Vision Circle

As used in the early 20th Century--when organizations like Omega Psi Phi were started--it was used ostensibly to imbue African Americans with a sense of agency, with a sense of responsibility. African Americans as a whole had the power to lift themselves up from conditions of material subjugation. Wealthier African Americans (they DID exist even during this time) had the responsibility to serve as role models for those less fortunate.

Now I believe that black people have agency. Contrary to popular belief we aren't totally powerless...and our lives are not individually or in the aggregate, pathological.

But the concept of "uplift" as disseminated by scholar activists such as Anna Julia Cooper, and WEB Dubois, is conservative to say the least. It is based on the fundamental premise that white supremacy is an attitudinal construct that is caused by black pathology. In blunt terms--the reason black people ain't got nothing is because black people don't act right. If black people were to properly organize their lives (establish modern family structures with a strong man at the head; stop having children out of wedlock; establish honorable jobs; carry themselves the correct way in public) two things would occur.

First, poorer black people would, from "role modeling" the behavior of the organized blacks, act better. They would organize their homes, organize their lives, and in the process improve their neighborhoods--which because of the disorganization was wracked by crime, disease, and harlotry.

Second, white people would see blacks carry themselves in a different way, and they would in turn realize that black people are responsible enough to bear the burdens of citizenship. They would then realize that the norms of white supremacy which forced them into all black wards, and kept blacks in the south from voting, were antiquated. A new era would begin.

The problems with this should be apparent, and I'll briefly touch on two. In its "pure" form, the notion of uplift is apolitical at worst, and at best articulates a vision of racial subjugation that is attitudinal rather than structural. Dubois in his strong social science phase believed that all he had to do was use the tools of social science to show whites and blacks how things really were and they would change their minds, leading to a change in relationships. It doesn't quite work that way.

The second problem is that the Victorian model upon which the pure vision is based, is itself, deeply sexist, racist, and classist. Folded into the model are notions of "civilization" which are based solely on European upper-class norms and standards (a civilized family is patriarchal, a noncivilized family is not; a civilized woman works only in the home, an uncivilized woman does not).

(As a sidenote come black nationalists flipped this on its head by arguing that the best civilizations were actually the OLDER civilizations. The Western vision was--the younger your civilization was, the better it was. The Southern vision was the exact opposite, which is one of the reasons why Egypt becomes so important in the African American imagination.)

In as much as black people living in America were influenced by American ideas, it shouldn't be surprising that black people attempted to flip the script on the Victorian model of success. But it should also be unsettling to know that many blacks supported the logical ideological conclusions (racism is attitudinal rather than structural, blacks are pathological), and the policy conclusions (many indicated support for some form of eugenics).

Now what the hell does this have to do with "positive images"? I'll get to that next.

(This brief piece is a snippet of a larger lecture I gave in my black politics class. It is based on the work Uplifting the Race)

Posted by at October 4, 2003 10:57 AM | TrackBack