The Introspection of a Nation

 by Winkfield F. Twyman, Jr.  

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Years of turning inward guaranteed that Black America would be more taciturn than forthright, more reticent than revealing.

Our thoughts about Black America need revision.

Conventional thought holds prejudice and discrimination accountable for what ails African-Americans. And there is much in the literature about conscious and unconscious racism to support the point. Others like Thomas Sowell and John H. McWhorter use culture as a lens for understanding the perception gap between Black and White Americans.  Social dysfunction becomes the outcome of character pathology.

Whether racism or culture matters more has become the equivalent of the chicken and the egg argument.  Both positions are defendable. Both vantage points explain part of the African-American experience. Neither thought can settle the debate.

A piece of the puzzle is missing.

To better understand Black America, one cannot start with the rage of a privileged class as seen by Ellis Crose, the stereotype vulnerability of college students described by Claude Steele, or the anti- intellectualism lamented by McWhorter. The axis upon which the great divide turns between White America and Black America is personality.

For a brief moment in time, relations between Whites and Blacks were fluid.  From 1619 when the first slaves arrived in Jamestown until roughly 1660, the tumultuous times rewarded extroversion. Everyone faced disease and massacre at the hands of indigenous tribes. Survival required an ability to take risks, to dominate and to subdue the elements. Africans were outgoing with the best of them. Anthony Johnson, an arrival in the first shipload of slaves, gained his freedom when his indentured servitude ended. He went on to become prosperous as a planter. He established a plantation and would earn his place in American history for suing to hold an African servant in perpetual bondage. The colonial court agreed, thus establishing the precedent of slavery in the English New World.

The pressures of slavery molded slaves into introspection. Why did it happen?

American slavery was more than physical bondage. The peculiar institution required vigilance. In the outer world loomed dangers. To this day, presenters at academic conferences can throw out an isolated hate crime in a distant city and tap into the primal fear of race hatred. All black Americans can imagine themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. These fears can be traced back to slave patrols in the antebellum South, unpredictable enforcement of black codes, and the memory of Blacks having no rights that Whites were bound to respect.  As a youngster, my mother warned that the Klan would get me if I did not behave. I behaved.

People looked inward. One of the best portrayals of inner life among slaves is Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese. An Italian-American, Genovese devoted years to understanding how an oppressed slave people protected their ego and sense of self. Genovese describes the rise of autonomous rituals and customs, creations known only to slaves and ignored for the most part by slavemasters. Roll, Jordan, Roll affirms the resilience of the human spirit.

The rise of introspection saved a race.

At points of contact with the larger world, the outgoingness of Anthony Johnson became lost. Prejudice destroyed the opportunity to make genuine friends in the white community. The imbalance of white privilege remained ever present for slaves. Relationships became soiled with a hesitancy, a double-consciousness of knowing one’s place. If you watch Roots, you can see this introversion at work. Kunta Kinte has an arrogance born of freedom. And yet he turns for guidance to Fiddler, a born slave who filters his actions so as to not disturb the racial order of things. Rev. T.D. Jakes once remarked that he found Africans difficult to understand because of their arrogance. His African companion replied that Africans were what African-Americans would be but for slavery.

That Fiddler and his descendants turned their energies inward is no surprise.  Early efforts to worship in integrated settings were rebuffed by white congregations.  Black leaders like Richard Allen created the African Methodist Episcopal Church where parishioners could worship free from slights. The same introspection arose in education. While some early black students like Alexander L. Twilight, Andrew Harris and John Mercer Langston thrived at white institutions before the Civil War, vicious acts of bigotry made the real headlines. Martin Delany and two other black students entered the Medical School of Harvard in the fall of 1850. They aspired to become doctors. White students met Delany and company with open revolt. Rather than face full-throated mutiny, the faculty expelled the black students. That the rise of black colleges would be welcomed after the Civil War is explained by fear of the larger white world. The same trends developed in the professions. When the American Bar Association erupted over the inadvertent admission of three black members in 1912, black attorneys took matters into their own hands. They concentrated on discovering their needs as a minority, thus giving rise to the National Bar Association. Every profession in America has a black adjunct association based upon the same premise.

Introversion should not be confused with segregation. Segregation is an enforced exclusion under color of law. It is a legal condition created by law. Introversion is a personality trait, a preferred way of interacting with the outside, larger world. 350 years of slavery, black codes, segregation, discrimination, and prejudice have formed a decided introversion in black culture and consciousness. And this introversion, more so than drugs or poverty or single-parent households or unemployment or incarceration, explains why Black America sees a different America from White America. 

Introversion carried advantages. Focusing most of the community’s attention inward became a means of survival when Reconstruction collapsed. Only the black community would care enough to nurture and sustain black colleges before the 1960s. To this day, the spiritual life of the community remains anchored in the black church, a historic role that produced leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Benjamin L. Mays, and Dr. Mordecai Johnson.  Spirituals and gospels, the mainstay of the black church, speak to the collective conscious that unites those who know prejudice and the double-consciousness of race. The introversion of the black community is at its apex on Sunday mornings. Even Upper-Middle Class professionals whose lives are integrated from 9 to 5 come together as a people to worship. 

But there is a downside to withdrawing.

Most Americans are extroverts. Most White Americans are extroverted. Outgoingness and domination are valued.  As a result, White Americans don’t get the tendency to withdraw. White Americans see the Black Table at colleges and think segregation, not solitude.  The absence of Black Americans from white barber shops does not register. Even in the upper classes of well-educated White Americans, the parallel universe of black service organizations, fraternities, sororities, and social clubs is an alien creation. The inner life of Black America remains as distant as the slave world was to slavemasters.

The Civil Rights Movement and integration did not change the black American personality. Yes, there were exceptions where groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims adopted an in-your-face stance. But by and large, most Black Americans were more eager to make their way in the system, if possible. Years of turning inward guaranteed that Black America would be more taciturn than forthright, more reticent than revealing. 

As a result, Black America is less open to outside influences than other groups. This can be seen in the low rate of interracial marriage. This can be seen in the levels of hypersegregation that distinguish Black Americans from other groups. Even Upper-Middle Class Black professionals like those that populate Prince George’s County, Maryland, are more comfortable in the company of others like themselves than in whiter, affluent places like Potomac, Maryland or suburban Virginia. The same dynamic can be found in the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia.

There is nothing disabling about flocking together per se. One might argue that private choices should be celebrated. 

The real problem is that an introverted nation needs to know how to succeed in a predominantly extroverted world. And that is the lasting injury to Black America. Black America doesn’t speak loudly and clearly when it needs to. Of course, there are exceptions but one doesn’t see this when careers are on the line, when contracting dollars are on the table, when poor choices are being made.

For example, the ability to navigate office politics is essential for one’s career growth. But academic excellence does not equal relationship excellence. There are disturbing accounts every day of Ivy League educated Americans, Black Americans, who needlessly falter and fail in the workplace. My classmate Paul M. Barrett has written about the sad story of another classmate, Lawrence Mungin. Mungin did all of the right things. He studied hard. He remained focused on his studies. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. And yet he discovered that self-reliance, the self-reliance that saw him through Harvard, served him poorly in the workplace.  He had no friends. He relied on the system to treat him fairly. As his career stalled, Mungin was left out of informal networks where he might have gained valuable social intelligence. Instead, he stayed in his office and worked hard. When his career came crashing down, he could not believe that he had played by the rules and lost. But that is the danger for an introvert in the workplace. Self-reliance without relationships is a prescription for disaster.

Relationships matter.

Introversion is now a dead end for Black America.

One symptom of introversion is the reluctance to ask questions when you need to because of some imagined sense that one represents the race. Asking questions is imagined to be a sign of weakness, of perpetuating sterotypes of incompetence. But you don’t represent the black race. No one represents 25 million black Americans. You do represent yourself. And you owe it yourself, not the race, to do the best that you can in any context. Claude Steele touches upon this point in his stereotype vulnerability argument.

But it’s about more than a feared dumb question. It’s about inner thoughts triggered when one walks into a conference and there are no other blacks present. I attended a San Diego Writer’s Conference recently. I had a great time. I made several contacts with big deal literary agents. I had such a great time that I spoke up and made my thoughts heard at every panel session. And why shouldn’t I? I consider myself to be a well-integrated, well-educated attorney. I had begun writing in my spare time. I was excited about meeting other writers.

I knew no one at the conference beforehand.

As I entered the conference room, I looked for other black people in the sea of faces. I saw none. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell has written about decisions that take place within a split second.   I immediately wondered if others would be uncomfortable in my presence because they would see my race first and bring whatever prejudices or life experiences they might have to the table. If I had been White, I would not have had these inner thoughts. These inner thoughts are part of a collective personality shared by all Black Americans in unfamiliar white settings.  Unless one is a celebrity or already known, there is that initial flash of introspection where one remembers that you are at the whims of whatever preconceptions others might have until one proves one self.

That introspection is central to Black American personality. One does not find the same introspection among Africans or West Indians in America. Only after repeated brushes with White and Black Americans does one see the introspection in mixed settings. Black Americans may pay homage to Africa but Africans in America are perceived as different.

How many Black Americans share their inner thoughts with others? 

There is an advantage to being inner directed. Free from microaggressions and the whims of others, a rich inner life propelled the growth of a people. Inward intensity produced the masterpiece of Howard University, the epic story of the famed M Street (Dunbar) High School, the crusade of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, the vision of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the solace of the National Bar Association. 

But the time for introversion has come and gone.

The personality of Black America will not change in our lifetime. Much time must pass before the ways of learned introspection can be undone and blacks can feel as comfortable in all white setting as they do in all black settings. Realizing that barriers are rooted in personality, in introspection, is an important first step for navigating an introverted people through an extroverted modern world.

Features, Race & Ethnicity, Multiculturalism

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