The Hunt for Black Identity

 by Winkfield F. Twyman, Jr.  

| View comments |  Print This Post

If you’re going to invest time and energy in a quest for Black Identity, why not define Black Identity in a positive, constructive fashion?

The Hunt for Black Identity has shipwrecked more black lives than any other contemporary pressure, bar none. In this essay, I will set aside the entertainment value provided by the Hunt. One could imagine an essay where I sought out black homeless men in downtown Los Angeles for their insights on the Hunt. Or, one might begin with the famous Greek philosopher who spent his life looking for an honest man. Both of these approaches would set a warranted tone about the search for unreachable game.

Instead, allow me to share a true story.

I once had lunch with a law professor from West Africa. A dark-skinned man with regal bearing, I looked forward to a good intellectual talk about his perspective on race. I got more than I bargained for.

“How do people in your country understand American slavery?” I asked. In my mind’s eye, I imagined a great emptiness at the center, a sadness comparable to a parent’s loss of a child.

“My family did quite well from the Slave Trade,” began my guest. “My ancestors delivered the slaves to the coast and used the profits to acquire large tracts of land. The profits supported the construction of comfortable residences. Yes, I would say that my family gained from the trade.” And he made these comments with the same regard as if he had ordered tea with a twist of lemon.

A chill ran down my spine.

As a Black American, the slave trade is original sin. Whether one is liberal or conservative, rich or poor, slavery is the great scar. To hear a black man talk about slavery in dollars and cents seemed surreal. And yet here I was atop the Holiday Inn restaurant overlooking the San Diego Harbor Bay chatting with a black man whose status could be traced back to the slave trade in Africa.

Then it hit me — we shared no identity whatsoever. None.

In fact, I felt diminished in his presence.

He continued to talk about his life of privilege and a perceptible haughtiness came over his face. Did he see me as lesser stock, a descendant of past transactions? I had never felt this way before in the presence of another black individual. I asked a few more questions but my taste for conversation had left me.

This Black Table chat has stayed with me over the years for several reasons.

First, there is no Black Identity. When Critical Race Theorists talk about identity, they assume an affinity, a shared perspective and life experience. But affinity grows out of what you know and how you react to the larger world. 30 million black people will have 30 million different life experiences. While my West African guest had darker skin than I, his identity bore no connection to his blackness. And why should it? If everyone is black in his country, then other markers like privilege and status define identity.

Second, I once assumed that if you were black and in America, you must be a “Black American.”  However, there are black immigrants and second-generation Americans who reject black identity. I know a “black” appearing law professor who takes great pains to distance herself from black Americans. Indeed, she is disdainful of black American culture and consciousness. Whether this law professor should be counted as black for purposes of diversity is an interesting question.  I know another black law professor who ridiculed American black women for straightening their hair. In his personal life, he avoided dating the descendants of American slaves because of their issues. Should this law professor be counted as black for purposes of diversity? I do not know.

Third, there is a growing disconnect between the intentions of the 1960s and the results of 2006. Did southern descendants of slaves risk their lives so that regal African scions of the slave trade could teach in American law schools? Did the children of rural sharecroppers march in the streets so that law professors from the Islands could define Black Identity? How does a black law professor’s rejection of a black American identity impact the self-esteem of black American law students? These are honest questions that call for honest answers.

Fourth, we live in a free country. If one chooses to anchor their life around race identity, then more power to you. I love my cousin, Toni, even if she uses black identity as a security blanket. And I wouldn’t change my uncle-in-law Tony’s “strong black man” identity for anything. People are happiest when they are themselves.

Finally, I began this essay by lamenting shipwrecked lives in the wake of the Hunt. Let me be clear — it is not Black Identity per se that harms black Americans. Everyone has an identity.  It is the Hunt for Black Identity — an adolescent quest for the Great White Whale beyond the horizon — that ensnarls youngsters in unwritten rules of black behavior, batters the drive to excel, and ultimately runs aground in the fog of obsession.

According to John U. Ogbu in Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement, elementary school children are free from pressures to set sail on the Hunt. Black kids in the lower grades tend to make friends with students from all races. There is a delightful openness to people as people.

In middle school, pressures to conform blow into the classroom and schoolyard.  With breezes of conformity come misguided ideas about identity. Teenagers begin a misconceived search for a collective identity rooted in blackness. Mind you, self-worth comes from within rather than from the outside. But as images of thug life and gangsta consciousness flood the airways, the vulnerable latch onto nowhere values and attitudes as authentic Black Identity. Good grades are forsaken in the quest to belong. Speaking proper English will not do if one must show one’s bona fides. And as for hanging around too many white students in honors classes? You will be teased and criticized by those down for the Hunt.

I imagine that Ogbu, a Nigerian immigrant, held his tongue as students recounted pressures from black friends to “do poorly in school,” to take “less difficult skills and college prep classes,” and to “forget their homework and shift their priorities from school work to other things.” Who needs physical slavery if you enslave yourselves with your thoughts?

Call me crazy but I don’t recall the national vote on Black Identity. Who made up these unwritten rules that you cannot speak proper English with friends and family? That it is one’s moral obligation to tease and criticize black students who do well in middle and high school? That the ghetto lifestyle is authentic Black Identity?  Did I lose my invitation to the national vote? Maybe, I left it unopened at the Black Table.

This woe-begotten journey for Black Identity leads to the shoals of defeatism and fatalism. Even the parents of black immigrants reject this suicidal voyage. A dear friend noted that, in her experience, West Indian parents instruct their children to not emulate Black Americans at school.  How sad.

If you’re going to invest time and energy in a quest for Black Identity, why not define Black Identity in a positive, constructive fashion? Black Identity could mean speaking proper English at school and at home. Whether one has many or no white friends could be irrelevant to the Hunt. In fact, you could create a mythology where Black Identity means high aspirations and top grades. To be a John Hope Franklin or Barack Obama is to be a real black while Snoop Dogg and 50 cent are seen as traitors to the race. One could imagine such an adolescent world where peer pressures accentuated achievement. Under these circumstances, a Hunt for Black Identity might ensure safe passage through teenage and later adult life.

Instead, we are left with a Hunt that requires smart black students to play dumb in class, according to Ogbu. And the goal is some mystical Black Identity beyond the water’s edge.

I offer this advice for the young in middle and high school — when someone urges you to embark on the Hunt for Black Identity, say, “Thanks but no thanks. I like my self-identity as it is.” Don’t set sail! There is no there there. In seeking a fool’s gold, you can only wind up as the fool. To hunt Black Identity is to become Elmer Fudd. And like Elmer Fudd, you will always end up seriously injuring yourself.

The greatest ridicule should rain down on black teenagers who criticize others for doing well. The salvation of the Race lies in doing well. Where are the leaders like Mordecai Johnson, the first black President of Howard University, who held Black Americans to the highest standards from 1926 to 1960? You have got to compete, whether you are attending a predominantly white school or a predominantly black school. 

Black law professors are natural descendants of President Johnson. But many are reluctant to hold black students accountable for simpleton behavior like the Hunt for Black Identity. The ship is now lost at sea. Up to forty percent of black male students fail to graduate on time from high school. Students wear low-hanging pants and gangsta clothes to show their bona fides. And more and more student lives are run aground in the fog of obsession with identity.  Elmer Fudd should not be leading the Hunt but no one on board ship will speak up to avoid the iceberg ahead.

One imagines the teenaged captains urging their friends to stay the course. Be resolute! In the darkness of substandard English must lie the way home to Black Identity, a glorious island paradise where libations of liberation are dispensed with afro-centric cheer. But like the mirage on the Vegas horizon, we never reach our island paradise. In the ship’s wake can be found black students who play dumb, upper middle class youngsters who flash gang signs to one another, and still-born valedictorians harassed into an ignorant stupor.

And from the deck of the Blame the Man schooner, I can see that Black Identity beckons just over the horizon . . ..

Features, Race & Ethnicity, Multiculturalism

Read more articles by Winkfield F. Twyman, Jr.