Black and White Matters

I'll self-depricate by pointing out the irony of my titling this essay “Black and White Matters”, being that the overarching point I’m making about these topics is that the substance of them is far from black and white. 

I have a variety of thoughts about this, some of which may contradict each other I’m sure. I’ll start by describing my background. I’m the oldest of three, in a family with a father from South Florida, who went to UPenn on a football scholarship and spent 20 years at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office as a patent analyst; and a mother from a tight-knit matriarchal family who grew up in West Philadelphia, was the first in her extended family to go into the professional services, and went to Swarthmore College before going to law school in D.C. and began her legal career as an employee benefits attorney. 

I’m “black” or African-American, whichever description used hasn’t been of significant practical importance to me, and in many ways the heritage hasn't also. I mention the ethnic classification after the personal and professional backgrounds of my mother and father because those descriptors have always been at the forefront of how I've naturally identified myself, as opposed to the people group I'm descended from, since before I'd understood the implications of either way of thinking. I grew up in a suburb of Northern Virginia, a town as middle of the road as I can imagine, went to a public high school whose demographic reflected the city's (roughly 25%, 25%, 25%, 25%; white [mentioning first as the "majority"], black, hispanic, then other), and took IB/AP classes until going to college in two of Virginia's fairly third-tier schools. I'd taken "advanced" classes since 3rd grade and had always been around a mix of white kids, black kids, and southeast/central asians, such that the ethnicity/race of the people I was around never was a purposeful thought then or a significant identifier - my best friends were always black though.

In college I followed the interest in politics/government I'd gotten from my dad, who'd been president of his school's Black Student Union; and along with student government and interning for a few state delegates, I'd joined my school's primary black mentorship club, and spoke on and invited one of the delegates I'd worked for and had gone to my church growing up, to speak as well, on a panel on police brutality back in 2015. I've given thought to the "black experience" and the reasons for the population's relative degree of lesser prosperity in the country, and what can be done and the obstacles in the way of that prosperity, for a fair amount of time now. Wanting to answer these questions, honestly being the largest motivating factor behind the "wanting to understand the arbitration of our society" that's been the driving force in each of my different academic and professional areas of focus over the years, and my preparation toward going to law school one or two years from now.

In delving into my thinking on the subject, a few framing statements seem good to present - some of which, I've drawn closer to as I've spent time exploring the Christian body of writings and history: American black people are the descendants of the African slaves who'd been sold by African slavers or European merchants; Europeans had been under bondservant arrangements throughout the feudal system's history, and the enslavement of indigenous people spans much of European history, particularly between the Celtic and Germanic peoples, and the resulting Anglo-Saxon population; slavery was a tradition supported in Old Testament and New Testament writings, and as far as I understand the American church was instrumental in the sustainment of the second-class citizenry of the American black population; (I won't be touching on this here) but I believe that a distinction should be made between proper bondservant/master relationships and those that were "harmfully" conducted, as well as exploration made of the expectations of both parties to the engagement; today's, as well as the historical black culture or "collective intelligence" is an often contradictory and self-sabotaging collective tradition, which exists primarily as one developed in relation to the Western tradition it was layered on top of; the deliberate and sustained disenfranchisement (in the lightest terms) of the American black population by the majority/ruling European population throughout American history is a real and significant force toward the detriment of the black population; and much of the over-identification with the external classifying characteristics that we or other people represent, often creates an unbreakable logical trap in our collective and interpersonal engagement in our society.

I'm breaking up my thoughts into 3 sections, and I'm deferring my laying out of them toward brevity.

The American black population is the group descended from the enslaved Africans brought to the country ~400 years ago. The legal ownership of bondservants was outlawed, civil rights were attained, and subjection-sustaining legal frameworks were thrown out, however much of the collective cultural practices that have made my group of people a tangible laggard on the country's Adam Smith based economy have remained. We often rely on the provision of resources and an economic foundation from the public or the state, with an expectation of those and other institutions as needed to function as a community, being largely what I believe to be an outcome of being the only people group in the country to have come or been established here out of another group's will, as opposed to having reached the point of having taken the initiative to come here of our own accord.

This tangible internal responsibility for the state of the black community being so, the external source of being impeded (again, to put this in light terms) and being "dealt with craftily" (as a metaphorical reference to the pre-Exodus pharaoh's conduct toward the subjected Israelite population) is very real, and a significant force in the community's state. To give a single angle on this, in today's context, the everyday experience as a 25 year old black guy, in the public or professional arena is very distinct. I'd best describe it as an almost universal alienation in public, and in most interactions being met with an assumption of incompetence. I can speak to this, and identify this pattern as something sourced separately from "myself", given my self-understanding as a smart and capable person; that "profile" being understood by most people I've had more than a handful of conversations with, and honestly observing myself as being a harder worker and having a greater intellectual capacity than a great number of the people I engage with. So I can be substantively undeterred from the surface-level distrust & disregard I find myself being met with commonly - but I can best summarize my daily experience, with an anecdote that can be extrapolated from, of today actually, with the only place I'd gone out to being a U-Haul dealer to return a trailer, and while walking back to my car seeing a woman look at me then cartoonishly dart back to her car and lock her door, after which I finished my walk to my car and started my drive back home without much unsettling from that, because of how often moments like that come up.

There exists a long list of self-imposed, as well as externally sourced obstacles toward the black community's "flourishing" as well as in the everyday black experience – deliberate and unintentional, deserved and undeserved, minor and significantly impactful, and isolated and socialized - however the purpose of this collection of thoughts is describing solutions and outcomes.

For all of the reasons there have been - throughout the last 4 years, in the months since the current pandemic & quarantine began, and in the different widely publicized policing incidents and the related tension and narratives that have been building for some time now - there was a country-wide (or at least broadcasted country-wide) set of riots and protests in the name of the black community's turmoil ignited by the George Floyd incident, that spanned about a two month period. Thousand plus people marches happened, city business districts were looted, statues were toppled, and conciliatory legislation was passed. A significant number of occurrences happened, honestly just about each of which were troubling or inspiring (depending on perspective) on their own, and maybe none of which would have been foreseen a year ago - even though, what seems apparent to me is that little of substantive value, in terms of positive societal progress (as opposed to social-media culture fueled narrative forcing, associative posturing, and Overton window widening - even in government), resulted. The "Black Lives Matter" movement, regenerated after a seemingly worlds-away initial development following the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin & Michael Brown incidents 6+ years ago, took hold of the black community's collective narrative - the approach and manifestation of its associated activity being representative of the underlying organization's claimed Marxist ideological inspiration.

There have been various off-shooting organizational and institutional responses - such as the performative, self-protective statements or empty public-facing initiatives in support of the black community or "racial reconciliation"; a re-emergence of the reparations discussions and public re-exploration of the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates and associated writings; and an emergence of academic style, university-sourced indoctrination-purposed bodies of thought around Anti-Racism, White Fragility, and similar writings. Many of these responses, genuine or born of pretense, end up becoming stumbling blocks or sources of confusion for many honestly good-hearted people, who have not individually been an active part of the black/white conflict in the country, and also many of whom make a point at engaging in redemptive or upbuilding gestures or initiatives in their everyday lives, that generally go unnoticed.

The writings and trends of work mentioned in the previous paragraph, that have drawn attention or were released over the past few months, to give a generalized assessment, may on the whole or individually come from a good place, or a selfless motivation, but I believe that many of them are developed upon a set of shallowly-derived premises and trails of thought stemming from collective grievance/indignation, and have a pervasive potential to layer on top of existing problems as a guilt-induced thought pattern of pretense, as opposed to digging in and addressing and solving the underlying problems that exist between the collections of American black and "white" (the quotations signifying "white" being an improper and shallow classification) communities.

In the exploration of, my thoughts at least, about what types of solutions or initiatives or general directions in addressing these things could be of tangible and long-term value, I'll list out the collection of thoughts that come to mind: I believe that self-sufficiency within the black community, and external assistance in the form of promoting self-sufficiency in the black community, as opposed to resource extracting, would be a generally beneficial development; I believe that the professional/economic and civic activity based body of collective understandings as they exist within the black community would yield significant impact if they were refined upon throughout the country’s population; I believe that initiatives at developing public narratives promoting guilt and the weaponization of offense, generally play out to as having done more harm than they are good, for everyone actually; I believe that the allocation and legitimization of personal agency and self-direction at the individual as well as the collective levels is significant if not fundamental to the development of the black community's well-being; I believe that a body of knowledge available and an initiative of presenting to black elites the internal society-wide understandings, held by "white" or majority groups of people, would be beneficial in bridging the gap in the communities’ perspectives, with the addition of creating a dialogue around what the black community can do to be of benefit to the "white"/majority populations' higher priorities; I think that genuine and open communication is valuable, and worth risking offense for; I think that almost any initiative built around vehemently preventing the presentation or availability of any idea or public figure is likely a greater problem than the target of its efforts; and I honestly, believe that most people are good-hearted, subject to more fear and social pressure than is healthy, and would do the right thing for the sake of other people, if doing that didn’t put them in harm's way.

So, that's what I'll lay out in terms of my thoughts. I could flesh out one area of it, or give more structure to another, but I’d say I like this for a broad brush outline. I didn't mention the Christian understanding as a factor in any collective reconciliation between communities, and that was deliberate. I believe actually that the set of understandings throughout the Christian body of knowledge is underlying much of the activities and initiatives that would be conducted towards the resolution of these matters, but to frame and describe them as such is really an activity of its own - and tangentially, I think that following Christ is something that should be pursued separately and regardless of reconciliation or tension between communities, and just as well that reaching a collective understanding and resolving tension between groups of people would be a beneficial thing, separately and without the condition of the people involved having made the decision to follow Christ (though that would be a great thing).

Alright, this is what I'll write for now. I'll be interested to hear anyone's commentary and I'll go into further detail on whatever subtopic anyone wants to ask my particular thoughts about, and I hope this can be useful for whoever reads it.