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Health & Fitness

The Postmodern Demands of Black History

Black History Month is a critical reminder of our own capacity for self-deception.

"In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever…." –George Wallace

 

As a Gen X’er who came of age in the 1980s, as soon as I understood the meaning of slavery and apartheid, I was perplexed by the most difficult of questions. How could the segregationalists of the 1960s (and earlier) have been so terribly wrong about civil rights?

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The common answer proferred by white America is that "they were raised that way." Yet, to my tween-age mind, this raised an even more disturbing problem. If our childhood culture can influence our values to such a degree, how can we ever be sure of our own morals? I agonized over the question: If I had been born under Jim Crow, would I have known that segregation is evil? Would I have been evil myself?

And that’s how I discovered, sometime around the birth of MTV, that I’m a true blue postmodernist. (Hooray for Foucault!)

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As an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I took a particular interest in Black Studies. My favorite "Black" writer remains Jean Toomer—author of the acclaimed literary work Cane (1923) and the so-called father of the Harlem Renaissance. For anyone who presumes to understand what Black Studies is all about, please read Toomer. For, here is a man who defied and defies categorization.

As Toomer himself wrote in his collection of aphorisms, Essentials (1931):

     I am of no particular race. I am of the human race, a man at large
           in the human world, preparing a new race.
     I am of no specific region. I am of earth.
     I am of no specific class. I am of the human class, preparing a new class.
     I am neither male nor female nor in-between.
           I am of sex, with male differentiations.
     I am of no field. I am of the field of being.

Do you think you know what Black History Month is all about? Think again!

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