After long reflection, I’ve come to believe that the single defining, likened sequence of stories that all Americans, north, south, and meso- share, regardless of our racial characteristics or ethnic cultural backgrounds, the one narrative that we all participate in, is that of the African Diaspora. This I the narrative template against which all others can be measured, fit into, laid over, or veneered onto. It doesn’t matter where in time one enters it –as Faulkner said, “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past –or from whose point of view it’s told. For we have all played different roles in that long serpentine story, and depending on our racial characteristics, sometimes we have been victim, sometimes victimizer, sometimes merely horrified, or thrilled, onlooker with something important, and self defining to lose or gain in the outcome. It doesn’t matter where it’s located. Surely by now we know that there is no town, no county, no state in America that has not been profoundly affected by the events, characters, themes and values dramatized by the story of race in America. It opens in the early seventeenth century, and it continues today in all the Americas, an in Europe too, as a late chapter in the Tale of Empire and in Asia as that chapter called the Vietnam War; and in Africa itself, in the chapters that describe and Liberia’s and Sierra Leone’s tragic, ongoing civil wars for instance. And you don’t have to be a prophet to see that, if this is indeed the era of the American Empire, the African Diaspora is a tale with chapters that will be set worldwide, whenever there is an American presence, well into the next century as well. I might go even further and say that if American culture, from McDonald’s to Disney to Nike, in all its subtle and not so subtle manifestations, has come to dominate the New World Order and if there is today no truly creolized society left on this earth—that is, no multiracial society in which power is not dispensed according to its citizens’ racial characteristics—then we might be able to speak of the universality of the African Diaspora as origin-myth. At least for the foreseeable future.
In its essential outline, it’s the story that begins in violence with capture, permanent enslavement, and forced migrations, passes into institutionalized racism and through emancipation rises to a first and false climax, where it undergoes sudden reversals and embittered transformation, withdraws like a wave falling back to gather force and new complexity, and leads eventually in our time to a future vision not of assimilation but of creolization—a strictly American vision in whose light we are led not to the denial of racial difference or to the celebration of either but to a vivid image of its eventual elimination as a means of group identification. Central to that story—the dialectical engine, one might say that drives its plot—is the conflict between the crime of slavery at the beginning and the morality expressed in our sacred documents, the Bill of Rights and the Constitutions; so that ultimately for the conflict to be resolved in favor of that morality (as it must, if we are not to be a nation of criminals) race in America will be seen to have been all along nothing but a social construct. It will be no longer possible to describe a child in racial terms. To say that a child’s skin is ‘black’ or ‘white’ or ‘red’ or ‘yellow’ will be to day noting socially meaningful about him or her. We will have become a true democracy at last, and, who knows, perhaps we can begin then to talk coherently and openly about economics and class. Continue reading →
