The following paper was given at a seminar,  Teaching African-American Literature,  at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies of Harvard University in April 1991. The paper addresses several questions. If social science, as a matter of scientific principle, must choose to avoid ethical conclusions, do black novelists, poets, and essayists help fill the ethical void? But then, are they objective enough

Jean, Clinton M.

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Trotter ReviewVolume 6Issue 1 Trotter Institute Review Article 61-1-1992Inside the American Stratification System:Imageries from the Black WritersClinton M. JeanUniversity of Massachusetts BostonFollow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_reviewPart of the African American Studies Commons, and the American Literature CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the William Monroe Trotter Institute at ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. It has been acceptedfor inclusion in Trotter Review by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. For more information, please contactlibrary.uasc@umb.edu.Recommended CitationJean, Clinton M. (1992) "Inside the American Stratification System: Imageries from the Black Writers," Trotter Review: Vol. 6: Iss. 1,Article 6.Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol6/iss1/6Inside the AmericanStratificationSystem:Imageries fromBlack WritersbyClinton M. JeanThe following paper was given at a seminar,"Teaching African-American Literature," at theCenterfor Literary and Cultural Studies ofHarvardUniversity in April 1991. The paper addresses severalquestions. If social science, as a matter of scientificprinciple, must choose to avoid ethical conclusions,do black novelists, poets, and essayists help fill theethical void? But then, are they objective enough?It is, of course, better to be just a little unbalancedbefore talking about anything important. Was itsome irreverent insight that prompted a student whohad been reading Michael Novak's The Rise of theUnmeltable Ethnics to remark to me, "The termAmerican suggests ethnic neutrality, and Anglo issilent because we want to keep quiet [about] wherethe dominant power is coming from. In essence, thereal American has not come yet"? She was Italian.Irreverence is not an acceptable mode in social sci-entific discourse. Protocol demands objectivity, asthey call it. One discusses triads, religion, and socialdespair all in a rage of analytic dispassion. Objectivedistance has the virtue, so it is said, of leading totruth. It frees discussion from the pressure of parti-san entanglement and polemical distortion. Wouldthat it were so.As a property of the world of facts, objectivitysimply reflects what exists. It is indifferent. It isneither hot nor cold. But as a principle that shouldgovern the mood or temper of research it is anythingbut indifferent. It has, as a worn sociological insighttells us, latent functions.Surely, an ironic commentary from an Italian onthe reality of Anglo dominance betrays somethingsubjective— distaste perhaps? But then, does ironyput the objective factualness of the commentaryinto question? Hardly.Historians tell us that during the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries nativist Anglos (poorwhites, suffragists, abolitionists, intellectuals,statesmen, presidents) had no doubt as to who ranClinton M. Jeanthe show in America; and no doubt as to their rightto run the same show elsewhere— "in all the wasteplaces of the earth," in Henry Cabot Lodge'sphrasing. 1 Theodore Roosevelt felt that the lynchingof Italians in New Orleans was "a good thing" andsaid so in the presence of "various dago dip-lomats . . . [who were] all wrought up about [it]."2 "Idon't go so far as to think that the only good Indiansare dead Indians," Roosevelt commented anothertime, "but I believe nine out of every ten are, and Ishouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case ofthe tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moralprinciple than the average Indian."3 These are notthe sentiments of people who need to retreat intoirony— or distaste. They liked what they saw. Thehegemony they enjoy is no less a fact for that.The declamatory arrogance of Roosevelt's timehas given way to a different mood, although I can-not examine here how that came to pass. There hasbeen a change in the lexicon of terms and emotionaltones that addresses Anglo-American power inAmerica and elsewhere. One no longer speaks ofTeutons and Anglo-Saxons as being among "thegreat masterful races." Instead, democracy, indi-vidual freedom, and free speech are the terms thatnow argue hegemony. Clearly, such terms do not de-scribe Social Darwinist endowments of "masterfulraces," but rather are structural features of a culturalsystem. This cultural system was the first to conceivethe vision of a world where "you could make some-thing of yourself; and it was the first that had theinstitutional inventiveness to bring such a world intobeing.The new lexicon, as lexicons generally do, tells ushow to see, how to do once we have seen, and how toreact. Looked at from the new angle, all that beingfirst to conceive such a vision allows is a claim to pri-macy; it is not necessary that it suggest hegemony—18indeed, what need is there for that? As for thosestraggling behind along the road to Anglo world,they are not so much peoples any more. They are justcultures. The peoples are as invisible as Anglo issilent.Passion, sentiment could have no place here.But what if one needs passion to be able to graspthings more fully, or even to see them? Is not objec-tivity then a sort of license for myopia? Perhaps onesees better if disgust is in the eye. What is it that oneshould not see?Anglo power, an Italian student said. And its vic-tims, we must add, are that large company of strag-glers crowding the American landscape. Here iswhere the black folks live. We know, or we couldknow. We have merely to follow the sound of theirpoetic rages.The howl of black discourse seldom breachesAnglo silence or uncloaks invisibility. To understandthat, it is important to keep the context of discoursein mind.One no longer speaks of Teutons and Anglo-Saxons as being among "the great masterful races. vInstead, democracy, individualfreedom, andfreespeech are the terms that now argue hegemony."An impersonal, uninvolved discussion," ThomasKochman says, "is the kind of discussion to whichwhites in official positions are accustomed. ... Indiscussion, one can be dispassionate; in argument,when one's own needs and views matter, it is muchmore difficult, and sometimes injurious to one'scause, to sound dispassionate. Moreover, it is possi-ble that the ability to remain dispassionate can beachieved only by those who have worked long andhard to separate thought from feeling. ... It is alsopossible that those who have succeeded in separat-ing thought from feeling are able to do so only whenthey have nothing at stake."For blacks, he continues, "to leave their emotionsaside is not their responsibility; it is the whites' re-sponsibility to provide them first with a reason to doso,»4In this context responsibility presumes power. Itfollows that it is not possible to claim just honor, ifthat's what it's all about, as the first on the road toprogress. Honor and primacy, one could argue,which are all objective dispassion seems able to dis-cern, are cover for a truth that a different age had noproblem affirming. Beyond that, is there not a largertruth at stake? For, indeed, stragglers must arguethat what silence dictates is political. And a questionof politics is surely a question of ethics. Perhaps si-lence is not so secure against this kind of clamor.Why risk that? Objectivity aborts the risk; it keepsthings out of earshot.Let us admit that the pen is not as mighty as thesword; that, in fact, it is impotent without collectiveaction. Still, the oppressed must speak; and manyblacks, resolutely non-accommodationist, havedone so in the social sciences and in the literary arts.They are armed with different kinds of intellectualweaponries.We are indebted to those paleontologists, histor-ians, and sociologists who have rescued African lifefrom Anglo-imposed darkness. We know, for in-stance, that Africans have a legitimate claim to pri-macy as the first humans and as inventors of the firstcivilization. We also know that white progress hasbeen, and is, fueled by the rape and manipulation ofblack peoples; and that many blacks have acted inwilling collusion with the destructiveness of whitedesigns.We may be sure that the impulse for these investi-gations, often enough, is the search for larger truth;not just what happened, but the politics and ethicsof it, and the sensual human realities agonizingwithin the social order. Yet, social science, even acritical black science, cannot completely reveal thislarger truth. The rule of objectivity prevents it.However factual the findings of research may be,science forbids their use as grounds for moral judg-ment. Black people cannot demand just treatmentas something that follows from the logic of objectiveinquiry. The social agonies that inquiry reveals donot make justice imperative. Well then, one mightsay, are their agonies as real and as visceral as in-quiry makes them out to be? Or, in a more popularvein (and usually asked in a tone of impatient frus-tration): what do black people want?There is no answer to this kind of hard-nosedskepticism, unless one can come up with somethingthat plays on imagination. That something must putblood and muscle into history— jealousies; virtue;ugly local treacheries swallowed up by treacheries ofencompassing cruelty; foresight; resolve; anxietyand despair; pathological rage in once balanced andcontented spirits; insecurity and arrogance andvenomous jealousy and a demonic use of power;Pilate and her opposite (let us call her ImitationSnow White). Social science does not (cannot?) ex-ploit this option. That has been left to novelists andpoets.there's only two parties in this countryanti-nigger and pro-niggermost of the pro-niggers are now deadthis second reconstruction is being abortedas was the firstthe pro-niggers council votingthe anti-niggers have guns . . . 519It is possible not to understand what NikkiGiovanni is saying. It is also possible to understandher only too well, even without a single word of ex-planation. Listen to Toni Morrison talk about Sethe,the main character in Beloved: "Sethe knew that thecircle she was making around the room, him, thesubject, would remain one. That she could neverclose in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. Ifthey didn't get it right off— she could never explain.Because the truth was simple, not a long-drawn-outrecord of flowered shifts, tree cages, selfishness,ankle ropes and wells. Simple . . . "6And what about the doubters, embattled skepticssnarling at truth winging in the nightmares of con-science? Black Herman, one of Ishmael Reed's fic-tional creations in Mumbo Jumbo, gives the word:"1st they intimidate the intellectuals by condemningwork arising out of their own experience as being 1-dimensional, enraged, non-objective, preoccupiedwith hate and not universal, universal being a wordco-opted by the Catholic Church when the Atoniststook over Rome, as a way of measuring every 1 bytheir ideals."7Anglo power will not promote the reunification ofthe rational-ethical mind. It is not in its interestto do so.Clearly, Atonism — shifting, clutching, pushingthrough history— thought it found an appropriatetext for its legacies in modern science, in claims toscientific universalism. But moralists, gnostics, andrhythmics denied Atonism universalist jurisdictionin all arenas of speech. It did not even have unchal-lenged jurisdiction in the world of indifferent fact, aworld it thought to colonize as its own.Stone, cold truth, without any pretense of sci-entific genesis, could appear in the passionate mus-ings of Sethe and in the musings of Paul D "listeningto the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neitherthe right nor the permission to enjoy it because inthat place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt,moon — everything belonged to the men who had theguns. Little men, some of them, big men too, eachone of whom he could snap like a twig if he wantedto. Men who knew their manhood lay in their gunsand were not even embarrassed by the knowledgethat without gunshot fox would laugh at them."8No doubt, facts revealed in the hardheaded mus-ings of muscular, agonistic historical consciousnesscan be questioned just as facts differently derivedcan also be questioned. But in this realm of hard-headed historical immediacy, an anthropologist tellsus, people live in a blaze of reality. 9 Questioning isnot allowed to retreat into an endless search, sup-posedly, for confirming facts — as in, the facts arenot all in. Questioning is not allowed to demand the"long-drawn-out record." There is already enough toprove the case.All of a sudden scientific skepticism about factscomes face to face with a dialogue it always avoids.If enough of the facts are in, then there is a questionthat must be asked. Stamp Paid asks it: "What arethese people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?" 10Stamp Paid's question is an ethical one. It lays thecharge of injustice for historical crimes on theAnglo world and, indeed, on Western culture as awhole. The question and the charge, in American so-cial thought, are relegated to the world of valueswhere one ethical judgment is as good as another,where everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion.It follows that Stamp Paid's judgment will not be ac-cepted as final or binding. From a different angle,though, it does not follow at all.The separation of ethical thought from factuallyobjective analysis is not something divinely re-vealed. It is a socially constructed practice by peoplewho breathe, eat, sleep, and change their underwear(thank you, Albert Camus) 11 just like the rest of us.Against the background of human history in itsvariegated multicultural expressions, such a separa-tion is, frankly, an unusual practice. One might evensay that it is a phenomenological curiosity. Perhapsit is culturally unique. What is certain is that itthrives on and feeds the malignancy of power. Thatis its function or, shall we say, its latent function.Anglo power will not promote the reunificationof the rational-ethical mind. It is not in its interest todo so. Under Anglo aegis, modern social science willremain morally emasculated. Behind this unhappyconclusion lies much more than the political-economic realities of the modern age. The fatal split-ting of Western consciousness is rooted in ancientEuropean history. (This has to be argued but thatcannot be done here.) The reintegration of humanconsciousness, a consciousness that has been in thegrip of the West for some time, will have to comefrom elsewhere. Black writers, some of them at least,show the way.It is not implied here that people in other culturesdo not commit mortal sin among themselves oragainst others. But there is sufficient evidence toshow that they did not pretend they did not do whatthey did however brass-faced they might have beenabout not giving it up. Chaka Zulu, that formidablenineteenth-century African, was hardly surprisedthat he got it in the end. And everybody was awitness.History, it has been said, is ironic. So it is. It pro-duced Chaka. Or do we wish to think that his rise topower at the very moment of Western intrusion intohis neighborhood is pure historical coincidence? Hispeople were still African enough to judge that he20had gone too far. But there would come a time when,caught in the culturally destructive tow of the West,Africans everywhere would begin to lose this gift.As Ayi Kwei Armah tells us in his novel, TheHealers, the Ashanti lost the gift. Their empire wasbrought to ruin by the force of British arms, but notby that alone. The divisions among the Ashanti laidthe groundwork for their collapse — divisions thatexisted before the coming of the British. The Britishpresence, though, gave these divisions room toflourish and, ultimately, to destroy Ashanti society.What if one needs passion to be able to graspthings morefully, or even to see them? Is notobjectivity then a sort of licensefor myopia?Ababio, Armah's king of Esuano, is corrupt. Hehas committed a heinous crime, the murder ofPrince Appia and the brutalization of the Prince'smother, and is without remorse. He gloats as he putshis actions in the context of things to come. "You'vealways been slow to comprehend reality," he tells theyoung hero, Densu. "Let me describe it for yourbenefit. This is a new day in the land. The whites arein control. They recognize those who have helpedthem. They recognize me, Ababio, as king ofEsuano. Whoever goes against me will have to takeon the whites. They protect me. They look after me.Whatever I want from them, I can ask for it, and I'llget it." 12Ababio betrayed his village. The queen-mother ofAshanti was caught by the same ambitions. She be-trayed her people.Ababio is the offspring of spitlickers on the make.He bragged of this himself. The new brood of safaribourgeois in Africa, the Caribbean, and Americastill speaks the way he spoke. "Keep this nigger run-ning," said Ellison's Bledsoe. 13The gift of rightful vision is not lost, though. Itsurvived in Sethe's community, which is why StampPaid was riled up at the thought that nobody had of-fered shelter to Paul D. It is why he stayed riled upuntil he got an explanation. It is also why everybodyin the community cut Sethe loose. They could un-derstand the wretched necessity that made her dowhat she did. But they did not like the fact that sheshowed no regret for it. Even so, they refused to letBeloved destroy her. Haint or no haint. "Butnothing," said Ella. "What's fair ain't necessarilyright." 14Pilate is the quintessential embodiment of Afri-can consciousness enduring in the storm. 15 Thespirits have blessed her. She has no umbilical attach-ment to white society and is beyond the blandish-ments of bourgeois tease. It was she who made Milk-man fly. In the land beyond time she surely recog-nized a kindred soul in Invisible Man's grandfather."'Son,' " he said, " 'after I'm gone I want you tokeep up the good fight. I never told you, but our lifeis a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, aspy in the enemy's country ever since I give up mygun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your headin the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em withyeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to deathand destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit orbust wide open. . . . Learn it to the younguns,' hewhispered fiercely; then he died." 16Our novelists and poets show us how to think inline with what is objectively factual, how to think inline with what is substantive and moral, and how tojudge whether what is revealed as fact is in harmonywith what is substantively reasonable. The novel andother creative forms use tools that creative fancyprovides to make its arguments: it makes virtue,wrong, contradiction, and turmoil visceral and im-mediate. If it does not restore human consciousness,it at least brings us face to face with what is to bedone.Clinton M. Jean is a lecturer in black studies at the University ofMassachusetts at Boston. He is the author of Behind the Euro-centric Veils: The Search for African Realities, forthcoming byUniversity of Massachusetts Press.Notes1. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1980), 291.2. Ibid., 291, 293.3. Robert Allen, Reluctant Reformers (Washington, D.C.: HowardUniversity Press, 1983), 89.4. Thomas Kochman, Black and White Styles in Conflict(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 40, 41.5. Nikki Giovanni, Black Feeling, Black Talk (Boston: South EndPress, 1983), 169.6. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987),163.7. Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Avon Books, 1972),153.8. Morrison, Beloved, 1629. Paul Radin, The World of Primitive Man (New York: HenrySchuman, 1953).10. Morrison, Beloved, 180.11. Albert Camus, L'Etranger (Paris: Bordas, 1980), 119.12. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers (London: Heinemann, 1979),299.13. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1947),191.14. Morrison, Beloved, 256.15. Morrison, Song ofSolomon (New York: New America Library,1977).16. Ellison, 16.21

Inside the American Stratification System: Imageries from the Black Writers

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Inside the American Stratification System: Imageries from the Black Writers

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