Introduction
Producing guilt may or may not be fine, but stimulating intelligent action is better. And intelligent action always needs to have its way paved by a practical estimate of the situation. The immediate objective of the polemics in The Omni-Americans is to expose the incompetence and consequent impracticality of people who are regarded as intellectuals but are guided by racial bias rather than reason based on scholarly insight. How is it that you white people who otherwise seem knowledgeable and competent are suddenly so obtuse about something that is as obvious as the fact that human nature is no less complex and fascinating for being encased in a black skin? Don’t you know that the direction of such stupidity is just the kind of general confusion that will destroy all of us? Don’t you know that prisoners sleep better than jailors? Get wise. As of know you are working against your own interest as much as that of your black compatriots! Furthermore, to the extent that your misdefinitions are picked up by Negroes, you are only aggravating the problem. This just simply is not the time for the politics of unexamined slogans.
Part One
The historian Constance Rourke (author of American Humor: A Study of the National Character and The Roots of American Culture), unlike many such historians, assumes quite accurately that there were time-coulisses in the pre-Columbian past that were relevant to the understanding of the American experience. Of the Boston Tea Party, for example, she wrote ‘it may well be a question whether the participants enjoyed more dumping the tea in the harbor masquerading in war paint and feathers and brandishing tomahawks. ’On the frontier,’ she goes on to say, ‘whites had adopted Indian dress and used Indian weapons, among other things, keeping the names of villages, for instance, even when the original inhabitants had been ruthlessly expelled.’
Nor did Constance Rourke overlook the Negro elements that have long been so deeply embedded in what she refers to as the ‘national character.’ ‘The Negro’, she writes in a reference to a visit by a European to the America of 1795, ‘was to be seen everywhere in the South and in the new Southwest, on small farms and great plantations, on roads and levees. He was often an all but equal member of many a pioneering expedition. He became, in short, a dominant figure in spite of his condition, and commanded a definite portraiture.’ What is more, Rourke’s acclaimed scholarly investigations of the origin and development of black face minstrels did not lead her to confuse elements of the national character with the folklore of white supremacy. Quite the contrary, her image of The American is a composite that is part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro. In tracing this composite, she was not unaware of the profound implications of homo Americanus as a vernacular adaptation, modification, and extension of homo Europaeus, whom Paul Valery once described as a combination of ancient Greek, ancient Roman, and Judeo-Christian.
The three interwoven figures in the native fabric loomed large, Constance Rourke explains, ‘not because they represented any considerable numbers in the population but because something in the nature of each induced and irresistible response. Each had been a wanderer over the lands, the Negro a forced and unwilling and wanderer. Each in a fashion of his own had broken bonds, the Yankee in the initial revolt against the parent civilization, the Negro in a revolt which was cryptic and submerged but which nonetheless made a perceptible outline.’ Such figures, she goes on, were the embodiment of a deep-seated ‘mood of disseverance, carrying the popular fancy further and further from any fixed or traditional heritage. Their comedy, their irreverent wisdom, their sudden changes and adroit adaptations provided emblems for a pioneer people who requires resilience as a prime trait.’ (Italics added.) . . .
It is all too true that Negroes unlike Yankees and the backwoodsmen were slaves whose legal status was that of property. But it is also true – and as things turned out- even more significant- that they were slaves who were living in the presence of more human freedom and individual opportunity than they or anybody else had ever seen before. That the conception of being a free man in America was infinitely richer than any notion of individuality in Africa of that period goes without saying.
That this conception was perceived by the black slaves is shown by their history as Americans. The fugitive slave, for instanced, was culturally speaking certainly an American and a magnificent one at that. His basic urge to escape was, of course, only human – as was his willingness to risk the odds; but the tactics he employed as well as the objectives he was seeking were American not African. In his objectives, he certainly does not seem to have been motivated any any over-whelming nostalgia for tribal life. The slaves who absconded to fight for the British during the Revolutionary War were no less inspired by American ideas than those who fought for the colonies: the liberation that the white people wanted from the British the black people wanted from white people. As for the tactics of the fugitive slaves, the underground Railroad was not only an innovation, it was also an extension of the American quest for democracy brought to its highest level of epic heroism. Nobody tried to sabotage the Mayflower. There was no bounty on the heads of its captain, crew, or voyagers as was the case with all conductors, station masters, and passengers on the northbound freedom train. Given the differences in circumstances, equipment, and, above all motives, the legendary exploits of white U.S. backwoodsmen, keel-boatmen, and prairie schooner-men, for example, became relatively safe when one sets them beside the breath taking escapes of the fugitive slave beating his way south to Florida, west to the Indians, and north to far away Canada through swamp and town alike seeking freedom – nobody was chasing Daniel Boone! . . .
Even the black militants own insight into the pragmatic implications of the heritage of black people in America is often only one-dimensional. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if they are more impressed by the white propaganda designed to deny them their very existence than by the black actuality that not only motivates but also sustains them. In any case, they speak of their own native land as being the White Man’s country, they concede too much to the self-inflating estimates of others. They capitulate to the con game which their ancestors never fell for, and they surrender their birthright to the propagandists of white supremacy, as if one could exercise the right of redress without claiming one’s constitutional identity as citizen!
American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and the so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other. And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society. . .
The Moynihan Report, which insists that Negro men are victims of a matriarchal family structure, makes no mention at all of the incontestable fact that aggressiveness of white American women is such that they are regarded as veritable amazons not only in the Orient but also by many Europeans and not a few people at home. But then the Moynihan Report also implies without so much as a blush that all of the repressions, frustrations, and neurosis of the white Organization Man add up to an enviable patriarchal father image rather than the frightened insomniac, boot-licking conformist, ‘The Square’ which even those who are too illiterate to read the “Maggie and Jigs’ and ‘Dagwood’ comic strips can see in the movies and on television. Shades of father Jack Lemmon and Tony Randall.
Similarly those white Americans who express such urgent concern when reading test scores of Harlem school children do not conform to white-established norms seem to forget that some Negroes know very well that all the banality and bad taste on television and the best seller lists comes from and is produced for those same norm-calibrated whites. But Sancho Panza was far from being the last man of the people who had to go along with the pedantic foolishness of cliché-nourished bookworms. Nobody in his right mind would ever seriously recommend illiteracy as a protection against brainwashing, to be sure; but still and all it may have been his illiterate immunity from the jargon of the fashion magazines that enabled the little boy in Grimms’ fairy tale to see that the emperor’s fancy new clothes were nothing more than his birthday suit.
There may or may not be something to be said for being an enthusiastic black sheep in a school system that emphasizes conformity to the point of producing a nation of jargon-and -cliché-orientated white sheep. Nevertheless, one factor that is always either overlooked or obscured in all interpretations of the low academic performance of Negro pupils is the possibility of their resistance to the self-same white norms that they are being rated by. What some white teachers refer to as being the apathy of Negro pupils, competent black teachers are likely to describe as lack of interest and motivation. Black teachers know very well that when there is a genuine Negro interest there is seldom any complaint about Negro ability. And yet most social science technicians persistently interpret low Negro test scores not in terms of lack of incentive but in terms of a historic and comprehensive cultural deprivation. . . .
Producing guilt may or may not be fine, but stimulating intelligent action is better. And intelligent action always needs to have its way paved by a practical estimate of the situation. The immediate objective of the polemics in The Omni-Americans is to expose the incompetence and consequent impracticality of people who are regarded as intellectuals but are guided by racial bias rather than reason based on scholarly insight. How is it that you white people who otherwise seem knowledgeable and competent are suddenly so obtuse about something that is as obvious as the fact that human nature is no less complex and fascinating for being encased in a black skin? Don’t you know that the direction of such stupidity is just the kind of general confusion that will destroy all of us? Don’t you know that prisoners sleep better than jailors? Get wise. As of know you are working against your own interest as much as that of your black compatriots! Furthermore, to the extent that your misdefinitions are picked up by Negroes, you are only aggravating the problem. This just simply is not the time for the politics of unexamined slogans.
Part One
The historian Constance Rourke (author of American Humor: A Study of the National Character and The Roots of American Culture), unlike many such historians, assumes quite accurately that there were time-coulisses in the pre-Columbian past that were relevant to the understanding of the American experience. Of the Boston Tea Party, for example, she wrote ‘it may well be a question whether the participants enjoyed more dumping the tea in the harbor masquerading in war paint and feathers and brandishing tomahawks. ’On the frontier,’ she goes on to say, ‘whites had adopted Indian dress and used Indian weapons, among other things, keeping the names of villages, for instance, even when the original inhabitants had been ruthlessly expelled.’
Nor did Constance Rourke overlook the Negro elements that have long been so deeply embedded in what she refers to as the ‘national character.’ ‘The Negro’, she writes in a reference to a visit by a European to the America of 1795, ‘was to be seen everywhere in the South and in the new Southwest, on small farms and great plantations, on roads and levees. He was often an all but equal member of many a pioneering expedition. He became, in short, a dominant figure in spite of his condition, and commanded a definite portraiture.’ What is more, Rourke’s acclaimed scholarly investigations of the origin and development of black face minstrels did not lead her to confuse elements of the national character with the folklore of white supremacy. Quite the contrary, her image of The American is a composite that is part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro. In tracing this composite, she was not unaware of the profound implications of homo Americanus as a vernacular adaptation, modification, and extension of homo Europaeus, whom Paul Valery once described as a combination of ancient Greek, ancient Roman, and Judeo-Christian.
The three interwoven figures in the native fabric loomed large, Constance Rourke explains, ‘not because they represented any considerable numbers in the population but because something in the nature of each induced and irresistible response. Each had been a wanderer over the lands, the Negro a forced and unwilling and wanderer. Each in a fashion of his own had broken bonds, the Yankee in the initial revolt against the parent civilization, the Negro in a revolt which was cryptic and submerged but which nonetheless made a perceptible outline.’ Such figures, she goes on, were the embodiment of a deep-seated ‘mood of disseverance, carrying the popular fancy further and further from any fixed or traditional heritage. Their comedy, their irreverent wisdom, their sudden changes and adroit adaptations provided emblems for a pioneer people who requires resilience as a prime trait.’ (Italics added.) . . .
It is all too true that Negroes unlike Yankees and the backwoodsmen were slaves whose legal status was that of property. But it is also true – and as things turned out- even more significant- that they were slaves who were living in the presence of more human freedom and individual opportunity than they or anybody else had ever seen before. That the conception of being a free man in America was infinitely richer than any notion of individuality in Africa of that period goes without saying.
That this conception was perceived by the black slaves is shown by their history as Americans. The fugitive slave, for instanced, was culturally speaking certainly an American and a magnificent one at that. His basic urge to escape was, of course, only human – as was his willingness to risk the odds; but the tactics he employed as well as the objectives he was seeking were American not African. In his objectives, he certainly does not seem to have been motivated any any over-whelming nostalgia for tribal life. The slaves who absconded to fight for the British during the Revolutionary War were no less inspired by American ideas than those who fought for the colonies: the liberation that the white people wanted from the British the black people wanted from white people. As for the tactics of the fugitive slaves, the underground Railroad was not only an innovation, it was also an extension of the American quest for democracy brought to its highest level of epic heroism. Nobody tried to sabotage the Mayflower. There was no bounty on the heads of its captain, crew, or voyagers as was the case with all conductors, station masters, and passengers on the northbound freedom train. Given the differences in circumstances, equipment, and, above all motives, the legendary exploits of white U.S. backwoodsmen, keel-boatmen, and prairie schooner-men, for example, became relatively safe when one sets them beside the breath taking escapes of the fugitive slave beating his way south to Florida, west to the Indians, and north to far away Canada through swamp and town alike seeking freedom – nobody was chasing Daniel Boone! . . .
Even the black militants own insight into the pragmatic implications of the heritage of black people in America is often only one-dimensional. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if they are more impressed by the white propaganda designed to deny them their very existence than by the black actuality that not only motivates but also sustains them. In any case, they speak of their own native land as being the White Man’s country, they concede too much to the self-inflating estimates of others. They capitulate to the con game which their ancestors never fell for, and they surrender their birthright to the propagandists of white supremacy, as if one could exercise the right of redress without claiming one’s constitutional identity as citizen!
American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and the so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other. And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society. . .
The Moynihan Report, which insists that Negro men are victims of a matriarchal family structure, makes no mention at all of the incontestable fact that aggressiveness of white American women is such that they are regarded as veritable amazons not only in the Orient but also by many Europeans and not a few people at home. But then the Moynihan Report also implies without so much as a blush that all of the repressions, frustrations, and neurosis of the white Organization Man add up to an enviable patriarchal father image rather than the frightened insomniac, boot-licking conformist, ‘The Square’ which even those who are too illiterate to read the “Maggie and Jigs’ and ‘Dagwood’ comic strips can see in the movies and on television. Shades of father Jack Lemmon and Tony Randall.
Similarly those white Americans who express such urgent concern when reading test scores of Harlem school children do not conform to white-established norms seem to forget that some Negroes know very well that all the banality and bad taste on television and the best seller lists comes from and is produced for those same norm-calibrated whites. But Sancho Panza was far from being the last man of the people who had to go along with the pedantic foolishness of cliché-nourished bookworms. Nobody in his right mind would ever seriously recommend illiteracy as a protection against brainwashing, to be sure; but still and all it may have been his illiterate immunity from the jargon of the fashion magazines that enabled the little boy in Grimms’ fairy tale to see that the emperor’s fancy new clothes were nothing more than his birthday suit.
There may or may not be something to be said for being an enthusiastic black sheep in a school system that emphasizes conformity to the point of producing a nation of jargon-and -cliché-orientated white sheep. Nevertheless, one factor that is always either overlooked or obscured in all interpretations of the low academic performance of Negro pupils is the possibility of their resistance to the self-same white norms that they are being rated by. What some white teachers refer to as being the apathy of Negro pupils, competent black teachers are likely to describe as lack of interest and motivation. Black teachers know very well that when there is a genuine Negro interest there is seldom any complaint about Negro ability. And yet most social science technicians persistently interpret low Negro test scores not in terms of lack of incentive but in terms of a historic and comprehensive cultural deprivation. . . .
Most Americans have been conditioned by a school
system and communications media that have over-promoted the methodologies and
the categories of social science at the expense of the more comprehensive wisdom
of the humanities and the arts – leaving their sense of context deficient. In
any case, they appear have to become also fascinated by pretentious terminology
and easy oversimplifications that they no longer remember what experience is
really like. If so, perhaps it is only natural that they no longer realize how
complicated human life is, even at its least troubled and freest. Which, of
course, means that they are not likely to realize how rich and exciting its possibilities
are either. And yet such people, who confuse metaphorical ghettos with real
ones, are often regarded as expert planners and programmers! They are not. They
are polemicists, and often more useful to the other side than to their own . .
.
More fundamental and no less obvious is another fact which the racism that underlies most discussions about American identity almost always obscures: In spite of the seemingly hypnotic spell that updated versions of the Huck Finn or Norman Rockwell plug-ugly and the shirt collar as Anglo-Saxon and Gibson girl images exercise over so many self-effacing, assimilation-bent European immigrants, there is no standard melting pot mold for the American Image. The only official image is the eagle. There has never been a standard image, and currently, for all the emphasis on norms, nothing seems to change more than the points of conformity.
As stated before, race is hardly as useful index to human motives as is culture and As for behavior or life style, no other people in the land have as yet evolved a characteristic idiom that reflects a more open, robust, and affirmative disposition towards diversity and change. Nor is any other idiom more smoothly geared to open-minded improvisation. Moreover, never has improvisation been more conditioned by esthetic values – or at the same time been more indicative of the fundamental openness that is the necessary predisposition for all scientific exploration! Improvisation after all is experimentation.
When such improvisation as typified Negro music, dance, language, religion, sports, fashions, general bearing and deportment, and even food preparation is considered from the Negro point of view, there is seldom, if ever, any serious doubt about how Negroes feel about themselves or about what they accept or reject of white people. They regard themselves not as substandard, abnormal non-white people of American social science surveys and news media, but rather as if they were, so to speak, fundamental extensions of contemporary possibilities
The whole world defers to the supremacy of American political and economic power mechanisms. Negro attitudes toward the so-called white cultural establishment, however, are entirely consistent with the pragmatic improvisational irreverence that most Negros display towards so many other established patterns and values. As a result, many things that most other Americans seem to accept as models for reverence and emulation, Negroes, not unlike jam-session-orientated musicians, use mainly as points of departure. Even when Negroes sets out to make literal imitations of white people, they often seem to find it impossible not to add their own dimension.
The creation of an art style is, as most anthropologists would no doubt agree, a major cultural achievement. In fact, it is perhaps the highest as well as the most comprehensive fulfillment of culture; for an art style, after all, reflects nothing so much as the ultimate synthesis and refinement of a life style.
Art is by definition a process of stylization; and what it stylizes is experience. What it objectifies, embodies, abstracts, expresses, and symbolizes is a sense of life, Accordingly, what is represented in the music, dance, painting, sculpture, literature, and architecture of a given group of people in a particular time, place, and circumstance is a conception of the essential nature and purpose of human existence itself. More specifically, an art style is the assimilation in terms of which a given community, folk or communion of faith embodies its basic attitude towards experience.
That is not all. Of its very nature, an art style is also the essence of experience itself, in both the historical and sensory implications of the word. It is an attitude, description, and interpretation in action – or rather, perhaps most often, in reaction. For needless to say, action is seldom gratuitous or unmotivated. Not only does it take place in a situation, it also takes place in response to a situation.
Kenneth Burke as equated stylization with strategy. To extend the military metaphor, one can say stylization is the estimate become maneuver. In such a frame of reference, style is not only insight but disposition and gesture, not only do calculation and estimation become execution (as in engineering), but also motive and estimation become method and occupation. It is away of sizing up the world, and so, ultimately, and beyond all else, a mode and medium of survival.
In the current social science usage, the concept of ‘survival technique’ has somehow become confused with technology and restricted to matters of food, clothing, and shelter. Human survival, however, involves much more than biological prolongation. The human organism must be nourished and secured against destruction, to be sure, but what makes man human is style. Hence the crucial significance of art in the study of human behavior. All human effort beyond the lowest level of struggle for animal subsistence is motivated by the need to live in style.
Certainly the struggle for political and social liberty is nothing if not the quest for freedom to choose one’s own way or style of life. Moreover, it should be equally as obvious that there can be no such thing as human dignity and nobility without a consummate, definitive style, pattern, or archetypal image. Economic interpretations of history notwithstanding, what activates revolutions is not destitution (which most often leads only to petty thievery and the like) but intolerable systems and methods- intolerable styles of life.
Most Americans know very well that the blues genre which in its most elaborate extensions includes elements of the spirituals, gospel music, folk song, chants, hollers, popular ditties plus much of what goes into symphonic and even operatic composition, is the basic and definitive musical idiom of native-born U.S. Negroes. But few if any students of America seem either to understand or even to have a serious curiosity about the relationship of art style to Negro life style. None seem to consider the blues idiom as a major cultural achievement. Not even those writers who have referred to it as being perhaps the only truly American innovation in contemporary artistic expression seem able to concede it any more significance than of some vague minor potential not unlike that of some exotic spice . . .
the blues idiom sustains an un-excelled sense of human worth and possibility, what every other non-totalitarian culture seeks and elaborates: elastic individuality, esthetic receptivity and unique blends of warmth, sensitivity, nonsense, vitality and elegance.
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