[This is the second of two blogs on the uproar in Ferguson Missouri, Thanksgiving week, 2014. For the first in the series see http://clarespark.com/2014/11/25/reflections-on-the-ferguson-aftermath/.%5D
For decades, I have heard the term “black community” as if even one drop of “blood” determined consciousness and interest. Even before the [mythical] “black community” erupted in rage following the grand jury “failure” to indict policeman Darren Wilson for the “racist” killing of Michael Brown, politicians and pundits in the media imagine that “blacks” or “African Americans” form a cohesive body, a veritable “people’s community,” sharing the same mental and emotional characteristics. Some of them must know that this is Pan-African, hence fascist or proto-fascist talk, but use the term because they have heard it used frequently and don’t want to be picky or hyper-intellectual. Better to agree with demagogues, politicians, and other pundits who define institutional discourses, submerging individual or occupational differences in the group. The same opinion leaders, inspired by “the Left,” refer to “the [broken] system,” –a “system” that exists only in their feverish imaginations.
In the real world, of course, there are better ways to sort out persons, apart from the lingo of blood and soil, according to economic interest and awareness. What have super-rich “black” celebrities (musicians, sports figures, actors), leaders of large corporations, hopeful entrepreneurs, other more established small business persons, hard-pressed working or stay-at-home black mothers, male or female industrial workers, domestic labor, clergy, teachers, and radio personalities, to do with the lumpen mobs burning, looting, or “protesting” in Ferguson, Missouri and other cities with large black populations? Each of these occupations has more in common with others in its socio-economic category than with “the underclass.”
Ironically, popular television shows, pressed by soi-disant “representatives” from “the black community” present heroic, successful black characters as role models, with the premise that positive images (including inter-racial sex: a rebuke to long-standing fears of “miscegenation”) will obliterate the racism that Democrats still impute to all Americans, as if slavery and Jim Crow laws still existed, or left lingering effects that infest the “body politic,” a.k.a. the fascist or proto-fascist notion of “the organic community.”
Since even “conservatives” on Fox News Channel use the term “black community” I can only conclude that the “one drop [of blood]” rule prevails and is hegemonic. I blame the white liberal establishment of the 1960s for supporting the crypto-racist, collectivist strategy of “multiculturalism” to improve “race relations.” Such pioneering civil rights figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Bunche would have been horrified to see their integrationist efforts distorted into the “Pan-Africanism” of “black power,” a development that I traced here: http://clarespark.com/2009/10/31/the-offing-of-martin-luther-king-jr-and-ralph-bunche/. Or try this one to eavesdrop on white liberals betraying the “liberalism” they supposedly advocated as they bargain with “black power” troublemakers, hoping to buy them off: http://clarespark.com/2010/07/18/white-elite-enabling-of-black-power/.
I write this blog on Thanksgiving, 2014, during a week of civil unrest and destruction. I am thankful that I live in a Constitutional republic that permits this sort of vigorous dissent and call to ameliorative action.
