Race and Resistance: A PDF Analysis

Here is the transcription of the document in markdown format: # Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance The broad and diverse discourse on African Americans has yielded many books, but only two basic stories: those of suffering and resistance Whether through exaggeration, understatement, denial, or in...

Here is the transcription of the document in markdown format: # Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance The broad and diverse discourse on African Americans has yielded many books, but only two basic stories: those of suffering and resistance Whether through exaggeration, understatement, denial, or intricate combination, all others derive from these two. Stated directly, the issues around these two stories seem more properly philosophical than historical or political, although they relate to every level of African American life, including the most intimate and personal. Like all such piercing matters, they also go beyond specifically racial concerns to ancient and interminable questions regarding the fundamental capacities of beings such as ourselves. Can meaning or wisdom come from suffering? Or is suffering the permanent enemy of the free life? Does suffering contain its own transcendence? Or can it be justified only as a means to the attainment of tangible worldly goods such as money, status, or political power? Such concerns have informed the race question as they have directed the general thrust of modern life. Animated in part by a stubborn faith in the human ability to resist or eliminate suffering through self-invention, technology, political movement, economic production, and many other means, modern societies have nonetheless remade human torment along myriad lines. As a leading concept of modernity, as a multiform social and political reality, and as lived experience, race has stood out for the extreme way that it manifests both the persistence of suffering and the great hope that by fighting against it human beings might deliver themselves from its grasp. The African American circumstance of exile, enslavement, segregation, and natal alienation has led naturally to a deep contemplation of the relationship between suffering and resistance, but it has yielded no sure answers. One influential side of the tradition regards suffering as a key to insight and creativity, while another regards it as an unequivocal negative, something to be fought, escaped, and constantly resisted. W.E.B. Du Bois had something like the former in mind when he spoke of African American "second sight" or of the wisdom of the sorrow songs in *The Souls of Black Folk*. So did Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's *Their Eyes Were Watching God*, when she said to her "kissin friend" Pheoby, "You got to go there to know there two things everybody got to do for theyselves. They got to go to God, and they got to find out about living." In order to achieve her inner victory, and in the end to pull in her horizon "from around the waist of the world" "like a great fishnet" with "life in its meshes," Janie had to suffer tremendous loss. Without this, her act of self-possession in telling her own story in her own way could not have occurred. Something similar might be said of the blues singer Ma Rainey from Sterling Brown's poem of the same name, who drew crowds from all around by singing about hard luck and ""bout de lonesome road/We mus' go"; or of Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist in Invisible Man, who learned to see the good air that danced from the visible end of Louis Armstrong's trumpet as the product of the more essential, sweaty, spittle-laced bad air on the business end. His marijuana-induced descent through the invisible levels of Armstrong's unforgettable song "Black and Blue" foreshadows a painful journey where he learns, like Hurston's Janie, that genuine life stories, black or otherwise, are always expensive. With a similar aim in mind, but in a register more informed by the African American Christian tradition than by the blues, James Baldwin in *The Fire Next Time* relates the tragic bottom line of race relations to his nephew: that in order to love himself fully, he must love whites, however much they hate him. If he can do this, Baldwin says, he will have paid the price to possess the wisdom of his slave ancestors, who understood the redemptive value of undeserved suffering Praising the poetry of the ancestors, Baldwin quotes a poignant line from the spirituals as his argumentative *coup de grâce*: "At the very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook, and my chains fell off." In other words, when one reaches the lowest and most wretched depths of existence, one depends most on faith. There, facing the chaos but aligned with God, the weakest man becomes the strongest. He may be physically chained, but spiritually and mentally he has achieved freedom in the deepest sense. In *Black Odyssey*, the historian Nathan Huggins seizes the same idea in order to cast the African American slave as a stoic whose sure apprehension of humanity under American tyranny provides the most viable alternative to the hegemonic force of progressive ideology, the dominant value in the master narrative of American history. According to Huggins, in order to preserve this grand narrative, American historians have depicted slavery and the subsequent events of the African American past as aberrations within a national story of expanding freedom, abundance, and democracy. Against this twice-told tale, he insists that American history began in tyranny, driven in part by the very progressive ideology that made the myth of American freedom and the reality of American slavery possible. Thus, he concludes that the decidedly unprogressive story of the dark and excluded, of human beings regarded as objects but with a keen sense of their human value, holds the key to a more inclusive, and more just, American national narrative. Looked at one way, Huggins's call for a new American metanarrative squares well with ideas of resistance. The very gesture of the slave claiming her humanity contains within it an undeniable "no" to the slave owner, however much it says "yes" to God, to faith, or even to suffering. The same holds for the conceptions of black dignity through suffering articulated by Du Bois, Hurston's Janie, Baldwin, and others. Yet none of these figures puts forth resistance as the fundamental value. In Black Odyssey, Huggins emphasizes the maintenance of African American community and family against the dangers represented by rebels who sought escape or violent revenge. Huggins put the 1960s and 1970s romance of resistance in his crosshairs, insisting that the lasting meaning of slavery required recognizing that the inconvenient ironies of everyday human interaction exist in a tragic context of oppression. We might join him in doubting whether a theme like resistance, which focuses more on the struggle against outside forces than on inner experiences, can give the best account of how both oppressed and oppressor exceed the frameworks that we use to explain them. Yet as we acknowledge Huggins's suspicions concerning the theme of resistance, we should also note that changes in the discourse on African Americans (and in American history in general) since the 1970s make some of his most important claims seem somewhat dated. However rooted in tragedy and irony, his ideas about African American dignity depend on notions of universal humanity that have long since fallen into disrepute, although it remains a puzzle how we might ground a concept like dignity without some idea of human commonality. Today, the standard perspective in the field emphasizes irreducible difference, incommensurability, and incongruity to such a degree that new grand narratives hardly seem possible, or even desirable. We think in parts, not wholes. Global contexts make Huggins's concern with American ideas of nationhood appear passé, even if our government's wasteful application of muscle-flexing, market-glorifying, neoliberal policies at home and abroad does legitimate his disdain for the ideology of progress. Huggins's tendency to describe slavery, and slaves, in overarching terms also runs against current sensibilities. And even if we could put aside the current preference for nonunitary accounts of slavery, slave stoicism might not strike us as the most usable inheritance. How many of us could embrace such an ideal, anyway? Looking back at slavery and at African American history in general from the current vantage point, we prefer to see our own situation more or less projected backward-where multiple identities, political power play, and social performance on fractured terrain form the order of the day. Yet, because of this, and despite all of the good reasons for rejecting major parts of his viewpoint, we might still pay attention to Huggins's call for a new story. For the skeptic, the utter dominance of the theme of resistance in the current discourse on black Americans should evoke some suspicion. Almost everyone knows the fundamental contours of the resistance theme in one way or another because it has dominated both the popular and the scholarly discourses about blacks since the 1960s. In its popular guise, resistance usually appears as a story of heroic opposition in the face of oppression as in the movies *The Jackie Robinson Story, The Tuskegee Airmen, Glory, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song*, or *Do the Right Thing* but it also serves as the underlying paradigmatic inspiration for a wide range of representations, from James Brown's "Say It Out Loud" to "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy, to modes of self-fashioning among today's "gangsta rappers." The resistance theme also frames popular political symbolism from Martin Luther King Day to the Million Man March, as it plays a central role in current scholarship about black Americans. One can barely turn a few pages of a journal in the field of African American Studies without encountering an article focusing on the way some text, character, author, or figure in history has in one way or another stood against or slipped the yoke of material or ideological oppression. Quite often in these articles, resistance serves more as a rhetorical deal-closer than as an analytical concept, more of an answer that ends or suspends the conversation than as a problem that opens it to new territory. Resistance is a constant theme of the historiography of slavery, of black literature and cultural theory, and of social scientific theories of black subjectivity and collective life. It practically defines Cultural Studies and Critical Race Studies, as well as the long Marxist tradition in the analysis of race relations going back to the 1910s. It also dominates the periodization of black American history. For example, we study the black migration and the Harlem Renaissance mainly for their resistance value. The Jim Crow period stands out as the opposite, as a time when black resistance and progress were beaten into submission. Yet prizewinning studies such as *Gender and Jim Crow* by Glenda Gilmore and *A Nation under Our Feet* by Steven Hahn reassure us that even here, in the darkest and most submissive period of postbellum black American history, resistance thrived. We may also owe the most commonly accepted name for our own period, the post-civil rights era, to the centrality of the resistance theme. If black American history is generally characterized as a progression from slavery to a culminating crescendo of resistance in the 1960s, it may not be a surprise that we have trouble imagining what comes after as anything but a "post." Under such conditions, it makes sense to wonder if the "post" will not go on indefinitely. Resistance has always played an important role in the African American imagination, but only in the past decades has it become an indispensable tool of race interpretation. No doubt, the very first slave pondered resistance, as did his or her many descendants. Still, under conditions where rebellion stood a small chance of success and involved great risk to life, limb, and family, sane African Americans necessarily focused on other aspects of life, aspects that we miss in giving resistance too much weight. Contemplating the ethical circumstances of Holocaust victims and others under extreme forms of oppression in *Facing the Extreme*, Tzvetan Todorov theorizes that the victims of overwhelming power most often turn to serving the immediate human needs of the others around them rather than rushing heroically into the cannons and bayonets of the enemy. Here an ethics of care, the sustaining value of collective life, comes to the forefront. Focusing on the basic needs of wives, husbands, children, grandparents, and friends, he says, many Holocaust victims went quietly to their graves without raising a fist to their oppressors, yet they met their demise having served themselves and others more powerfully than they could have as pugnacious underdogs "pressed to the wall, but fighting back" (to borrow a phrase from Claude McKay). I cite Todorov here not to put forth his perspective as the only truth about men and women under conditions of extreme oppression, but only to point up a theme that our current emphasis on resistance tends to preclude. Like most dominant paradigms or "master narratives," the resistance framework obscures as much as it clarifies. While it emphasizes important aspects of African American life, including bravery, sacrifice, and ideas of dignity based on these, it tends to subsume such other themes as pleasure, artistic invention, religious belief, and issues of interracial and intraracial solidarity into a narrow set of dualities concerning submission and defiance. Sometimes the focus on resistance inspires an all too pat and unified picture of black life. And, at its worst, the resistance framework promotes a melodramatic logic of perpetrators and victims, or of righteous freedom fighters and evil masters. While most recent, some might say "postmodern," approaches to African American resistance employ more sophisticated or ironic terms than these, almost all of them tend to follow a totalizing logic that sees resistance as the fundamental condition of black existence. Some studies of this type manage to find resistance of one sort or another in nearly every aspect of black American culture and social organization, but in such small and subtle quantities that they appear to make very little difference. Often, this comes dangerously close to finding resistance nowhere at all. Yet, despite all of my complaints about the resistance paradigm, I want not so much to argue against it as to explore the intellectual roots of our tremendous respect for it. Why, I wonder, have we come to connect race and resistance so insistently? What ideas do we find at the core of this concern? As an opening gambit in explaining how and why we connect race and resistance as we do, we must, to borrow loosely from William James, consider some of the more tender-minded and popular ways of dealing with questions of race, victimhood, and suffering, which stem from the sentimental and melodramatic tradition. Although Harriet Beecher Stowe by no means invented this form of racial imagination, in *Uncle Tom's Cabin* she crystallized it as a lasting mode of popular fiction, one that powerfully informed racial representation for more than one hundred years. Today, it serves as the most common underlying logic in novels, plays, movies, and the news for making sense of race and for granting stories of blacks and whites a kind of closure that they rarely possess in actual events. On one side of American race melodrama, we find the image of the "bad" or angry and vengeful black, a character often depicted in American fantasy as a bloodthirsty criminal or a rapist with an insatiable primal hunger for virginal white flesh. Traditionally, this figure has provided racists with a formula for transforming black degradation into a guilt-relieving tale of white victimization On the other side of race melodrama, we find the black victim/hero, whose noble and undeserved suffering evokes white compassion and respect. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom provides the most famous example of this type, but he reappears in a wide range of characters, both male and female, actual and fic-tional. Commonly, Americans gain a great deal of guilt relief through their compassion for such noble figures, but it is not necessary for the "Tom" character type to display nobility in order to inspire sympathy. He only has to suffer. The appeal of the "Tom" figure inheres in his confirmation of black skin as the very presence of suffering, thus making possible a masochistic identification with his unfortunate condition that reinforces racial compassion to the same degree that it fortifies racial separation. In other words, "Tom" suffers for the sins of his guilty audience, which feels its goodness by tearfully witnessing his grimaces and groans. His status as both insider and extreme outsider makes him a perfect catalyst for the production of sentiment in a rather seductive form. Although his audience might wish for his suffering to end, it still remains complicit with his punishment, even to the point of insistence. As Linda Williams shows in *Playing the Race Card*, the logic of race melodrama reaches its apex in a kind of compassionate violence, as in the motion picture *The Green Mile*, where a black Jesus figure-who miraculously heals almost everyone he encounters by absorbing their pain into his gigantic body-is executed by the very whites who love him the most. Watching these white men carry out his execution with tenderness and care, the audience could follow the hallowed rules of race melodrama by regarding deep love for a pure and virtuous black man as a proper remedy for the guilt of having to kill him unjustly in the name of the state. Nevertheless, one might still hope that at least some of the audience would recognize the great divide of justice and sympathy in this scene and vote with justice. Unfortunately, given the history of popular American thought on the race question, this seems unlikely. Still, despite its grand contribution to interracial dishonesty, it remains important to recognize the good that the sentimental and melodramatic imagination has wrought. Almost everyone knows of the role *Uncle Tom's Cabin* played in the popularization of antislavery sentiment. Also, over the years, melodrama has proven just as useful for blacks as it has for whites. The dramatization of undeserved black suffering at the hands of evil and ignorant whites or within the clutches of a biased and cruel "system" has provided one of the best weapons in the arsenal of the black freedom movement. This weapon, when skillfully wielded, has combined suffering and resistance, galvanizing blacks and whites into making justified claims against the system. It has also led at times to genuine sympathy between the races and to the passage of laws that have undeniably advanced American democracy. Among its indirect effects on the advancement of democracy, the sentimental and melodramatic racial imagination has stood behind the most common constructions of the black rebel, who turns the passivity of the "Tom" figure into heroic action and converts the dangerous primitivism of the "anti-Tom" into passionate, principled resistance. Rather than submit to the role of the abject sufferer, many blacks, from Frederick Douglass to the black power protesters of the 1960s, have preferred to imagine themselves along these lines. In this way, they have attempted to undo the terms of both the negrophilic "Tom" and the negrophobic "anti-Tom" tendencies of white American racial discourse. Yet the underlying melodramatic logic remains the same. Seeing the black rebel as a hero requires a certain sympathy with her victimized state, which ratifies her rebellion in proportion to the severity of her victimization. Sometimes this means viewing her as having been removed from a previous state of innocence, perhaps in Africa or in the South, to which she symbolically or literally returns in the act of resistance. At other times it means contemplating her alienation from family or from some other basic category of human belonging. Regardless of the particular source of undeserved suffering, the formula remains the same: as the inversion of Tom, the rebel never fully leaves him behind. He simply transmutes the cry of the sufferer into the shout of righteous protest. Developed along melodramatic and sentimental lines, the black rebel may stand out for his courage, his sense of justice, or his deft timing in taking direct action, but sincerity is his best calling card. Unlike his sometimes equally rebellious but unprincipled counterpart, the trickster figure, he signifies on the outside exactly what he feels in his heart. This quality touches us when the famous teardrop rolls down Frederick Douglass's cheek in the *Narrative* as he remembers the joyful slave songs that filled the air at the Great House Farm, but it chills when Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas, headed down a Green Mile of his own, utters with equal sincerity, "What I killed for, I am!" On the list of ethical values that modernity has granted special importance, sincerity may have the greatest range of applicationFrom the bedroom to the political podium, the honest soul who can show his true feelings makes himself a candidate for praise. "Show me that you really mean it." On the one hand, the lover with a ready response to this request may earn a delicious gift. The black slave, on the other hand, may only gain the reward of survival. For him, the game of sincerity had particularly high stakes because the black-white racial divide assumed a gap so great that the masters always had to wonder if something they could never know went on behind appearances. Of course, they preferred to believe that no distance obtained between the black signifier and signified and found comfort in whatever evidence seemed to support the wish. Bequeathed to later generations, this wish became one of the true stalwarts of the American racial imagination, even to the point of making possible certain acts of white sincerity. One only has to think here of Al Jolson's blackface routine in *The Jazz Singer*, where his character, Jakie Rabinowitz, communicates his love for his mother as he leaves the ghetto and the world of his dead father, the cantor at the Orchard Street synagogue. Now, as a real American, he can love his mother the way a Negro supposedly loves his mammy. One imagines that he could not have signified this kind of deep love through the native gestures of his new white identity-that he could be true to himself and others only by adopting the mask. Among its many effects, the desire for black sincerity produced in the slave, and in her segregated and otherwise racially circumscribed descendants, a peculiar fascination with the honest soul. We might even speculate that the popular idea of black soulfulness, as a matter of religion, food, and music, has something to do with the black need to claim ownership over this idea. One only has to think for a moment about such masters in the art of avowal as Harriet Jacobs, Smokey Robinson, and Louis Farrakhan to recognize some of the unique ways that African Americans have developed this mode. Given its elaborate presence in African American culture, it hardly surprises that sincerity would provide a strong resource for the black rebel figure both in art and in life. Rather than rooting performance in the fear of paranoid white oppressors, the rebel transforms the act of meaning what one says into a matter of courage and group solidarity-in other words, into something that can work for African Americans as a sign of defiance and freedom. Given the centrality of sincerity as a racial value for both blacks and whites, it stands to reason that the honest soul-whether as a loyal house servant, a country bumpkin, or an earnest advocate of racial solidarity-would become one of black laughter's favorite targets. The same forces that made black Americans focus with special intensity on the development of sincere modes of expression also inspired a fascination with characters that either could not or would not say anything they meant. Br'er Rabbit, the signifyin' Monkey, and other trickster figures of African American folklore provide a long tradition along these lines. The wonderful speeches in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, inspired in their own way by the trickster tradition, offer another. In these, humor arises in part out of the protagonist's inability to say anything that he means, mostly out of his desire to look like an honest soul. Caring only about his appearance to the crowd, he cannot begin to master himself. Still, he succeeds in moving his listeners, but only when he loses control, and on a basis that he cannot understand. Rather than disqualifying him from black leadership, this makes him the perfect candidate. Similarly, the speech by Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, a thinly veiled parody of W.E.B. Du Bois, in George Schuyler's *Black No More* highlights through humorous exaggeration just how self-defeating the act of racial sincerity can become. In his effort to rally a group of black leaders to prevent the sale of a formula that will end the race problem, and their race hustle, by turning black people white, he invokes his own special version of the "old-time religion": reminiscent of the high-toned rhetoric of such works as *Darkwater* and *The Souls of Black Folk*, he assures his listeners that their destiny lies in the stars. He invokes in quick succession "Ethiopia's fate," "the bitter tears of the Goddess of the Nile," "The Great Sphinx," "the lowering clouds over the Congo," and "lightning flashing o'er Togoland," and concludes with an Old Testament flourish: "To your tents, O Israel! The hour is at hand." In the face of such an appeal, even the duplicitous leaders of black America had to acknowledge the imperative of racial resistance, which in this case meant saving the Negro from his desire to escape the race problem by the most efficient technical means ever invented-a magic elixir Among its effects, this scene highlights through parody the self-deconstructing tendency of sincerity. The better or more consciously crafted the act is, the more it looks like an act. According to Lionel Trilling's *Sincerity and Authenticity*, the intimate relationship between sincerity and deception slowly contributed to the displacement of sincerity as a dominant social value in the West by the late nineteenth century, although, as the examples above indicate, it continued to hold a solid place on the list of modern virtues. Sincerity received its first recognition as a praiseworthy quality of the individual in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the European class structure of the Middle Ages started to erode and give way to an expanding social sphere. At this point, Trilling points out, men and women of all stations could cross paths and, if they dared, pretend to a higher social station than they actually occupied. Such fakers threatened social hierarchy in a number of ways, but most crucially by exposing everyone else as a faker. If aristocracy could be effectively imitated, or reduced to mere social performance, what of the claims it made to noble blood? Thus arose the comforting idea of the honest soul, who would presumably never dream of misrepresenting himself. The parallel between this kind of class mobility feared by aristocratic Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the type of racial passing that we know well in the United States does appear worth noting here, especially given the role of sincerity in both cases as an answer to ruling-class anxieties about the supposed danger of improper contact. Whether or not we regard the class-oriented anxieties of early modern Europeans as "racial" in some connection, it would seem remiss to ignore the role of race, the slave trade, and colonialism in expanding European wealth in the sixteenth