The Black Experience in America is Unique (1443 hits)

The Black Experience in America is Unique

By Peter I. Rose



Unique Americans

The black experience in America is unique—it has no real parallel. And black Americans are unique. Paradoxically, blacks may well be at once the most estranged and the least foreign of all the citizens: most estranged because of their special history, which began in subjugation, continued in separation, and persists to this day under various forms of segregation; least foreign because, ironically, having been cut off from their native roots, they had few guides but those of the master and his agents. This is not to say no “Africanisms” survived. Of course they did. Still, most black Americans, for good or ill, were imbued with many of the same goals and aspirations of those of the dominant group. Many of their cultural traits were similar too.

What they said and what they ate, what they believed and, in some ways, the way they worshiped, were heavily southern Americana. And so with their names. And in these names one finds the true paradox of being both a part of and apart from society. Names are labels by which others know you. Black people’s names are those of whites, usually white masters. It is little wonder that one of the symbolic gestures in the new search to assert both self-hood and people-hood by young blacks is to cast off their “slave names” and to adopt African ones—or simply to call oneself “X.”

By and large this assertion did not come about until quite recently. For years black people—named Smith and Jones and Brown and Washington—quested often the American Dream and sought to take their place with whites. For many, the venture proved quixotic. Some succeeded, however, and became black equivalents of the white nouveaux riches, with all the material trappings to indicate having arrived. Others eschewed such life styles and sought other benefits in the dominant society, especially through higher education and work in the professions. They often found smoldering bitterness and exacerbated doubts about the rightness of seeking to integrate in the first place.

They sometimes proved more akin to the Arabs in French Algeria than the Italians or Jews or Irish-Americans with whom they were so often compared. As Raymond Aron points out:

The French never established an integrated society in Algeria. Ironically, the young Algerians who came closest to being French, by education and training, were usually the most hostile. But this is understandable, because they were the most sensitive to their rejection by the French ruling class.

Persistent relegation to inferior status and the internalization of values regarded as most typically American (such as the idea of individual achievement through hark work) have led, especially in recent years, to a different sort of response on the parts of blacks compared with members of most other American ethnic groups. Some began to argue that the more they learned about the wider society and its members’ unwillingness to honor its own lofty ideals, the less they should encourage their “brothers” and “sisters” to accept its basic tenets. Since whites appeared eager to maintain their position of preeminence, many blacks began saying that integration was, in fact, highly dysfunctional for blacks—just as it was in Algiers.

These observations are not to suggest that all social scientists who see blacks as the latest immigrants are white supremacists. But they may be quite naïve in assuming that admitting black children to white schools, opening neighborhoods, saying, in effect, “You’re as good as I a,” will solve the problem. Assimilation may have been the goal at one time but it is being severely challenged (see Chapter Seven).

http://www.nathanielturner.com/blackexperi... Posted By: Steve Williams
Tuesday, November 10th 2009 at 2:51PM
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