experiences of black lives today, lead to the
conclusion that the issues of divided communities lies most within the cultural
approach we take towards race issues. Du Bois refers to the ‘problem’ of race
as a delicate topic, difficult to even frame the question of overcoming racial
divides (Du Bois, 9). The tensions apparent in society today lead people unable
to form the proper language to confront racial inequality, to acknowledge the
unequal treatment of black people. To breakdown the problems of maintaining the
construct of race, people need civil activism as well as the institutional
support to back cultural movements. Americans and the government need to listen
to black voices, the most mobile movement currently being the Black Lives
Matter movement, in order to acknowledge the gaps in consciousness shared
between races. In every person there is the capacity for compassion through
empathy, and the works and literature of generations of black Americans ask
readers to recognize the search for wholeness in a nation which does not
support black lives and continues to enable the traumatic consciousness of
black Americans.
Works Cited
Baldwin,
James. Notes Of A Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, c1955. Print.
Du
Bois, W. E. B., Gates, Henry Louis,Oliver, Terri Hume.The Souls Of Black Folk:
Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism.
New York: W.W. Norton, ©1999. Print.
Fanon,
Frantz. The Wretched Of The Earth. New York: Grove Press, ©1963.
Print.
Olsson, Göran H, Lauryn Hill, and Frantz
Fanon. Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the
Anti-Imperialistic
Self-Defense. United States: Alive Mind, 2014.
Outlaw, Lucius T. On Race And
Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Thorsen, Karen., eds. James Baldwin:
The Price Of The Ticket. San Francisco, CA : California
Newsreel,
1990. Print.
West, Cornel. The Cornel West
Reader. New York, NY : Basic Civitas Books, 1999. Print.
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