This year 2011, having been designated by the UN the International Year for the African Diaspora, it's hardly surprising that, in some quarters, the long drawn-out mental process of psychological emancipation can conceivably lead into all sorts of blind alleys, not excluding the use of race as a decoy to recycle black distress and ancestral pain, thereby removing the shackles from the limbs and placing them securely on the corresponding minds.
That's perhaps one of the reasons why television personality Bill Cosby took time off, seemingly less in anger than sorrow, to implore "the members of his tribes to wake up and smell the coffee, thereby taking some responsibility for themselves, their children and their own condition and examining to what extent their own self-destructive propensities are responsible for their ever-recurring difficulties. As Dr Huxtable in a popular long-running television series (the fictional Huxtable family depicted an educated and successful African-American family), Bill Cosby undoubtedly enhanced the African-American profile.
Incidentally, the African-American who portrayed Dr Huxtable's wife was recently awarded a lifetime award for being an accomplished actress. She not only publicly acknowledged her pride in her African heritage, although she was clearly of multiple heritage, but she conceded that "the culture and rhythms of her African origin were kept intact." Besides this she admitted that she celebrated "the joy of ancestry, which transcended the weight of history." Back to Cosby. Bill Cosby didn't say anything new. What's new was that Cosby brought to bear his own name and image recognition. Cosby's detractors, who took umbrage, refused to give a reasoned response but elected to shoot at the messenger and feigned to ignore the message.
Cosby was accused of "scorning the degrees by which he did ascend and providing grist for the mills of those who would take pleasure in denigrating the black man." They also accused him of "hanging out their dirty linen in public." An unrepentant Cosby retorted, "Let me tell you, your dirty linen gets out from school at 2.30 every day, cursing and calling each other by the 'N' word on the street. "They think they're hip, they can't read, can't write but they're laughing and giggling and going nowhere. I can't even talk the way they talk and I blamed the kid until I heard the mother. And then I heard the father. Everybody knows it's important to speak properly, except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth."
The naked facts speak for themselves. Without going into the depressing minutes, the gravamen of Cosby's stricture is that there is a mindless squandering of the sacrifices of the past. And that applies to a much wider audience. It's a truism that "where ignorance is bliss, it's folly to be wise," and there's also an African saying that "until lions learn to write, only hunters will tell the stories of the hunt." Why is it that immigrants who came to America much later than "blacks," without being able to speak the language and experiencing cultural and other handicaps, have been able to secure their piece of the "American dream," ahead of many a member of the so-called African-American underclass? One of the reasons given is that the "blacks" were the only ones brought against their will in chains and shackles.
One of Malcolm X's more memorable lines was, "The early white immigrants landed on Plymouth Rock, but Plymouth Rock landed on us." Be that as it may, in the historical experience of slavery, one can't help but marvel at the outer limits of superhuman endurance displayed by the victims. Some may even lay proud claim to the heritage and traditions of struggle, resilience, survival against great odds, that we are presumably heir to. I recently saw a video clip of an African-American who claimed that by "tracing his roots DNA style" he found out that his great-great-great grandfather was born a slave and ended up a businessman.
It's quite another matter, of course, to be using the "memory of slavery" and its psychic scars as opiate and/or therapy-thereby becoming suckers and/or manipulable pawns at the mercy of astute demagogues with their own sinister agendas and vested interests. That's not to say that leaders cannot be found who are genuinely concerned with questions of African identity, African pride and African self-esteem, self-worth-realistically based on achievement-past, current and anticipated. A famous French poet framed all this in his notion of "negritude." There are, arguably, those-not necessarily unlettered and unlearned-who, for their own reasons, extol as virtues obvious self-defeating vices and shortcomings of "the tribe."
In a heterogeneous society, it's quite possible to find sheep without shepherd... shepherd without sheep... goats without herdsmen... herdsmen without goats, and even goats masquerading as herdsmen. I'm by no means being facetious when I say that it behoves us to examine the horns.
Understandably, the psychological reverberations down the years have manifested themselves in the production of survivor and victim syndromes. I suppose that's how the cookie crumbles. Sadly, there are those who, having failed to take advantage of opportunities within reach, find, in the troubled past, the basis for an epidemic of self-serving excuses for apathy, inertia, non-performance, thereby squandering and being unworthy of the past sacrifices of forebears.