In 1997 I wrote an essay entitled “Is the Web too Cool for Blacks?” In it, I suggested that blacks were not flocking to the then-nascent Web because its chaotic, unconventional mechanisms ran counter to the very conservative impulses that run deep in the Afro-American psyche. “Yes,” I wrote, “black folks brought you jazz. Yes, we are famed in the popular mind for adapting forms of music, speech and worship to suit our own ends, the rules be damned. And we have historically been demonized in the majority mind for congenital lawlessness. Yet, in fact, we are the product of a culture that is among the most conventional and, yes, even timid in modern America.”
Asked to take another look at that piece, I see that blacks have largely bridged the famed digital divide. We still lag somewhat in high-speed access, but that gap, too, is closing. This, however, is less a testament to our rousing ourselves from a shattering complacency than a sign of the deep mainstreaming of the Web, which is now an engine of the status quo. Yes, some insurgents snuck through the door when it was still wide open, but by and large, the big players online are the most familiar ones: TimeWarner, Microsoft (failing for now to gobble Yahoo), CNN, News Corp, Viacom (which ate BET) etc. Back in ‘97, it seemed the Web might be anybody’s playground, but like one of those retro games in which you tilt the little balls into the clown’s eyes, the universes of power and information have come to rest in their standard orbits. Oh well…
If anything, our propensity toward the conventional, our post civil-rights-era allergy toward the radical has only grown in the past decade. But this has put us right in sync with our white countrymen. Oprah Winfrey ascended to the power stratosphere by becoming the doyenne— the veritable high-priestess— of the conventional. From books to music to movies, with rare exception, she reliably identifies that which will comfort and soothe the broadest swath of her audience. Barack Obama is praised for proving how mainstream he is. Our most outré forms, like gangsta rap, are immediately, and with our enthusiastic support, scooped up, sanitized and mainstreamed for consumption in commercials, movies, and fashion.
Our radical history has been sanded and whitewashed into a perversion of its original self, our struggles reduced to picaresque “black history month” bromides that omit the fact that Martin King and his movement radically attacked every edifice of the status quo this country had to offer, from its governance to its military industrial complex, the man himself reduced to some sort of high-end Uncle Remus who just loved him some white folks. You wouldn’t know that the Harlem Renaissance was a hotbed of atheists (Hubert Henry Harrison, A. Philip Randolph), gays (Langston Hughes, Billie Strayhorn, Claude McKay), lesbians (Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Grimké) and communists (WEB DuBois, Chandler Owen). Our most storied achievements were liberally seasoned in radical unconventionality, yet today we stand as the epitome of the mainstream.
Social critics like Bill Cosby and Juan Williams ache for the good ole days when blacks were raised in two-parent homes under the “high moral standing of civil rights.” What they never acknowledge is that those halcyon days of black responsibility were buttressed by a deep radical strain. In Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint’s Come On People, they write “Despite the fact that racial discrimination has not been eliminated, black strength lies in our resolve to keep on keeping on, never quitting, never giving up, never yielding to the role of cooperative victim.”
Perhaps that dying strain of radicalism kept us from playing Cosby’s “cooperative victim” by forcing us to relentlessly challenge the status quo—and it vision of us. Perhaps the wholesale acceptance of the status quo is particularly detrimental to an historically reviled minority. Perhaps becoming cooperative victims of a consumerist society while, at the majority’s behest, forgetting the radical strain in our greatest accomplishments… perhaps it has left us particularly vulnerable to society’s ills.
At one time our radical traditions propelled us toward greater progress. Today, we honor our roles as keepers of the status quo. Our music has rarely been less interesting, our letters are leaden, and our religiosity clings to the moldering lace of civil-rights-era words and actions.
It looks like late entry onto the Web was the least of the issues stemming from Afro-America’s loving embrace of the status quo and from our willful blindness to our radical past.
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Leonce Gaiter’s work on social and cultural issues has appeared in numerous publications, from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times magazine. His noir novel “Bourbon Street” was published by Carroll & Graf. Image: Hirji Kubota, 1969, Chicago.
Is it that there is comparatively little-to-no radical black culture being produced or that it is structurally buried? If the latter, isn’t that the same as it has always been?