Problem Chylde: Live from Pressure Cooker, USA

First off, this Sylvia Wynter article is deliciously dense. So many choice quotes I want to isolate and preserve here after I try to answer some of these questions! And of course, DuBois always makes my blood boil in a good way, an intellectually amazed and awed way.  Let’s see if my brain is up for the challenge of synthesis; it’s been a slow and sluggish uphill battle today.  Let’s hope my answer matches the question; if not, it’s perhaps time for a brief sojourn away from the computer.

Do you find it effective to define community against something that is recognizably NOT your community? Can you think of any examples of community or connection that you have experienced that don’t require exclusion? Wynter suggests that jazz is an example of black people creating an “us” that doesn’t require a “them”. Do you agree? How does art or a creative process change our relationships to community?

It’d be cheating to answer the first question with a simple, emphatic “no,” but that’s my answer.  It is ineffective to define a community by its direct opposite.  Using binaries are perhaps great for description (i.e., midnight black is not olive green; Garfield the cat is NOT Odie the dog) but piss-poor for identity formation.  Wynter’s discussion of external constructions delighted me because in many ways, through the construction of what she calls the Normative Model of Man, our Western morality (and by extension, much of Christian morality) encourages us to strive for perfection — something human beings are not, nor will they ever be (except for one, according to Christian doctrine).   The harm of using what what a person is not as a definition of that person is simple: what if the person becomes the very descriptor she opposes?  Will she confront the reality of that alleged transposition calmly and seek new means for identification outside of A-Not B conceptions, will she harmfully suppress her inclinations, or will she try to rename what she is radically to preserve the convenient identification binary she’s created?

Too often in racial discourse, there emerges a simplistic model of understanding racial oppression over time.  Institutionally speaking, it is correct on a fundamental and descriptive level; but as the focus narrows to the interpersonal, the cultural underpinnings of layers upon layers of haves and have-nots (or what Wallerstein refers to as a “bimodal distribution of rewards”), the model’s limitations alarm and disorient anyone accustomed to dealing with truth in any recognizable form.  This simplistic model is the concept of “racism = prejudice + power” — and that model being the only accurate illustration of understanding racial dynamics on any level.  The two indicators of race, prejudice and power, must exist concurrently within this paradigm for racial discrimination to exist, even though it is often mistakenly applied to whites only, regardless of the earmarks of power they may lack in other oppressive dynamics, regardless of the possible scenarios in which nonwhites may wield more power and exercise prejudicial thinking that would lend itself to racist classification.  The possibility of recognizing whites may experience more benefits from an oppressive institution yet not all whites have fully realized those benefits are illusory in the hollow frames of a binary.  Gradients of power disappear.  Relative weights of prejudices and manifestations fade.  However, it strangely would be racist to use the true definition most people who conceive of this “prejudice + power” relation in such simplistic terms are using: racism = prejudice + whiteness, sexism = prejudice = maleness, etc.  To put it narrowly, oppression is a state of believing combined with a state of being something perceived as immutable.  This relationship is hard to maintain if people’s beliefs change and people’s beings are always restructuring and reforming — and sadly for binary oppositions, these processes happen all the time.  The result of binary relationships, whether spoken openly or silently observed, is ultimately alienation.  Alienation is significantly and powerfully what Wynter and DuBois reject outright.  It is the ideology which deserves alienation, not the human attempting to speak it to power.

Wynter and DuBois ascribe a hefty amount of weight to the creative act as a breaking with these dangerous binaries — a subversion through the act of recreation and flexing the signs that surround us in Nature and in our constructed natures.  I am reminded of this fact through a statement from DuBois: “But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head, — some way” (2).  All three choices require collective interaction, cooperation, and generative synthesis between human beings.  Wynter’s borrowed definition of culture from Leopold Sedar Senghor also brought this idea to light: “Man adapts himself to Nature, at the same time as he adapts Nature to his own exigencies.  From this contradictory, dual process, springs his social and economic structure, his art, and his philosophy” (82).  Despite the irony of constructing this relationship within a binary, the action-reaction relationship chain of creation takes precedent, focusing integration rather than perfection.

All humans are capable of speaking truth to power; all humans are what they make themselves.  However, with such a power, we must be careful to ensure we are speaking truth and not simply naming tools by which to enact force — power’s greatest enemy.  True power is active, but not forceful.  Force implies coercion, and power exists without external manipulation and handling.  And that’s the danger, isn’t it?  To force oneself into a binary situation means the opposite can force that person right back out, correct?  Balance is significantly absent from the equation; emulation and imitation, rather than creation, take the floor.  (DuBois: “He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another” (6); Wynter: “The salvaging of ourselves, the reclamation of vast areas of our being, is dialectically related to the destruction of those conditions which block the free development of the human potentialities” (83).)  We create other humans through a generative process reified in Nature; we wield thoughts through poetics with every accommodation and connection we allow between ourselves and Nature’s processes.  Perhaps that’s why humanity provides for the potential for growth while raced beings attempt to concretize capabilities and attributions — impose ideological limitations on one’s range of motion to eliminate any perception of boundless and ever-present potential.  To keep our powers “strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten” (DuBois 3).

I’ll leave this as my one answer for now and will return to it after more thought.  I shared the Baldwin piece because I found it interesting how significant the element of America as New World, as raced nation, as violent backdrop and division of humans, can slice through to the very core of a person’s individual perceptions, as well as the perceptions of a collective.  It tied to DuBois’ joke (more funny in the “sad but true” sense than the “har har” sense) — “And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, — peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe” (2).  Either you return to your most natural state of childhood or you leave the environment entirely — natural birth or social elimination from what formed your angst, a faux, ideologically created death.