Prometheus 6   

Til now, blacks have been social weaklings buffeted about and passively informed of their reality (e.g. you may live here but not there, you may sit there but not here on a city bus, you may protest in this way but not that way) by the first class citizens, both their protectors and their enemies. It's time for blacks to engender passivity in others, to inform outsiders of who blacks are and what will and won't happen in black communities. Blacks must now stop screaming at the top of their lungs and start speaking with quiet authority; the authority of the fully entitled, the authority of the calmly confident, the authority of the self–legitimized citizen who has no intention of being silenced or marginalized ever again, but who, most importantly, does not expect to be.

The first step in freeing each other is for black people, collectively, to surrender, to consciously give up on achieving racial justice. Certainly, they must renounce any notion of justice meant to even the historical score or to bring about actual racial integration. The Civil War did not end with Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Nor did it end with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act one hundred years later. It continues to this day. But that War over the social and political position of black people must end and that end can only come in the form of black surrender. What blacks must surrender is the notion that they can be made whole for the centuries of loss and degradation, that whites can be made to suffer guilt and shame equal to the portion they dealt blacks, that America will ever see itself the way that its blacks citizens do. America will never feel blacks' ambivalence for the Founding Fathers, it will never waver from nostalgia for that much vaunted 'Age of Innocence' that the black experience proves never existed. It can't. If it did, it would have to come up with another, less glorious definition of itself because that 'innocence' is that of the criminal whose victim lies mute, buried in an unmarked grave and lost to history. Whites will never cringe with the shame blacks feel appropriate; they will never welcome blacks freely into their neighborhoods and schools. They must abandon the quest for whites' respect, settling instead for their acceptance, however grudging, of the fact that interference will be summarily dealt with (and not via bullhorn). Blacks must cease clutching the unlocked fetters of humiliation and voluntary outsiderness that hobble them to a view of the present shrink–wrapped to the circumscribed past. Alas, they don't even have their faces pressed up against the plate glass window of the future. They should be working towards a day when segregation is turned on its head, when whites sue blacks for admittance to black schools, black medical staffs, black businesses. Until then, blacks will remain the annoying kid brother Mom forces you to tolerate.

This surrender must also acknowledge that blacks are Americans living in a Euro centric culture, but one which could not have been built without them. They should feel free to adopt Western culture, reject it, or meld it with some desired level of Afro– (or other) centrism. But they should make that choice aware of its consequences (and, of course, free of coercion from goaltending Blacks and their apologists) [P6: emphasis added]. In a recent book called a Hope in the Unseen, a striving black youngster from the ghetto claws his way to Brown University only to find that the Afrocentrism of his neighborhood education left him knowing all the words to Lift Every Voice and Sing but clueless as to who Churchill and Freud were. He was also sorely lacking in the academic basics. That youngster had mainstream aspirations but was impeded by his well–meaning black teachers in availing himself of that to which his citizenship entitled him and for which he had worked so hard.

Blacks must accept that they are a numerical and political minority and must master the dominant bodies of knowledge even as they fight for the inclusion of worthy multicultural knowledge. As rational adults, they should concede that, forced to choose, it should be Churchill over Patrice Lumumba, the Inchon Landing over the Zulus' David vs Goliath victory over the British. Of course, they shouldn't have to choose; the goal should be to expand the base of cultural literacy, one sinew of a strong nation, not play a zero sum game in which one nugget of western civilization must be jettisoned for every multicultural nugget included. For the same reason that all schoolchildren need to master algebra whether they think they'll ever use it or not, blacks must master the Master's world. They needn't embrace it or even believe it; they must simply render unto Caesar the things, which are Caesar's. And then subvert it from within.