Have you noticed much attention to a possible correlation between the corporatization of health care in this country and diminishing confidence in the delivery of medical services that we are seeing today? Me either.  Yet, the occurrence of one in parallel to the other should not be dismissed.  From my own experience, I have seen one health services corporation in my area literally swallow every other service in the sector.. no doubt under the guise of ‘increasing efficiencies.’ When I go to the pharmacy, the number of bags waiting for customers is astounding and unsettling. Are we all that ill? I wonder.  I have seen prescription bags multiply – as if self-replicating –  since that medical corporation has settled in.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m enormously thankful for the sophistication and accessibility of our medical systems.  I am thankful to be in a country where such services are available, especially if one has health insurance. However, one can’t help but notice that the more you have health insurance, the more tests are suggested, the more medications are recommended, the higher number of surgeries that are possible and often pushed.

Part of the answer to the public refusal of vaccines and suspicion of government in general can, unfortunately, be laid at the feet of the great marriage between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry. I don’t much blame the doctors, though.  They were ambushed some thirty years ago and put into vassalage by the increasingly powerful and ubiquitous Big Pharma. I don’t totally blame Big Pharma, either. It is wonderful what well-financed medical and other scientific research can bring to society, and I wouldn’t want to see that end.

BUT.  When people see themselves aggressively targeted for medical services, some of which they haven’t even dreamed of, believe me that at some level, conscious or unconscious, they know it is not all about an altruistic concern for their health. The bonding of medical services with private, corporate approaches to service is disastrous in ways that many have not noticed. The medical professions loses CREDIBILITY when their work is more tied to a profit motive than to a healing and service approach.  Hard for the public to believe that it is all for their own good! It is starting to feel vaguely predatory. No wonder people are suspicious of vaccines.

Pushing medications, services and sign-ups to un-necessary networks, newsletters, and announcements leads the public to see themselves as the ‘mark’ they are in this process. So I’m suggesting here that the work ahead of us is more than even simply changing the payment system and organization of our health insurance. I also urge us all to reflect, really, on what services are or are not really necessary. This year I had two tests ordered for me without my knowledge that I didn’t need and didn’t ask for. I caught this in time, but I get it. Everybody wants to make their dollar out of the deal. Why is it that we have so much medicine circulating around and as a nation are so much sicker than most other industrialized northern nations?

We need lifestyle changes, and we need to figure out how not to be marks in a predatory health care delivery system, or change it. What do you think?

It is a sad truth that in the imaginary of some white people in the United States there is a vivid conjectured  stereotype of ‘the angry black woman.’  There is first the fact that some whites, and indeed most Americans, know that there are many things that might indeed make black women angry, and with reason. That is a healthy and rational interpretation of events. In this essay that is not the circumstance that I am talking about. Those are not the people I am talking about.

Here, I am talking about situations where a white person, often unconsciously, creates a situation that engenders conflict and presents unnecessary discomfort or hardship to a black woman, and then continues to push the situation forward. When the ploy does not produce the (unconsciously desired) angry and explosive outcome that could have happened, irrational responses from the perpetrator follow. These responses, instead of de-escalating the situation, typically proceed to amplify antagonisms.  But that’s not all.

The really fascinating thing about these scenarios is that they are most often not about big issues. They are about small, mundane issues. They are about trivia, things and tasks that should normally proceed easily without particular notice or perturbation. These actions might be productively described as ‘passive-aggressive.’ Some internal machinery seems to make it attractive to the white person in question to draw out and prolong, and to amplify, a very small and negligible circumstance.

It seems to me that these are ‘triggered’ responses, deeply buried in the psyche, that make up part of the repertoire of race conflict, or if you like, race war in the United States.  Unconscious aggressions that operate to frustrate the target, engender strong reactions, and push the target to ‘act out’ are efficient acts in the making of the ‘angry black woman.’ The results of such actions are twofold: conflict and opposition around ‘small stuff’ can wear a person down; they are signals that say ‘it is worth it to me to oppose you on even the smallest grounds’ and second, they have the potential to create the ‘angry black woman’ that the white person in question perhaps already sees when he/she looks at her – she will be pushed to conform to the unconscious stereotype that the perpetrator carries around in her/his head. I have heard of many such situations from friends of color (“non-whites”).

Here’s the thing: it is BORING. It is so boring, and a little tragic.

The white person who is unaware of their unconscious desires and needs to thwart and discourage nearby black persons in the course of everyday life by throwing small barriers and other negative ephemera at them is a rather tragic figure. The need to do such a thing is tragic. The lack of self-awareness is particularly tragic. And especially, the unnamed programming that produces such behaviors is very tragic. These acts cannot and should not be elevated to significant white racist behavior. They can be classified, perhaps, as ‘habits of racism,’ buried deep in the psyche. These acts recall the behavior of a child who thinks that his/her naughty behavior or bad thoughts cannot be discerned. They are like a small, mean bacteria that such a white person is unknowingly host to. But to persons of color, or people not from the U.S., these behaviors are often painfully obvious.

For a black woman who has had the good fortune of distance from the petite race games that proliferate in this country, these games are only tiresome. Often, one sees the expectation of such a white person for the black person to join into this old American tradition. But really, nobody wants to be bothered with this kind of small, but insidious, intrusion on their mental well-being. These utterances and acts are part of a very strange game that whites and blacks play in the United States; I say this as an American. To respond strongly is to join the game, and to uphold an undignified struggle that is child-like and pathetic for adults.

The work needed to resolve this engagement with illusion and fantasy is not for the layperson. This work needs to be done by trained psychiatrists and psychologists.

For the rest of us, those who have been able to get ‘out of the box’ and observe from a distance, it is just boring. Boring and sad. And that’s all I have to say about that.

I love the United States, but it keeps wounding me.

It wounds Iike an unhealthy relationship with a neighbor who has the upper hand; like a mean father, like a cruel mother, or a wily adversary. Like a crafty jealous sister, or a cruel, sadistic uncle. The United States continues to inflict these wounds.

Every time another young black person is killed in nefarious police circumstances, I feel a wound. My psyche bleeds anew every time.  Just when I think it can’t, it bleeds again. Inter-group violence is something I understand – it is human. Young black people fight terrible battles over territory, over drug markets, over insults. I don’t like it, I feel bad about it, I am heartbroken, but I do not feel wounded. The classification of these young people by certain powers as superfluous, though, is painful.

What wounds is the random act. What wounds is the sterility of the action.

In 2016 Achille Mbembe said one of our difficulties in this era is knowing the difference, in this moment, “between absolute murder and absolute justice.”

 (at Duke University in April, 2016).

Think about that.

Teju Cole wrote an article about the black panther. He talked about the fatigue of being seen, perceived, understood as being from ‘Africa.’  He spoke (with regret? disgust?) of how public discourse does not recognize black specificity, does not engage realities of African countries, of African nationalities. He also talked about being in the U.S. and his evolving or evolved relationship to the concept of blackness.

On the Blackness of the Panther. ‘In my wildest dreams, there …

https://level.medium.com

There is a blackness all African descendants feel, in the face of unmoved whiteness.

What I really wanted to talk about is black precarity. The precarity of black lives at this moment in time. In the United States, Britain, or France, the supposed black culpability. In the United States, the disposability of young black lives. I live in the United States where there are statistic probabilities that I, or someone in my family, someone I love, can be killed ‘by mistake.’

I know this existed way before, but I sense it has gone to another level.

In Africa, the statistics are not good there either. There is a lack of hospitals, of medicines, of ambulances, traffic lights, and of doctors. Your body can randomly get wounded. I often want to live there anyway. In the places I know and love in West Africa, there is a kind of dignity of daily life. I like that.  There are many problems (class, caste, etc), but there is less targeting, less random wounding of the spirit.

These conditions of violence and chance are perhaps the detritus and the product of the colonial fantasy.

Random death by car accident or random death by police accident? Or random death by some other black person who is even more frustrated than you (another black person) are. This is the precarity of global black life.

“To do something and to understand the historical origins of that something, or its larger context, are not the same.”

The black people who arrived to the Anglo-American, Spanish and French colonies from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth are generally referred to as the ‘Old African Diaspora’ in the scholarly literature. In its formative period, the United States had Africans, and thousands of them. It is something that truly, if we are honest, is hard to capture – this idea that the blacks who were here in the antebellum period were in a state of ongoing transformation, moving between the poles of ‘salt water negro’ (new arrivals from the Atlantic crossing) and ‘creole,’ – African and American.  Not African Americans. This was not a three-week, or even a decade-long transition, though it is still not  well understood by the general public that all the Africans did not come at once. Not one group arrived 400 years ago, but many groups, continuously arriving, for two centuries at least. Some Africans were here earlier than others, some arrived later, most arriving between 1760 and 1810.  That is a bit more recent than ‘400 years ago.’ Although this information is accepted as historical fact in some circles in the United States, it is still hard for people to grasp the cultural ramifications of this drawn out process of intermittent injections of diverse African cultures into American society and the United States landscape.

As a society (by this I mean all Americans, particularly those of three and more generations in the United States) we have blocked out much of the social history of the nineteenth century.  We discuss diversity as though the brown people, the Asians, and the blacks only recently came into view. We have conveniently forgotten that many Chinese families have been here for almost two centuries, that Spanish speakers and Native Americans were always with us, and that the very foundational cultural life of the United States is intricately tied to the presence of African slaves and their descendants.   We also pretend that those non-white groups remained among themselves, or that they had no cultural impact on the larger society, in spite of the intimacy implied by the kind of work that was relegated to their communities.  Many cultural practices that have their origins in the intersection of these different cultural enclaves have become so embedded in American culture that they are no longer recognized as anything but “American.” Further, the racialist agendas of the nineteenth century would not allow any recognition of cultural activities or preferences that came from, or were influenced by, “the blacks,” except perhaps in minstrel and eventually vaudeville shows. Even among black Americans, it is only with difficulty that people can look at their families or themselves and think that this action, or that preference, is here because of African antecedents.  Such was the strength of the social sanctions against Africa and Africans in America’s nineteenth century.  The inability or discomfort to name practices according to where they came from has to do with how we were subjected to cultural pressures from Europeans. It is evidence of an ongoing performance of colonial power, as has so eloquently been discussed by the BLM author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor .

For black Americans, over the 19^th century, there were increasingly rare occasions to remark that a way of walking, a way of telling a story, or even beliefs in ‘haints,’[i] — anything not reducible to material evidence (like hair)  –were inherited from an African ancestor.  Henry Louis Gates’ recent PBS documentary on the black church chronicles this beautifully. It is only through music, whose beginnings were in the sacred, the celebratory and the spiritual, that we are in agreement that ‘something’ came from Africa. The drums, we agree, came from Africa.  The use of the fiddle, violin, and the voice in African registers and melodies are less well known as having a strong West African genealogy. Yet, as all anthropologists know, to do something and to understand the historical origins of that something, or its larger context, are not the same. African Americans and other Americans may indeed have cultural proclivities that have their origins in African practices, but they do not understand or often care about where such practices come from. This does not change the historical itinerary of cultural practice, though, but rather only our current understanding of what we do.

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[i] Spirits, from “haunt”

In 2011, African American journalist (Washington Post, MSNBC) Eugene Robinson published a book called Disintegration, in which he talked about important changes in the black community of the late 20^th and early 21^st century, and how these changes are related to class and ethnicity.  He saw the disintegration of the black community as he had known it most of his life. Robinson identifies four categories of people in today’s African American population, which he names as ‘the mainstream,’ the ‘abandoned,’ the ‘transcendent’ and the ‘emerging.’  In today’s United States the mainstream represents about forty percent of the African American community; this group includes both the old and the new middle-class of the black community.  The transcendent are those who have risen beyond middle or even upper-middle class status, they are movie stars, sports stars, famous judges and people in the corporate world. The abandoned are the roughly forty-two percent of blacks, from America’s ‘old diaspora,’ who continue to live in poverty, in violent neighborhoods, where there is little household stability. They are numerically the most represented among incarcerated blacks, and the least educated as well, as a group. Finally, there is the group of the ‘emergents.’  Robinson sees this group as composed mostly of African and Caribbean immigrants and their descendants as well as children of ‘bi-racial’ couples. They are emerging, in Robinson’s view, as an outward-looking, optimistic group who share African American identity but also maintain other ideas of who they are that are different from the others.

I mostly agree with Robinson’s typology. I want to talk about that third category, which I think has also got several sub-categories.  This third category describes, among other things, the poor or almost poor blacks living together in almost exclusively black urban neighborhoods.  Some of the people in these socio-economic circumstances have almost climbed the ladder to category one, only to slide back down due to a few too many social or health issues that cost the family too dearly.  Contrary to what many think of, these households might include one or two family members who have made it to college, and actually completed an undergraduate degree. These are also families who have college-educated members who didn’t finish due to economic as well as social problems. Yet, this group provides significant leadership for the black community through church work, service organizations, and social networking. Unfortunately, it also provides considerable fodder for police aggression and the gangs of the black ghetto, to the AIDS wards, for the liquor industry, and mass incarceration.  Often they don’t choose or care to imitate white behaviors for the sake of networking for jobs and ‘getting ahead.’ Unlike immigrants, they tend to think that since they are American then their way of speaking English or otherwise expressing themselves in song, dance, or social exchange should be acceptable, while immigrants do their utmost to speak America’s standard English. This has important consequences for the public school experiences of children from the two groups.

“There is this American folk belief of [and dependence on] the black position as producer of newness and difference”

As I said, this ‘abandoned’ group provides an unfortunate number of the young black men in prison, as well as young black teen-age mothers, many of whom are also in prison.  The majority of people in this category live in some version of an extended family, and this social and economic environment is often at odds with them ‘getting ahead.’

The contrast of the nuclear family success to the extended family’s fragilities tends to support the idea that culture can be part of the reason for not getting out of poverty. If communities don’t follow the atomized, Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal of the nuclear family and the self-promoting individual, they are at greater risk for health disparities and social sanction, like imprisonment or breaking probation rules. For example, one of the main probation rules is to not socialize with any felons or formerly arrested and charged individuals. What then, are people supposed to do if this describes half of their family? Is there really any way to follow the rules of probation when you live at home with your family, can’t get an apartment due to a criminal record, and don’t have the money anyway to move elsewhere?

The great irony is that this mass of folk were once considered (before integration) as the conservative, exotic Negro community; the original, the real Negro, the nice Negro, the religious Negro, the interesting Negro of anglophone North America.  These are the folks who brought us jazz, blues and hip-hop.  These are the people who developed rhythm and blues styles, who popularized barbecue, chicken wings, and fried fish with hot sauce. They have functioned as a sort of Adelphi Oracle of American popular culture; a sort of magic, interminable cultural well that constantly waters the North American cultural landscape.  One wonders to what extent that can continue – where is it all coming from?  How long can it last?  When will this seeming endless capacity to re-invent, to re-create, to improvise, be exhausted?  Should we be worried about that? Protect it? Even the African genius (maybe what Mbembe calls the ‘heretical genius’?) (2016) can be wasted, used up, badly exploited.

There’s a danger here to the whole of American culture. It is the impossible standard that has been raised: this unspoken sense that this creativity is magic, it came from Africa, it can’t be used up in spite of poverty and moral corruption. This is the American folk belief of the black position as producer of newness and difference, hence in the face of racism the black cultural obligation to be different, to keep improvising, to keep nourishing a society with an insatiable appetite for the new, the different, the sensational.  This includes ideas of incredible sportsmanship, the untouchable musician, the unbelievable dancers. There is not a rational idea of where to stop, when enough is enough, of where Africanisms/Negro-isms simply should not be put out on the market, just for popular entertainment, at the risk of destroying the source of cultural production. What an expensive way to defray the aggressions one endures for being poor and uneducated. This price is more than blood. Blacks are allowed to experience calamity after calamity in order to continue to sell the blues.

As I have stated elsewhere, “the political and socio-cultural challenges that are perennial to the African American community of the United States require us to seek new ways to explain the current isolation (social and political) of poor African American communities, and the seeming fragile nature of citizenship that continues to endure for African Americans generally… not the legal nature of citizenship, although that too is brought into question by recent actions regarding voting rights, but rather the lived cultural experience of citizenship as it is idealized in a northern, post-industrial democracy.”[i]  In looking at current discourse of African immigrants and black Americans about each other, and public and private conversations about black Americans in West Africa, I see as an ongoing discussion that has been in play for more than a century. I wonder how questions of honor, dignity, shame, and aspiration are engaged or not engaged, and I think these issues have not outlived their usefulness as themes to which we must pay attention. These questions are of primordial importance to the survival of the African American community today.             If one lives long enough one sees social and political changes never anticipated earlier in life. The events of January 6, 2021 are a case in point. This is personal maturity and also a national experience: the realization that things do “pass away” and what you assumed as a permanent part of the social landscape can be lost, swept away with time, and disappear. My purpose is to provoke conversation and dialogue, and to share ideas about the cost of just one imaginary of the black experience. We should disrupt complacency regarding how blacks are viewed by outsiders and even how we view ourselves.  Of course, it is important that people of African descent negotiate and manage their relationship to whites, but it seems to me we can anticipate the ebbs and flows of relationships among ourselves (various communities of African descent) as well. We could, for example, look at the relationships between (core) black  Americans and black immigrant families (African, AFro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino) and then use this discussion as a window through which to look at alternative futures. By looking at points of tension and grace between black Americans and other communities we may uncover something about the historic relationship of the black community to other American ethnic groups.  Such an exercise may help us explore aspects of black history and ethos that contribute to black isolation in contemporary America, and how resilience has been re-created each generation, even while the ‘core’ community continues to be a ‘melting pot’ of diverse peoples of color.

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[i] Wilson-Fall, “African Americans, Identity and Cultural Meaning: the Poetics of Being Black?” in Interrogating Gaze: Resistance, Transformation, and Decolonizing Praxis, ed. Jemadari Camara, forthcoming, Dakar: Amalion Press, 2021.