Vision Circle

I had a similar thought...I suppose the issue comes down to your understanding of the term. African-American, in the political sense, is still a pipedream...that has not happened and probably will not happen until whites are in an extreme minority position and suffer a good deal more blood loss. Simply, citizenship in a nation state is a quid pro quo arrangement...fidelity for protection. The US has not protected the Africans - physically or politically - for any sustained period of time. The closest endeavor was Radical Reconstruction. That experiment ended in 1877 (I believe this to be the single most significant event in the history of Africans in America - more at another time.)

Culturally, Africans have been Americans for centuries and have defined "American" since their arrival in either 1555 or 1619 (your choice). With respect to the film, I feel you LKS, because the contour of the series has been to focus on the political relationship. Certainly a slave is not a citizen and therefore not "American." The Romans never considered their slaves to be Romans. No slaving society considers "differentiable outsiders" to be of that group. Certainly, from 1877 to 1970, it is absurd to considers Africans as Americans politically.

We become african-americans when we lose our old school blackness....,

Mademoiselle Rice is an african-american.

Mssr. P-Diddy is an african american.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters is still black...,

Maxine Waters is a fully enfranchised member of the most powerful legislative body on the planet. She's been a Washington insider for 14 years. She's on the House Judicary as well as the Financial Services committee, and if her name isn't on at least a billion dollars worth of federal money, I'll eat my hat. She's American alright.

I get the point of the question and I don't want to play word games, but African American is a demographic not to be confused with black, which is an intellectual invention. Think of African Americans as a migratory group, like the 'Overseas Chinese'. Think of black as series of personal concepts adopted by this group of people, as in Black Arts, Black Consciousness, Harlem Ren...

Blacks are the adoptees of the Black Consciousness movement which was part an parcel of Pan Africanism and Black Nationalism. I can envision black communities, but not African American communities. African America is more of a nation, like Kurdistan. It is an ethnic minority group which came from a specific place in a specific time and context.

Africans have been singularly incapable (I say immoderately for the sake of argument, dismissing Liberia & Marcus Garvey) of breaking away from America. And nobody else has either for that matter. So there really isn't a world or domestic control by which to judge the quid pro quo arrangement. Everybody defaults. But one can certainly see that African Americans, like Jews, Italians, Irish and dozens of others fare better here than they would have in their native nations. When do you become American? When you lose your language and your religion to your adoptive home. Regardless of how well you fare in that nation, it is your nation.

America is a success. If you compare the African American experience withthat of other indigenous or immigrant groups, I think you'll find they have come further and faster. Compare Aborigines in Australia, mestizos in Central America and tribal groups in South America. Compare Philipinos guest workers in host countries. This is Sowell's balliwick btw. Where is that damned book? I'm also thinking of the Soviet Union, which on the whole you'd have to say was a failure to do any real integration. Ukraine, Belarus, Czech.. no way.

I believe that if you compare African Americans to just about any other minority ethnic group, you'll find that we are an exemplary success in terms of depth and breadth of integration across a whole host of metrics. So much so that we don't emigrate in any significant numbers although we've been free to since Emancipation. The easy question would be to eyeball those Africans who went the extra mile to Canada on the Underground Railroad. Where are they now?

When do you become American? When you lose your language and your religion to your adoptive home. Regardless of how well you fare in that nation, it is your nation.

adoptive?

and this is the ineradicable pivot...,

blackness is the conscious retention of cultural otherness in this uniquely strange culture...,

in the American world, but not intrinsically of it...,

deracialization is the equivalent of soul-lessness...,

it's post abduction syndrome

I can buy that only halfway because I don't think there should be a zero-sum. It seems to be that if the improvisational aspect of blackness seeks to keep itself anti-American and oppositional, (which is a skill I think most of the Afrofuturists have mastered absolutely) then it's always on the run. Not only that, it's academic and necessitates a black underclass. The logic of keeping blackness oppositional and other, makes it smaller and smaller, and it demeans African American success. I think this is the very dysfunction of much of the lefty black attitude and justifies all the gobsmacking they get from the white and black right. The rejection of assimilation is precisely what invalidates the significance of every 'black' victim of police brutality.

Blackness in this definition is an outlaw culture.

Just as your minister says you may be in this world but not *of* this world. This is the cue to blackfolks to ignore the lessons of this world and remain insularly other.

PAS is exactly what you would expect of a people who are convinced that they can never be fully at home, that their values are incompatible with that of the culture in which they are embedded. Again, this begs the question 'what do you people want', because blacks under this way of thinking would always have to come up with a separate and unequal justification for doing the same thing as nons. Again, it puts the burden of legitimacy on a debtor nation, and all blacks have to do is 'die and be black'.

That's a bottomless pit of solopsism and self-pity. We can't let blackness be that. Why? because we excuse our own responsibility for the failures of society. If we are not prepared to take the American flag and raise it over our own houses, then we are not invested in its improvement - we simply live to criticize it. In such a case, anyone is justified to run us through with the flagstaff as in the famous photo. Black vs America? I don't think so.

Given your comparative silence on the point concerning America's unique cultural strangeness - I must conclude that you agree with me here. Nevertheless, in much of what you say Mike, it seems as if you not only suggest ignoring the underbelly, but also embracing it as if it were our own.

This seems Faustian to me. There is something morbid, parasitic, and thanaturgic about this culture and reading Kennedy is a healthy reminder of how recently these aspects were in plain sight. When I need a tangible reminder, however, I don't have to go historico-imaginal, I can just roll down Troost, Prospect, or one of the blvds in my hood, counting the number of payday loan, plasma extraction, liquor and smoke shops and draw a clear and present conclusion about what the cultural detente between blacks and America represents. It looks hella zero-sum from where I'm standing.

While I agree with you about the hazards of insularity - my present understanding of blackness is now identical with my understanding of orthodoxy, it is an interpersonal praxis by which one lifts oneself above the sheer moral horror by which one is surrounded.

The orthodox church coexists with all of Christendom while preserving its otherness and it is not outlaw..., it's simply a law unto itself.

“I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you — the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.”

— C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”

To “rip open the inconsolable secret,” to awaken the spiritual hunger for something beyond the materialistic scope of American-ness - is the anamnetic legacy of blackness-as-praxis.

Blackness is a final plea and warning to America to repudiate its unsustainable and ultimately self-destructive course, to discover its here-to-date unknown capacity for spirituality in self-sacrifice for the sake of others.

As goes blackness, so goes America...,