To ask “If God is for you, who can be against you?” is but half the question. The other half is rhetorical: “If God is for you, must you not be for yourselves?”
—Dr. C. Eric Lincoln, Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma
So far, one of the most challenging aspects of studying history at an HBCU has been wrestling with a dominant scholarly discourse that regards Blackness essentially as a function of the marketplace (in fact, I’m about to take an entire course on this very subject titled “Slavery and Capitalism”). In this framework, Blackness is literally an accident of the quest for market dominance, and a purely instrumental concept that only has meaning vis-à-vis its functional relationship to “whiteness.” From my perspective, embracing this view of Black identity obliges us to engage in a form of critique that not only treats all forms of personal identity as a function of power relations, but serves to effectively depersonalize Blackness itself. This leaves us in the position of trying to describe and reassert our humanity in terms of the very systems that were used to strip it away, an effort that is the essence of the term “self-defeating.”
As far as I can tell, the only way out of this self-imposed quandary is to begin to take seriously the idea that Black people are, in fact, a people, as much as Slavs, Polynesians, Greeks, or what have you. This in turn requires re-examining our notions of what constitutes “peoplehood” if you will. In the simplest terms, a “people” is an ancestral community with a shared lineage and heritage. But our contemporary notions of collective identity tend to dwell on convergent economic and political interest, as opposed to familial concepts like ancestry.
Indeed, a significant proportion of contemporary Black scholarship seems aimed at contesting and critiquing the sense of self, family, and community that derives from ancestral ties. Many of these critiques argue in one way or another that Blackness is an identity that is accidental, incidental, and/or externally imposed by oppressive regimes. To be sure, there are ways of construing the significance of ancestry that are irrational and destructive (e.g. racism). But that does not mean that ancestral identity is arbitrary or oppressive in itself, nor does it mean that it is disposable. In fact, I would argue that the absence of the physical, cultural, and moral structures attendant to the cultivation of a sense of an ancestral self leaves us with a deep sense of isolation, alienation, and anxiety. Absent our most immediate, intimate, and enduring sources of identity, we are left with the impossible task of constructing a sense of personhood in a physical, cultural, and moral void. We can try to fill that void with socio-political theories of self, but more often than not, the powerful and omnipresent forces of the consumer marketplace rush in to do the job. The process of identity formation is displaced by a process of commercial curation, and our sense of self is inexorably reduced to its commodified signifiers. Arguably, the worst impact of this state of affairs is experienced by Black children and youth.
Personally, I prefer to do work of a different sort, the kind that embraces the lineage and legacy of my people, without reducing them to mere socio-theoretical signifiers. More importantly, I prefer to embrace my own self–and the culture, family, community, and history that it is embedded in–as a whole self, rather than its negation. I prefer to be Black on purpose.
