The idea of an Old Settler’s temperament in a black person seemed absurd. Whether it was seen as politically impotent or socially up its own ass, the black elite was an irrelevance at a time when the forces of liberation were out to reshape the world and when the vernacular was being elevated as the true source of black culture. For figures like Malcolm X, the history of black resistance exposed the futility of conventional avenues of struggle, as if illustrating Foucault’s point about the moral training of populations and the reform of manners as a means of reducing threat to property. Others criticized black institutions for being conformist. In his grand remonstrance, Black Bourgeoisie (1957), Frazier castigated the black upper class for having deteriorated into a sad imitation of conspicuously consuming white America.
Franklin Frazier had described how migration and the urbanization of black America changed the criteria by which a black upper class defined itself. In The Negro Family in the United States (1939), E. The black elite provoked some scorn in the civil rights era of revolution in mass black consciousness. You didn’t come here on the ‘Mayflower.’ You came here on a slave ship.” But what else are you? You are ex-slaves.
Malcolm X said that he was a field Negro and for him the black establishment, the black upper class, became synonymous with the house Negro. The house Negro loved the master more than the master loved himself, while the field Negro prayed for a strong wind to come along should the master’s house catch fire. He ate the same food as the master, dressed and spoke just as well. The house Negro lived better than the field Negro, Malcolm X explained. The house Negro, according to Malcolm X, looked out for his master’s interest and put the field Negro back in his place on the plantation when he got out of line. Margo Jefferson at Columbia University, New York City, September 2015
0 kommentar(er)
