A: The same folk afraid of uplifting interpersonal communion.
I've been struggling for the past several days with the problem of collapsing a huge number of (to me) interwoven threads on identity and authenticity. This morning, I chanced upon a critique of Stanley Crouch's "The Artificial White Man - Essay's on Authenticity" and the orchestrated objective reduction of these disparate threads finally jelled.
In my opinion, what Crouch and other deeply frustrated old school black public personae have been struggling to say about the tectonic shift in Black identity and nationalism in America - has been paralleled for centuries in the schism separating the authentic Church from the western catholic, protestant, and evangelical sickness.
Looking at the critique of kwanzaa and the threat of an apologetic for the so-called Christian Christmas as it is desecrated in America, only increased my sense of urgency for driving out the common theme which ties these disparate quests for authenticity together.
I believe the itch that the frustrated old-schoolers cannot scratch is rooted in nostalgia for a lost sense of interpersonal communion which formerly characterized segregated black communities. THAT is the secret *vitality* which formerly endowed black communities with a specialness which produced a distinctively black sensibility and aesthetic. It was also, I believe, a byproduct of the heroic collective interpersonal defence black folks maintained in the face of enforced and overt racist oppression. I'd go so far as to say that socio-economic necessity fused blacks in America into a therapeutic bond of interpersonal communion that has its closest socio-historic parallel in the orthodox Christian Church as an intentional therapeutic bond of interpersonal communion.
To get past the surface of identity and authenticity issues, it's fundamental to understand that racism is far more than simple ideological difference. In practice, it is a neurobiological weapon of mass destruction used by one human collective to sicken and parasitize another. Organization to defend oneself against racism is a biological imperative.
It is not my intention to argue the merits of one brand of Christian writing and preaching over another. Those arguments need not be recreated here, as they've been conclusively engaged on numerous scholarly fora. Not only that, but I believe that any such doctrinal argument here would be the equivalent of enacting the type of politicomedic theatre that Jon Stewart so aptly lampooned on Crossfire, IOW - the rhetorical posturings of public personae would quickly overshadow the possibility of serious and substantive exegetical engagement.
Any genuinely interested student of Christianity can easily explore the [hidden in plain sight] history and substance of Orthodox Christianity to their heart's content beginning at orthodoxinfo.com and make their very own determination of the respective doctrinal merits for themselves. No point misdirecting, anathematizing, or punditizing around doctrines that can be readily compared without the distraction of personal advocacy.
The other overarching influence for this collapse - is Earl Dunovant's piquant serialized essay on The Care and Feeding of White Folks. While I don't know whether Earl is familiar with the fiery writings of Fr. John Romanides who calls western Christianity a neurobiological sickness;
"The sickness of religion is caused by a short-circuit between the heart and the brain. This is what causes fantasies which distort the imagination and in varying degrees cuts one off from reality. The cure of this short-circuit has three stages which will occupy us in some detail later. They are: 1) the purification of the heart, 2) the illumination of the heart, which repairs this short-circuit which produces fantasies, of which both religion and criminality are by products, and 3) glorification, which makes one uncreated by grace and by which one sees the uncreated ruling power of God which is a simple energy which divides itself without division and saturates all of creation being everywhere present, though not by nature, and ruling all of creation. The Bible calls this the "glory" and "rule" of God and those who reach glorification "prophets" and "sent ones (apostles)."
Romanides and Dunovant share many themes in common.
My strong assertion is that the niggerati and negrotarian objective during the Harlem Renaissance was to ignite a separate, secular, and aesthetic mode of interpersonal communion using cultural production as the framework for glueing it all together. I would not be the first to make such a claim, Jon Woodson made a similar claim in his book To Make a New Race Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance - and while his claims are on the right track, had he gone to the Orthodox root of Gurdjieff's teaching, he might have seen the deeper taproots undergirding the complete enterprise.
As time permits, I'll attempt to explore that in much greater detail over at niggerati.net.
Posted by at December 20, 2004 12:27 PM | TrackBack