Transcription
Now that disintegration has cleaved one black America into four, will we still nod to each other when we pass on the street? Uh >> oh. I have to ask whether black Americans, divided as they are by the process of disintegration, still have enough shared experiences, values, hopes, fears, and dreams that they define and claim a single racial identity and feel a racial solidarity powerful enough to connect, if only for an instant, strangers who may never see each other again. He's asking if they still have the glue that makes a people. He sees them split into four groups and he's been living long enough to see the changes and the differences between them. And now he's wondering if they still have enough shared identity to feel like one people. Because if that glue is gone and the feeling is gone, then black America becomes just a label instead of a real people moving in one direction. >> I give the little nod without even thinking about it. Is it my imagination or are fewer people nodding back? >> Which one is it? >> We now know that in terms of biology, race means nothing. >> Here we go. Now, what does he mean when he says race means nothing in terms of biology? He means when you look at the actual genes, not the stories that people pass down and not what people imagine based on appearance, but when you examine the actual biological code, people can't be divided into racial groups and especially not how America categorizes the groups. This has long been intuitively obvious, at least to non-racist, but now we have proof. >> Because humans are experts at making up stories. They'll swear up and down that because a person looks a certain way that their physical appearance must be the reason that they think or act in a particular manner. But that's not true. He's saying that this has been intuitively obvious to the non-racist and it's been that way for a long time. But now it's past being an intuition because we have proof. What proof? >> The deciphering of the genetic code shows that external features such as skin color and hair texture indicate nothing about a person's nature, intelligence, or capabilities, and that it would make just as much sense to group people by any other arbitrarily chosen markers, blood type, say, or ability to whistle. >> The deciphering of the human genome began in 1990, and it took 13 years to complete. The vast majority of it was deciphered in 2003 and the remaining gaps were uh fully completed in 2022. But basically this was a project on reading the instruction manual for the human body coded in four letters A, T, C, and G. So the job of the scientists was to write down the human DNA sequence so they could see what the human genetic blueprint actually looked like. And after examining the genetic code, they didn't find anything that could be perfectly linked to the human invented category called race. It's not there right now. Genetics don't require a human to invent it for it to exist. It exists whether humans believe in it or not. Race on the other hand depends upon humans creating it and then continuing to believe in it to exist. You see? So skin color is real obviously, but grouping people together as a master category for identity, that's something that's picked by people. And we could just as easily lump people together based on blood type or their ability to whistle. Like Mr. Robinson said, you could take all the people with ball heads and call them the ballheadian race. And then you can create narratives about their origin, about their intelligence, about their character. And once people start believing it, it eventually becomes a societal truth. Not a biological truth, but a societal truth. That's how race operates. >> Human beings are one species, and what we call race is really just a crude marker for proximity. The code shows that humans are one species, but race is a rough way to label people based on physical traits. The traits that became common in certain parts of the world over generations. People who live near one another tend to share genetic material. And this tendency was much more pronounced throughout the eons of human evolution when groups were settled and the only means of transportation was walking. Thus, it follows that people whose ancestors live closer together are more likely to share genetic traits, skin color, for example, than people whose ancestors lived far apart. Notions of there being precisely three major races of people whom we classify as white, black, and yellow, or perhaps five with the addition of red people and brown people, are 18th century rationalizations for the brutal use of European technology in the colonial subjugation of populations that lacked firearms, sailing ships, and horses. >> White, black, yellow, and so on are colonial categories. What was the mission of colonizers? To colonize, right? What goes into colonizing people? Taking over their resources, taking over their land, and taking over the people themselves. The Europeans were professionals at doing this, right? They're the goats. They use their advanced weaponry to force people into accepting their classifications and their ways of thinking and their religions and so on. And so once their classification system was pressed into the minds of the earlier generations, it became the standard operating system that those people would eventually pass on automatically to their offspring. So the colonizers understood that they had to use brute force to get the earlier generations involved, right? Talking specifically about the ones carried from Africa and getting them to identify as negro or black because those people were not going to willingly accept that. They're not going to willingly accept being renamed by outside people. you have to put a hard force on people, right? And so the people fought back. But once the colonial operating system was firmly ingrained in them, their later generations would accept it without the fight, right, or without reading the terms of agreement. They automatically click agree to calling themselves a color that doesn't match their skin. They agree that skin color tells them who they belong to. They agree that someone gets to name their people. They agree to keep clicking I agree without reading the terms. And they agree to hand their children the same terms of agreement that they've never read themselves. Right? The racial system is a colonial imposed system and it stays alive because people keep clicking. I agree. >> People who lived a thousand years ago would have thought this classification system absurd. People who live a thousand years from now will surely think it barbaric. >> People in the future will look back with utter disbelief about humans identifying themselves as colors. The idea will appear to them as barbaric as the idea of owning people does to modern humans. But the thing is this, it won't take a thousand years for humans to think that about racial classifications. You don't need a thousand years for it to look barbaric because it's already happening today. The idea is already circulating through the society right now as we speak and it's going to continue growing as it wins the war in heaven. >> Race is a human invention, a social construct and its parameters shift over time. >> Not biological, but human invention. That's why it can shift almost at any time. A person could just make a rule out of thin air and they could say that anyone with African ancestry belongs to this category and then later on another person in power can split the category and call some negro, call some mulatto, call some a a quadrun, some [ __ ] right? The human can keep shifting the categories at any time because the categories themselves were made by humans in the first place and humans in positions of authority know that. But the common person typically does not. Right now, here's a few examples. >> Racial identity has always been fluid, based not on objective reality, but on perception and self-image. Europeans once held the notion that the Irish were a separate race with distinctive characteristics as were the Germans, the Slavs, and of course the off-persecuted Jews. Now we think of all these peoples as white. >> You see, now when he says we, he's referring to inside of the American system because many of them outside of that system don't see themselves as white. In Germany, they don't use racial classifications in the official census. They categorize more on immigration history, citizenship, and country of origin. In Israel, they use labels like Jews, Arabs, and others, not black and white. Right? But his point is that groups once treated as separate races were later folded into the American system as white. Now, just because they moved from Ireland or Germany to America, does that mean that their DNA magically changed? No. But the identity changed because it's fluid. The sand people of South Africa have a different genetic and cultural history from that of the Bantto people of the Congo. But both are now considered black, >> which is wild. There is no valid way to divide people into racial categories. Which means that the important thing where race is concerned is how people are seen and how they see themselves. >> And that's because it's a social category. It doesn't have the backing of biology. So it depends on how others see you and how you see yourself more importantly. So there are people who don't typically look like what society would put inside of one race, but they still present themselves in society as if they are that race, right? It works on the other end, too. In the Marines, I was good friends with a guy from Ukraine, and there was no way in the world you could get him to identify as white. He saw himself completely different from white Americans. And then on the other hand, I knew a girl whose dad considered himself black, but she has features that look mostly like people from Asia, and she still identifies fully as black. You see, so these classifications are mostly based on perception. Some of the most interesting recent data about African-American self-image comes from that stunning 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center in which 37% of black Americans said that black people in this country could no longer be thought of as a single race. Uh-oh. There was no follow-up question to explore just what those people, an incredible four out of 10, had in mind when they made that judgment. But there are powerful suggestions that the separation perceived by so many African-Americans is both economic and cultural. The Pew survey asked African-American respondents which of two statements was closer to their own views. Racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can't get ahead these days or blacks who can't get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition. When the question was asked in 1994, a majority, 56% blamed discrimination. Only 34% held the black poor responsible for their failure to get ahead. >> But watch this. >> But in the 2007 survey, those attitudes were reversed. A full 53% of African-American respondents blamed poor black people for their plight, while just 30% said that racial discrimination was making it impossible for poor African-Ameans to better themselves. That excuse lost a lot of power. >> This says nothing about racial identity, but perhaps it does tell us something about racial solidarity. >> Pay attention. >> Solidarity has been one of black Americans most powerful weapons in the struggle for freedom, justice, and opportunity. There was often sharp disagreement about how to get from where we were to where we needed to go. The argument between Booker T. Washington and Web Deo, for example, or the many differences in approach among such titans of the civil rights movement as Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, and Martin Luther King. Yet, despite clashes over methods back then, there was no real dispute about what the agenda for black Americans should include. The right to vote, the right to a better education, the right to use public accommodations, the right to live beyond the confines of assigned ghettos, the right to live without fear of oppression by police, the right to live without fear of violent attack by hooded cross burning terrorists. >> So they agreed on what was needed, but not the way to get it done. >> Those were the short-term goals. Longer term, there was political empowerment, economic development, and full incorporation of African-Americans into the worlds of business, academia, the media, and so forth. It was clear where black Americans needed to go, and there was not really much of an argument about the kinds of policies we should advocate and support. Crudly put, what was good for poor people was good for black people since so many black people were poor. Conversely, what was good for rich people was bad for black people since so few black people were rich. >> He's talking about the hard unified struggle leading up to the civil rights victories. >> The economic theories of John Maynard Keynes were good for black people because expensive government programs were necessary for the project of uplift. If deficit spending led to inflation, that was no great disaster because black people had so little capital to protect. The economic theories of Milton Friedman, which saw inflation as a scourge and advocated tight control over the money supply, were bad for black people. In the larger sense, it was generally true that what was good for the established order was bad for black people who didn't belong to the establishment, and what was upsetting to the established order was good for black people because it created new opportunities for outsiders like us. This was before the black mainstream and the transcendent class became woven into the fabric of American society. This was before they had high stakes in the system back then. What disrupted the established order was generally productive for blacks and what protected it was generally counterproductive for blacks. This is what he's saying. >> That was then. Today, black Americans fundamental rights are secure, >> legally secured, in the books. >> To be sure, these rights are not always and universally observed. A year into the administration of the first African-Amean president, federal authorities accused the Mississippi school district of deliberately enforcing a policy of segregation by transferring students to designated schools according to race. Post-mortems on the subprime mortgage crisis unearthed evidence that worrisome numbers of black home buyers were steered by agents and brokers into riskier loans at higher interest rates than whites with similar incomes and credit ratings. African-Americans are tremendously over represented in the prison population nationwide. And much of the disparity would be eliminated if the law did not treat crack cocaine, which is mostly bought and sold in abandoned black communities, so much more harshly than it treats the identical drug in powder form, which is the way whites tend to buy and sell it. When presented with obvious examples of unequal treatment such as these, it is easy for the four black Americans to agree. Here is an injustice. Here is how to fix it. So when they see a clear inequality, they have no issue agreeing and uniting there. >> There also is no real dispute about issues that involve symbolism. When a white entertainer utters a phrase like nappyheaded hoes or uses the word n, all four black Americans concur in outrage. >> That's the nuclear bomb. And one of the whites could push it at any moment and all four will concur in outrage. >> It would be wrong to trivialize these kinds of incidents. Symbolic is not a synonym for insignificant. Dignity and respect matter. And given the arc of African-American history, they matter a lot. The history of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and much more. That history carries a lot of weight. So these words and incidents are not viewed as light things. They hit some very old wounds. And because of that, he's saying dignity and respect matter a lot for blacks. Okay, now let's move on. >> The economic interests of the mainstream and those of the abandoned coincide in the long run. Ultimately, the goal is for the abandoned to become mainstream, but those interests diverge along the way. Two obvious goals for African-Ameans are consolidating decades of impressive gains into solid multigenerational wealth and doing whatever it takes to uplift the millions still trapped in desperate multigenerational poverty. Now, this isn't some grand organized plan that's already taken place. He's naming what he thinks the two big priorities should be. the mainstream protecting and building wealth and the abandoned being lifted out of multi-generational poverty. >> One project benefits the mainstream, the other benefits the abandoned. There is no obvious reason for universal agreement on which should have first claim on finite government resources and attention. This is a moment when the transcendent are in an unprecedented position to lead. You know, all this sounds good on paper, but most of these people already have their own individual agendas. So, he's reaching for a leadership solution to get blacks working together as a team. And we have to remember that he still carries those old expectations of racial solidarity because of based on his background and his experience, right? And how he grew up. He expects the ones who made it and made it the furthest to feel obligated to lead the rest of the people. And that would probably work if they actually felt that obligation to be a top priority. But that's not what many of them appear to be on today, especially not the transcendent class. They have way more than enough money collectively to really build black communities if they wanted to. So the issue today is not resources and neither is it the law. It comes down to priorities and having a strong enough desire. Today's transcendent black Americans have far more clout as individuals. When Oprah Winfrey says jump, legions ask how high. But there are no leaders who can claim to represent all four black Americas. In a similar manner, transcendent CEOs can't rescue the abandoned, but they can serve as localized engines of economic development for the mainstream by making certain that their companies actually practice diversity rather than just preach it. If they ensure that qualified and capable African-Americans are represented among their executive teams, suppliers, and outside bankers, lawyers, and accountants, they will leave behind a far greater legacy than whatever the final numbers say on the balance sheet. There is Barack Obama, of course, who technically does represent all four black Americas and belongs to two of them as a transcendent and a double emergent. But Obama represents the whole color wheel of America, white, brown, yellow, indeterminant, whatever. >> Obama wasn't going to lead any black community. That wasn't going to happen. And it should not have been expected to happen either. It is inconceivable that the president of the United States could see himself or have others see him as a black leader. It's time in any event to retire the term black leader for good. At this point in our progress, it sounds patronizing. Given the achievements of African-Americans over the past four decades, we are hardly a bunch of followers who need to be told what to think and do. More important, leadership implies coordinated movement in a specified direction. >> Here we go. It implies an agenda and African-Ameans don't have one. >> So they don't have one agenda. >> We have many. >> They have a whole bunch of them. And at times it looks like every man for himself. >> At times they overlap and at times they conflict. >> Example, >> politically it is likely that all four black Americans will remain loyal to the Democratic party for the foreseeable future. Not only because of Obama, whom African-Americans are unlikely to desert, but because the modern Republican party has made so little effort to attract black voters, or even to stop doing their best to drive them away. Meanwhile, it's all but inevitable that at times the four black Americas will rub up against one another, and the points of contact may chafe. There is already friction between the immigrant emergent and the abandoned who complain of being exploited by immigrant blackowned businesses just as they once complained about neighborhood stores whose proprietors were white, Jewish, or Korean. The mainstream have long whispered their disapproval of how emerging immigrants were taking or to be honest winning college admission slots that some believe should go to the native born. Now increasingly those objections are being spoken out loud. It's all over the internet today. >> The biracial emergent have the advantage of straddling two worlds, but also the disadvantage of being able to reject neither. Those who embrace African-American identity with no reservation, as President Obama did, are in turn embraced warmly by the other black Americas. Those who have more difficulty composing a coherent racial self are viewed with a certain cool ambiguity. The abandoned increasingly stand apart and alone. They resent immigrant emergence who use their communities as stepping stones. Mainstream dogooders who come to lecture them by day but make sure to leave before nightfall. And transcendence who talk black but in every sense act white. >> Going upside everybody's head. >> The rest of us moved away and left them to their own devices without the tools or the knowledge to better themselves. >> Oh snaps. >> They noticed >> this stuff is wild. Web Deo famously wrote that the problem of the 20th century is the color line. I believe the problem of the 21st century is the problem of the abandoned. The longer we wait to solve it, the harder it will be to even know where to begin. And the longer we wait, the longer we forstall the possibility of a day when race ceases to be the defining attribute of African-Ameans. Throughout our history, other groups of outsiders such as the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews have been looked down upon, stigmatized, and discriminated against, but eventually through hard work and sacrifice have won their rightful place in American society. African-Ameans have overcome far greater obstacles to accomplish the same feat. And yet, race still separates us, preoccupies us, and defines us. still tagged as colonial property and still agreeing to the terms of service that lets race define them. >> There is no longer one black America, no longer a complete sense of racial solidarity based on clearly defined common interests. But there remains one black racial identity that the majority of African-Americans, mainstream, abandoned, transcendent, and emergent still share. >> And that's one of the last things left. That identity is strongly rooted in the garden of people's minds and it holds on for dear life trying to stay alive. When it hears that there's no longer racial solidarity based on common interest, it interprets that as a threat because that weakens its ability to move people together in the real world which means that it becomes more of a thought form with less power to influence the physical plane. Think about that. So this concludes our investigation here using disintegration by Eugene Robinson. Right now we shall close the final book and this time we will not pick back up with the next commentary. I thank you for your time and attention. My name is Brooklyn St. Michael and I'll see you in the free