Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century - Rilegato

Kenan, Randall

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0679408274 ISBN 13: 9780679408277

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1999

Riassunto

An authoritative look at the state of affairs for African Americans in the 1990s is based on interviews taken from diverse members of that community across the nation and explores both the hopes and difficulties of being black in America today. 20,000 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore

Randall Kenan grew up in Chinquapin, North Carolina, and was graduated from the University of North Carolina. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia University, Duke, and the University of Mississippi, and is now at the University of Memphis. He is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits, and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. Among his awards are the Mary Francis Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writer's Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Prix de Rome

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.

What does it mean to be black?

        In discussing Black America, on whatever level, be it politics, economics, music, food, I often use the word "we." Aside from the necessity of sometimes making broad generalizations about broad groups, the more I think about African America, the more I cannot help but question what I mean by "we." I'm not the only black person who does this. All through my growing up my relatives did it, my teachers, my ministers; in school, at work, whenever or wherever I encountered black folk talking about black folk--even when speaking to nonblack folk--the word "we" was used.

        Do we mean race? Do we mean culture? Do we mean skin color? The more I thought of it, the more problematic the idea became--even as I persisted in using the word, becoming ever more uncertain of what I--what "we"--meant.

        Did I mean race? If I did I was a hypocrite, because I don't believe in "race" as a fact of nature. Biologically speaking there is only one human species, and though tremendous amounts of time and money have been spent on the classification and subdivision of human beings, classifications that go beyond mere skin color, no one has succeeded, scientifically, in demonstrating any significant difference among people who look different from others. Consider cats: A Siamese, a calico, and a tabby are actually of different genera--that is, they have specific genetic codes (even though they can mate); whereas Koreans, Botswanans, Apaches, and Swedes are all within the same genus. We humans are all calicos, despite visual persuasions to the contrary. But as a rule, human beings don't think that way. Since the time the noted anthropologist Franz Boas wrote:
Where is the proof of the development of specialized hereditary capacities? Where is the proof that such capacities, if they exist, are recessive? How can it be shown that such specialized characteristics in selected mating will be bred out? Not a single one of these statements can be accepted.
No one has presented any compelling evidence to the contrary. Where race is concerned I feel very much like Henry Adams when he wrote: "And yet no one could tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it should be known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet without the clue, history was a nursery tale."

        Race is better explained by what historian Barbara Jeanne Fields calls "an ideological construct and thus, above all, a historical product." As a great many historians have noted, "race" is far more a mythology than a reality, brought about first by the proponents of slavery as a way to create a caste system in the United States. It is a melding of class with pseudobiology in such a way as to make and maintain an inferior, unequal group of people, a people both socially and economically on the lowest rung of the ladder. "During the revolutionary era," Fields writes, "people who favored slavery and people who opposed it collaborated in identifying the racial incapacity of African Americans as the explanation for enslavement."

        For two centuries "race" has become more and more deeply ingrained in the American imagination, and in some cases has taken on a life apart from its original intentions. Today the word "race" has profound currency. Be it in politics or mass culture, the buzzword elicits for the American ear a panoply of meanings or "realities." Polls are tallied in terms of "race"; the U.S. Census Bureau divides people by "race"; on television talk shows and news broadcasts, on the front pages of newspapers and on the covers of magazines, the word "race" is used with great surety and finality, as if it were a scientifically quantifiable trait. Americans know what they think they know, and in that knowing lies tremendous power.
        As Lorraine Hansberry has a character in her play Les Blancs, say:
Race--racism--is a device. No more. No less. It explains nothing at all. . . . I am simply saying that a device is a device, but that it also has consequences: once invented it takes on a life, a reality of its own. So in one century, men invoke the device of religion to cloak their conquests. In another, race. Now, in both cases you and I may recognize the fraudulence of the device, but the fact remains that a man who has a sword run through him because he refused to become a Moslem or a Christian--or who is shot in Zatembe or Mississippi because he is black--is suffering the utter reality of the device. And it is pointless to pretend that it doesn't exist--merely because it is a lie!
        In that same way, to be an American is to be shaped by the "device" of "race." Whether one believes it to be reality or mythology, whether one is white or black or something entirely other, to live in the United States is to be shaped on some level by "race."
        Yet race is only one element of being black, only one side of the multisided rubric of understanding who "we" are.
My initial reaction to Burlington was: clean, clean, clean. Alpine and remote. Green and villagelike. Technology encroached in the form of excellent highways and the nearby industrial park, but the timbre and the lay of the land were fresh and inviting. (One night I saw a deer amble down Main Street.) I felt almost as if I were in Canada, rather than still in America--most signs are in French and English, and the television picks up the CBC and CTV--the nearest "big city" is Montreal.

        But as I drove around, I realized that Burlington had two very distinct faces, like every other place: one of pristine opulence and one of squalor. I passed through a poorer section and realized that the booming economy had not touched every hovel and den. The sight of scruffy teens in black leather and boots and bandanas contrasted mightily with the evergreen splendor, and I remembered graffiti, on a concrete wall down by the lake, telling me: "Don't shed tears for the Children of Hell."

        From downtown, Lake Champlain, on whose shores Burlington is situated, seemed deceptively minor, appearing smallish and long, though nonetheless gorgeous. The mountains in the background receded row by majestic row, disappearing in the distance as steely purple-blue phantoms.

        I wandered around downtown Burlington, falling into conversation every now and again with a shopkeeper or a waiter, and I was struck by how everyone seemed to find the absence of black folk humorous, and the fact that I had come to the "Whitest State in the Union" to investigate black life a curiosity.

        Later that night I happened to catch a PBS documentary on the late, great Millicent Fenwick, congresswoman from New Jersey, with her corncob pipe and firebrand ways. One thing she said in an interview stuck with me my entire time in Vermont: "I don't believe in tolerance," she said. "Who am I to tolerate anybody? No, it's not about tolerance, it's about respect and understanding."

        Vermont's total population was a little over 500,000 souls, and the number of African Americans was less than 2,000--less than one third of 1 percent, with the largest concentration found in Burlington. Overall, the smallest percentage of any state, thence the curious moniker "Whitest State in the Union." I wondered if this fact happened by design or by some other happenstance. I found many articles enumerating the results of such a situation--the blatant acts of racism, intolerance, indifference--but few gave me insight into the larger question: Why? Moreover, Vermont's history had been one of tremendous "tolerance," to say the least. In 1776 Vermonters elected the first black person in any state legislature, and Vermont was the first state to outlaw slavery. I found a number of essays that suggested answers. Robert Mitchell sums it up best: "Perhaps the best explanation for the state's tiny . . . black population is its rural character, since 75 percent of the national population of blacks live in urban areas and 97 percent of those in the Northeast are city dwellers." Indeed the presence of people of African descent went back to Vermont's beginnings--a great many black folk escaped to Vermont on the Underground Railroad. One scholar, Marion Metivier-Redd, suggests that many of those former slaves settled and intermingled with the white folk, in effect "bleaching" themselves out of existence, but leaving their legacy.

        I wondered, in truth, how white Vermont actually was.

        The day I got lost on the University of Vermont campus on the way to church, I met Jack Guilles at the University of Diversity.

        The university campus looks like the quintessence of an American land grant school, all red brick and malls, statues and tall steps leading to the halls of higher learning. That morning, already fifteen minutes late for church, I walked around the campus hoping to inquire as to the whereabouts of New Alpha. The few people I did encounter looked at me as if I were a Venusian--but were nice enough. They had n...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679408274
• ISBN 13: 9780679408277
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 670