Beware the Recasting of Racial Issues in Terms of Academic Assertions Concerning "Culture"

Professor Stacey Patton recently declared, Black America Should Stop Forgiving White Racists. "The almost reflective [sic] demand of forgiveness, especially for those dealing with death by racism, is about protecting whiteness, and America as a whole," she wrote concerning the recent murder of black parishioners in Emmanuel AME Church. 

The first false equivalency here arises from the misreading of the private exercise of Christian forgiveness (Mat 5:44 "But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you . . .") as incompatible with vigorous action in the political sphere. Ms. Patton missed a unique chance to contrast the authentic Christianity of black worshipers with the faux-religious posturing of the religious right.

It gets worse. Dr. Patton adds:

Matthew P. Guteral, an historian of race at Brown University, says: “For all the public talk about supposedly absent black fathers and derelict black culture, the extraordinary act of forgiveness might remind us that the nation’s most historically oppressed group does a better job of doing what we all say we want most: being decent and human. Even when it seems impossible. We cannot say the same thing about whiteness or what we should call white culture, which insists it is superior, ... (Emphasis added)

Our first black President doesn't think "absent black fathers" is fictitious:

It’s true that if I’m giving a commencement at Morehouse that I will have a conversation with young black men about taking responsibility as fathers that I probably will not have with the women of Barnard. And I make no apologies for that. And the reason is, is because I am a black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that. And I also know that I have the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence, I think my daughters are better off.

I once worked for a supervisor of Asian extraction, who told me, "individualism is a white idea." (Given that civil rights are the rights of the individual, this, if true, would have been a matter of praise.) So let's say this right now: Ideas don't have a color. Culture does not have a color. It is dismaying that creatures of the university such as Professors Patton and Guteral have not internalized this concept.

Sir V.S. Naipaul has said, of Our Universal Civilization, "it fits all men."* That is the cosmopolitan outlook, the outlook which those deserving of the university manifest. Before mentioning other passages in which Sir Vidya describes the way this supposedly "white" culture benefits all races, let's look at Professors Patton and Guteral's other remark, about "supposedly . . . derelict black culture."

We once had a brilliant black writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates I, who gave a matchless description of the benefit of moving from a subculture to modern, first-world, culture—and of the wrenching personal change entailed:

When we talk "culture," as it relates to African-Americans, we assume a kind of exclusivity and suspension of logic. Stats are whipped out (70 percent of black babies born out of wedlock) and then claims are tossed around cavalierly, (black culture doesn't value marriage.) The problem isn't that "culture" doesn't exist, nor is it that elements of that "culture" might impair upward mobility.

It defies logic to think that any group, in a generationaly entrenched position, would not develop codes and mores for how to survive in that position. African-Americans, themselves, from poor to bourgeois, are the harshest critics of the street mentality. ...

To the young people in my neighborhood, friendship was defined by having each other's back. And in that way, the personal shields, the personal willingness to meet violence with violence, combined and became a collective, neighborhood shield--a neighborhood rep. ...

I think one can safely call that an element of a kind of street culture. It's also an element which--once one leaves the streets--is a great impediment. "I ain't no punk" may shield you from neighborhood violence. But it can not shield you from algebra, when your teacher tries to correct you. It can not shield you from losing hours, when your supervisor corrects your work. And it would not have shielded me from unemployment, after I cold-cocked a guy over a blog post.

I suspect that a large part of the problem, when we talk about culture, is an inability to code-switch, to understand that the language of Rohan is not the language of Mordor. I don't say this to minimize culture, to the contrary, I say it to point how difficult it is to get people to discard practices which were essential to them in one world, but hinder their advancement into another. And then there's the fear of that other world, that sense that if you discard those practices, you have discarded some of yourself, and done it in pursuit of a world, that you may not master.

'Elements of that "culture" might impair upward mobility,' Coates said back then. "It's also an element which--once one leaves the streets--is a great impediment," he added.**

Professors Patton and Guteral also allege that "white culture . . . insists it is superior." Naipaul, who also moved from a third world culture, by contrast describes modernity as (to borrow Lincoln's words) "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times":

It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism.

How crabbed and narrow and bitter, by contrast, is the outlook of Patton, Guteral, and (unfortunately) the later, ideological Ta-Nehisi Coates, who politicize culture as propaganda, in the process fanatically denying the "immense human idea" of the "awakened spirit." “The central conservative truth,” observed Pat Moynihan, “is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

Many previous posts in this blog address the charge that "white supremacy" founded America, as if the development of a dynamic democracy with a liberal founding was the effect of a monstrous racism embedded in the soul, and not the well-grounded prospering of a great culture with an awakened spirit. 


(*) Our Universal Civilization:
The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn’t always universal; it wasn’t always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial taint, which still causes pain. ... A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. ... I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

(**) Ta-Nehisi Coates II, by contrast, says:

The notion that black irresponsibility is at least part of the "race problem" is widely shared among black America's most prominent figures, beginning—but not ending—with the president of the United States. ...

Respectability politics is, at its root, the inability to look into the cold dark void of history. For if black people are—as I maintain—no part of the problem, if the problem truly is 100 percent explained by white supremacy, then we are presented with a set of unfortunate facts about our home.