Many people of all ilk agonize openly when they hear the word NIGGER or see CONFEDERATE FLAGS on public display. But, I have been criticized by folks over the decades, including friends, because I do not respond to words and symbols of racial animosity in ways that have been deemed appropriate.
Make no mistake about this: I have long lived with a clear awareness of the burden of Blackness; of how powerless people are treated in America even under the best of circumstances; and of how I was expected to react to signals from society that purportedly defined and demeaned my people. Nevertheless, the open expressions of racism do not exacerbate my ongoing animosity toward the people and the institutions that perpetuate injustice.
My own agony has been relentless from the time I learned that the more harmful outcomes intended for people like I was as a child, as true through 400 years of history, are constants, insidious, invidious, and extremely complex, publicized or not. To this day, the best American resources are lower for Black Americans; and the worst of conditions are higher for us.
Fortunately, early in my young adult life I concluded that racist attacks in “modern America” were intended to cause me to harm myself, first, and, then, my family, my friends and others who depended on my leadership.
When we inculcate racist signals, and behave in the prescribed ritualistic manner, we encourage exploitative charlatans within our own “camp” and embolden our adversaries in the external society. In fact, we broadcast to even the lowest among our non-Black antagonists that they have the capacity to thwart our power to advance, as well as to make us harm ourselves and each other.
Anger is major, natural response to our experience in America. On occasion, I, too, have experienced the seductive power of this sentiment. However, once I became aware of racism, I have struggled against my allowing that emotion to block my drive toward success. Such a reaction would have made me an instrument of our enemies in that I would have been destroying myself and harming people for whom I was responsible. In addition, I am of the mindset that enemies are hurt more when you succeed in ways that they want so desperately to prevent.
“I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Despite my own capacity to resist the allure of anger that debilitates, I fully understand that some of our folks can get so overwhelmed by the stress of anger-provoking historical issues and contemporary racist events that they succumb to the temptation of immediate actions that drown out other factors so critical for success and progress. The Devolution-Deprivation Equation has been unremitting. It contains hidden components that undergird the various open expressions of racism, that are found in practically every aspect of America, and that distract even the best of us from finding permanent, broad-based solutions.
My soul, my spirit, my mental functioning and my decision-making process have been inured against superficial attempts at provocation, but not against the various kinds of real harm that affect large numbers of Black children every day.
It is not true that there can be no personal freedom without group freedom. Before the seventies, the burden of Blackness was spread generally across all segments of Black America; but since the seventies, the impact has fallen increasingly and disproportionately on our own lower elements, as the gap between Black-Haves and Black-Have-Nots grew in education, income and geographic locations. For example, the number of Black children living in concentrated poverty increased by nearly 17% between 2006 and 2014.
It would be criminal to overlook the serious flaws and inadequacies in our institutions, or to fail to utilize the substantial degree of freedom that most of us enjoy, within the framework of these flawed institutions, to modify them or even replace them by a better social order. One who pays some attention to history will not be surprised if those who cry most loudly that we must smash and destroy are later found among the administrators of some new system of repression. (From Norm Chomsky, et al)
The result of my continuous agony presses me to demand that leaders who claim commitment to our causes and followers of those leaders stop the sheep-like endorsement of failed policies and plans. Others must do likewise. To go against the dominant thinking of your friends and colleagues, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform. (Theodore White)
