Culture vs. Race: American Identity Hangs in the Balance
Race, to all people who use the term correctly, is a matter of a few easily observed physiological characteristics: the color of your skin, the texture of your hair, and the shape of a few extremities . . . But there is no scientific correlation between those physical features and behavior. The only correlation comes from the conditioning of the consciousness—and that is not the same thing as race. Consciousness and race just don’t correlate.
—Albert Murray
Introduction
Race is like a dead virus, brought alive by the vulnerability of those it feeds upon, attacking the immune system of the citizenry. “White supremacy” is a dead metaphor of this deadly virus.
Culture is a garden of growth, integration, and synthesis of human roots and branches expanding into a universe of possibility.
Race is like a weed that chokes development, its very design an enactment of invidious division and categorization.
Culture, says Nigerian Nobel Laureate of Literature Wole Soyinka, is the “primacy of Source,” a universal spring “nourished by its tributaries, which sink back into the earth, and thereby replenish that common source in an unending, creative cycle.”
Wole Soyinka
Race promotes the suppression and repression of some for the material benefit of others, damaging American character and our collective nervous system from the top to the bottom of the caste hierarchy, inter-generationally.
Culture is also transferred “from generation to generation” wrote Ralph Ellison in 1970, with “forms of expression” converted “into forms of art” through which “[Black Americans] have projected their most transcendent images of themselves and of the world.”
Ultimately: culture is an infinite game, race a finite game.
Gardeners celebrate variety, unlikeness, spontaneity. They understand that an abundance of styles is in the interest of vitality. The more complex the organic content of the soil, for example—that is, the more numerous its sources of change—the more vigorous its liveness. Growth promotes growth.
So also in culture. Infinite players understand that the vigor of a culture has to do with the variety of its sources, the differences within itself. The unique and the surprising are not suppressed in some persons for the strength of others. The genius in you stimulates the genius in me.
—James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
Don’t Confuse Race and Culture, Please
In my nearly 57 years of experience as an American citizen, I’ve found that many conflate being racially “white” with being American or Western. Some well-meaning people (as well as bad faith actors) confuse race and culture when describing the differing somatic and cognitive styles of people originally from Europe, Africa, and Asia. Such views erase the distinction between race and culture and commit intellectual violence.
Those continental differences, aside from historical and environmental influences and worldviews, arise from variations in culture, expressed as idiomatic styles in language and writing, music and the arts, spirituality and philosophy, cuisine, rituals, myths, and games.
Allow me to get personal: racially, I'm not white. But from a cultural and historical lens I am Western and American. So, my cultural roots as an American, as part of a family of multi-generation American citizens of African descent, are also part European.
I even have biological European roots. My 23andMe results are as follows: 80% Sub-Saharan African, 18% European, and 2% East Asian and Native American.
As my focus in this post is pro-culture and polemically anti-race, I’ll continue smacking the deadly inadequacy of the race concept upside da head: as my mentor Albert Murray said above, consciousness determines behavior not phenotype or skin color, factors underlying “race” which tell us nothing about a person’s subjective response to life’s conditions or challenges.
No matter what racial essentialists and social determinists claim, culture is a generative cocoon, a holonic, holistic vision of metamorphosis. Culture can ready our wings to not just survive but thrive on the other side of this collective phase shift of self-organizing emergence into an uncertain future. The words, images, and ideas we invoke and evoke right now are crucial, for, as Ellison once said, “writers and poets help create or reveal hidden realities by asserting their existence. Otherwise they might as well become social scientists.”
American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other. And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society.
—Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy
By the way, the inverse of my personal scenario above holds true too: anyone who identifies as an American has cultural roots which are part Negro or Black- or African American (take your pick). This cultural reality may come as a surprise (or shock!) to those given to racial tribalism and myths of purity, but the sooner this cultural truth is accepted and embraced the better for this nation’s civil and civic discourse of pragmatist pluralism in an open society.
All of us are part white, and all y’all are part colored.
—Ralph Ellison, 1973 @ Harvard’s Alain Locke Symposium
While I can and do accept my European roots as an American, I wonder if white Americans who think in racial terms have trouble accepting their Black American roots. If so, this is yet another instance, among so, so many others, that perceiving in racial terms, rather than seeing and feeling with cultural intelligence, is a pothole-ridden road to ethnocentric confusion and tribal division.
Constance Rourke, author of American Humor and The Roots of American Culture
What Is American Culture?
American culture is a mixture, a hybrid, a pluralistic composite. Therefore jazz, perhaps the best exemplar in organized sound of American culture, reflects a synthesis of parts or tributaries too. Jazz integrates elements that originated in Africa, Europe, and Cuba into a unique synthesis of feeling and form, technique and passion, individual excellence and ensemble mindset.
Constance Rourke, pictured above, identified the archetypal figures of the indigenous Yankee, the backwoodsman (partly Native American), and the Negro as taproots of the American character in the era of Andrew Jackson. John A. Kouwenhoven's idea, in works such as A Beer Can By the Highway: Essays on What’s American about America, was that American culture derives from the interaction of vernacular or folk traditions and a learned, academic tradition—largely derived from a European intellectual and philosophical heritage. The tension between a more conservative academic orientation and a more free-wheeling make-do-and-improvise-with-what-ya-got style is in part what makes American culture so robust and resilient. (So, conservative and liberal dynamics, conceived in cultural terms, becomes a dynamic of massive creativity rather than the hyper-polarized political environment in Washington, D.C. today.)
Vernacular style, according to Ellison’s riff on Kouwenhoven, “is a dynamic process in which the most refined styles from the past are continually merged with the play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear improvisations which we invent in our efforts to control our environment and entertain ourselves.”
As mentioned above, the idea and enactment of race fits what James Carse termed a finite game, a rivalrous, win-lose, in group-out group social system. Race is a social and power dynamic based on the boundaries of phenotype and skin color that reinforces what master journalist Isabel Wilkerson aptly calls an American caste system.
Conscious culture, rather, is an infinite game, a visionary horizon of open possibilities and playful creativity. Race in its modern guise is only several hundred years old. The concept and practice of culture has a legacy of several thousand years as the symbolic means through which human beings hang together, bridging our biological to cosmic heritage.
We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
—Ben Franklin
The choice is yours: race or culture? In the same vein, let’s ask ourselves “what cultural values do we seek to manifest on the other side of this paradigm shift?” The answers may determine the very future of America and the New World.