Critical Social Justice vs The Omni-American Vision
The post’s title above is taken from a crucial portion of an interview with me by the editors of the Journal of Free Black Thought. Free Black Thought is a
. . . small group of scholars, technologists, parents, and above all American citizens determined to amplify vital black voices that are rarely heard on mainstream platforms. As citizens, we pursue no political agenda other than a commitment to free speech, civil rights, and a conviction that a pluralistic society committed to liberal democracy is nourished by the entire spectrum of black thinking on matters of politics, society, and culture.
As parents, we are troubled that our children, black and non-black alike, are coming of age at a time when K-12 schools and elite institutions such as academia, major media companies, and corporations appear committed to enforcing narrow and tendentious standards of black racial authenticity in thought and behavior. We hope our efforts inspire our children to see their blackness as a space not of constrained identity but of endless possibility.
As scholars and technologists, some of us currently serve in organizations that might look unkindly upon our efforts to celebrate black diversity. We regret that some of us must therefore for the time being remain anonymous.
As one of the Partners of the “Combating Racism and Antisemitism Together: Shaping an Omni-American Future” event, Free Black Thought gave me the honor of challenging me with possible critiques of the event. Here’s an excerpt:
Mike Bowen
What kind of pushback do you get when you talk about the Omni-American project, perhaps especially from Critical Social Justice activists? What are some of the things that your critics are saying and how do you deal with them?
Greg Thomas
An Omni-American future means being against racism and antisemitism, so some might automatically think that it's a part of an “antiracist” ideology from the likes of Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo. I've heard some rumblings of criticism, but the project is very new so it's not yet in the crosshairs of the cultural wars. I would like you to share with me some of the pushback that you think might come. Let me respond to that.
Mike Bowen
There are some people who draw a line between Branford and Wynton, and say that Wynton, at Lincoln Center, doesn't have very black audiences. You know, he plays classical music and he's all about the money, so you know, Is he really black? Is he really down with the people?
Greg Thomas
You gave me a softball question, man! I’ve known Wynton since 1993. If you look at and listen to interviews with Wynton talking and can't tell that Wynton Marsalis is a straight up brother, I don’t know what to tell you. He’s from Kenner, Louisiana, a hop and a skip from New Orleans. He grew up dealing with racism in school; he inherited a 60s-derived pro-black nationalism of sorts—until he met Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray. They helped to expand his horizons of understanding and range of reference considerably, which, along with his talent and incredible work ethic, makes him down not only with his own idiomatic group, but to Americans overall. He’s an example of what I, borrowing from Anthony Appiah and Danielle Allen, call a rooted cosmopolitan.
But I can tell you from knowing him personally that he is one of the highest representations of a Black American ethos and living value system. The idea that his playing classical music is outside our tradition is just ignorant. I'm sorry: it's just ignorant. Murray said that as Americans, we’re heirs of the entire legacy of world civilization. We've certainly had great Black Americans who have performed other musical forms at very high levels. So, in classical music, we can mention the divas, Leontyne Price, Shirley Verrett, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle . . .
Mike Bowen
All those people are dead or old. How you going to deal with Twitter and TikTok, where young people's attention is? We're living in a post-modern society. We don't care about traditions. You don't have influencers standing around with horns and mutes and plungers. Where does jazz have any relevance in the way society is going?
Greg Thomas
There's a lot there to unpack. Let me just start by saying that jazz is what Murray called a fine art. It’s not one that is evaluated based on pop culture standards. Its relevance is not based on whether or not it is popular. Its relevance is based on how it embodies and expresses the best aspects of Black American idiomatic culture and American culture overall.
When I was young, when I was learning to play saxophone, I would listen to people like Sidney Bechet, who was the first truly great individual soloist on saxophone. Duke Ellington loved him. He was from New Orleans, like Louis Armstrong. I actually had the audacity and ignorance to think that, because he played with a wide vibrato, and sounded old-timey and out of fashion to my young ears, that it was corny, and even easy to play. But as a horn player, try to play what Sidney Bechet played and you'll be disabused of that ignorance.
Sidney Bechet
So, a lack of historical grounding and understanding is not something to be proud of. Young people should be open to history and the wisdom of their elders—when I say that elders, I don't mean just their living elders, I mean elders across time—and learn the lessons from those elders and from that history, because if you don't, it's not just that, as they say, history will repeat itself. It's not actually true that history repeats itself per se. But there are lessons that have been learned, there are advances that have been made. There are solutions to problems which have been developed and presented—if you don't learn about them, you could end up making the same mistakes or going down a road that your ancestors already realized is a dead end.
For example, racial essentialism: that's a dead end. Evaluating people based on race or their skin color and phenotype and imputing negative attributes to them—I don't give a damn who's doing it—that's racism. That's racist. If I'm saying that because Jacob has light skin or you Mike, because you have darker skin—all of the stereotypes that were put on black folks back in the day—if I'm going to put that on you just because of the color of your skin or I'm going to put all the negatives of “white folks” on Jacob… on the face of it, that is ludicrous.
But people still do it.
Some don't understand the battles that have been waged to move beyond that way of seeing things, which Ellison called “blood thinking.” And I think some are vulnerable to the information warfare out here. There's information warfare being waged in mainstream media, in social media. Some of it is coming from outside of the United States but there's a bunch from inside the United States, too. I urge people to check out The Consilience Project; they delve deeply into this. I’m a member of their Board of Advisors.
So people end up becoming a part of groups—on the right, white nationalists who are taken with “replacement theory.” “We will not let the Jews replace us!” That kind of nonsense. But I’m also talking about on the left, where folks will, in some of these diversity training sessions, either literally or metaphorically put different groups of people, based on race, in different corners, with a dunce cap on.
The dunce cap has their “race” on it and underneath WHITE will be OPPRESSOR and underneath BLACK will be VICTIM. I'm sorry, that's ridiculous. Through our history and through the advancements of our political movements, we should have learned enough to not fall into those traps again. I think we have to be strong and speak out against that regressive tendency, because we know where that leads. Why would we fall back into that kind of thinking?
Certainly, there are aspects of the postmodernism that you [Michael] mentioned that are important. It's important to take a look, as postmodernism does, at modernity, and be honest about disasters of modernity. You had slavery during modernity. You had it before, but we're talking about chattel slavery and we're talking about settler colonialism. That's different than pre-modern slavery, where you might have someone that was sold to a family and becomes a part of the family and so forth. (I'm not saying that pre-modern slavery was anodyne nor am I saying that it was right. What I'm saying is that it was a different form of slavery.) It's one thing to critique—and it’s important to critique—the downsides of modernity, which, in large part, is what postmodernism does.
But modernity wasn't just a disaster. Modernity also has dignity. There are advancements in terms of liberal, universal values, particularly as related to the individual, that we cannot afford to let go of. So, as we go from—and this is Big History again—a pre-traditional, say, indigenous society to a traditional society, where religion and myths were prominent, you always have a move against the previous stage. There are different developmental theories that focus on these stages and transitions. With modernity and the scientific revolution, the mythological and religious aspects are critiqued: it's not empirical, it’s based on non-rational, magical thinking.
With modernity there are scientific advances, and advances of liberal humanism and so on. But then the postmodernists come along and say, yes, but you still have slavery, you still have all of these disparities that still exist because of those times. So, they're in a very strong critique-and-deconstruction mode. That is important. But for us to move forward, for us to shape an Omni-American future, we have to envision how we can reconstruct, not just deconstruct, and we should evaluate what we want to accept and integrate from earlier phases and stages of human development. What can we take along and bring along? That's wisdom! Don’t just throw out what came from the past.
Let's go to indigenous knowledge. My wife Jewel Kinch-Thomas, my beloved, and I maintain a blog together, TuneIntoLeadership.com. Her post, this very morning we’re doing this interview, is about her seeing two indigenous men, two Native Americans, who both spoke about indigenous wisdom. They look seven generations ahead. Think about that. In separate conversations, on different shows on the same day, Jewel heard them say that they plan their society seven generations ahead.
What do we have in our supposedly more advanced society? (Of course, in some ways it is more advanced, in terms of technology.) But in the corporate sphere, it’s often about quarterly returns—every three months. That ain't no long-term perspective. We have existential and civilizational threats to humanity, so it’s imperative that we develop a longer-term view based on wisdom. So that's an example of something that we can take from the indigenous perspective. There are examples of similar value through each stage. The postmodern critique is important, but it's not the be all and end all.
There are movements called Advanced Modernism, Meta-Modernism, Integral Theory. There are different models under development beyond the postmodern. There’s the Post-Progressive movement that I’m part of, for instance. I have an essay titled “Why I Am a Radical Moderate,” in which I discuss this perspective.
Another example. Jim Rutt, the past chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, talks about how our current social predicaments can be thought of from the perspective of game theory. He and those in his circle study and explore how we can move from the extractive, exploitative Game A to what they term Game B, a more generative social dynamic where more of us can thrive, not just survive. There are all kinds of different models, where people are investigating how we can move forward in a way that appreciates the wisdom of the past, while striving to leave aside its downsides. That's what we're trying to do with this Omni-American movement too. That's part of the orientation.
J:
So, here's one thing I would imagine some of my students saying. They would say look, you know we admire the intentions behind this project. It's very important that we connect oppressions, that we connect the oppression of racism with the oppression of antisemitism and other oppressions, so that we end up in a common fight. We need to have solidarity. However, we take issue with this concept of the “Omni-American.” To me that sounds a lot like All Lives Matter. It sounds a lot like “I don't see color.” It sounds like you're saying “there's only one race, the human race.” But the fact is that white supremacy has created a society in which we don't live as if there's one race, the human race. We assign different values to different people, based on their race, and we lift up some at the expense of others, black and brown people. So, to start talking about “Omni-Americans” is to give aid and comfort to white oppressors because it's telling them we're all one big family, so let's just have a hug and forget about the oppression. You don't have to give up any of your privilege, and racism is over, so you’re off the hook.
They might say, as well, that “Omni-Americans” erases the specificity of the black experience, the specificity of the Jewish experience—we’re all just Omni-Americans—and that in itself is is white supremacist . . . (to read the remainder of the interview, go to the Free Black Thought site.)
It’s not too late to register for the Shaping an Omni-American Future event. Even if you can’t attend live on Sunday from 6:00-7:30 pm EST, or Monday, 6:00-8:30 pm EST, by registering you’ll get a link to view at your leisure.