Possibility and Peril: Internal American Relations
In the address below, given at the Omni-American Future Project’s award ceremony two weeks ago, I focus on the relationships of Americans with one another through the prism of the Black American-Jewish American bond. (The planning for the event far preceded the recent controversies over antisemitism and adjacent bigotries by Kanye West, Kyrie Irving, and the orange-haired menace to society.) The speech followed a presentation by poet and journalist Roya Hakakian in which she recalled the role of Harlem and Afro-American literature in her imagination while growing up in Iran. Hakakian quoted from Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans to counter the rhetoric of victimization and liability as regards Harlem, its people, and the culture developed there.
In a lightly edited version of my speech, I continue in the same vein:
Let’s continue with Albert Murray speaking about Harlem in the essay “Image and Unlikeness in Harlem,” from The Omni-Americans, where he counter-states those who over-emphasize liabilities over assets:
What most observers almost always seem to be unaware of for some strange reason, however, is the incontestable fact that Negroes in Harlem, like those elsewhere, also respond to beauty, style, and elegance—even as their wonderful ancestors found delight in the magnolias and honeysuckles, the crepe myrtles and cape jasmines, the terrain, the fabulous thickets, woodland streams, and verdant hillsides, the gourd vines and trellis work near the cabins, the graceful lines of plantation mansions and even the deep richness of the soil they tilled during the darkest and most oppressive days of slavery.
—Albert Murray
In the last portion of that statement, Murray isn’t romanticizing the slavery period. But he is capturing an aesthetic sensibility that descendants of the continent of Africa who labored and loved and bided time and dreamt and prayed and sang of a better life right here in the U.S.A. maintained as equipment for living. This sensibility was translated as styles and strategies for being and becoming, and this sense of life and lifestyle found a home in settings both sacred and secular. These idiomatic nuances of culture were foundations for how a scorned and rebuked people survived as they were striving and striding toward freedom.
Our Current Predicaments
The current predicament is how we as a people of and in the United States of America, as citizens of a flawed yet great republic can keep the light of our highest values as contained in our founding documents in clear view as we engage in pluralistic, democratic dialogue about confronting the problems and predicaments that bedevil and beset us. These problems and predicaments include a deep and persistent inequality at the root of so much social division. The generational lack of upward mobility that so many live with and under, breeds resentment, cynicism, and depression and becomes social unrest, substance abuse, and even violence, while, at the very least, making family life more difficult. And when we factor in the the loss of meaning formerly found, on a more widespread basis, in our religious institutions, such as the Abyssinian Baptist Church, as well as the momentous technological shifts wiping out whole industries and categories of work, many, far too many, are adrift, unsure, and uncertain about the present and the future.
Yes, racialization and racism remain. But the structural impediments aren’t only based on social identity categories, though it is exacerbated by them. The structural impediment is the lack of courageous leadership in the public and the private sector, leadership centered on a vision of helping individuals, families, neighborhoods and communal institutions to flourish, and working to eliminate or at least attenuate the factors and forces that interfere with the realization of that vision.
A Democratic Vision of Human Flourishing
Dr. Danielle Allen, tonight’s winner of the second annual Albert Murray Award for Omni-American Excellence, presents such a vision in her work. In a recent podcast interview with political scientist Yascha Mounk, Allen concluded by saying:
In the 19th century, this country had a focus on the concept of internal improvements: how do you put the infrastructure in place that gives people the chance to stand up and build a life for themselves? I believe we should replace our “safety net” conception with [a] foundational flourishing conception; that we should be invested in internal improvements that yield an infrastructure pack that makes it possible for people to stand up and find a pathway to flourishing [emphasis added].
—Danielle Allen
By highlighting the bonds that our two crucial groups—Jewish Americans and Black Americans—hold in common, as an example of constructive ways to fight against tribalism, illiberalism, and bigotry, the Omni-American Future Project will set an example of civic and cultural excellence that points a way to that flourishing. Some highlight the tensions between our two peoples, tensions periodically evidenced in handwringing about so-called Black-Jewish relations. My study of this history suggests that oftentimes those problems are exaggerated. At the same time, the harsh and tragic lessons of history as well as evidence provided by those who track bigotry, demonstrate to both of our groups the necessity of vigilance against antisemitism and racism, from whatever quarter and whichever extreme of the political spectrum they may arise.
Let’s go back to those aforementioned bonds. Another writer crucial to the blues idiom wisdom tradition we’ve mentioned several times tonight is my late friend Stanley Crouch. Here’s what he had to say in The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race: “… what is most important about the parallels between U.S. Negroes and Jews is the tragicomic sensibility, as it has translated itself into music, dance, comedy, and drama. From the Old Testament’s tragic vision of human frailty, from the Passion of Christ and perhaps the greatest blues line ever written, ‘Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ [Afro Americans] fashioned one side of their vision … [and] transmuted pathos and tragedy into exultation through the rhythmic lyricism of swing.”
He continues:
I believe that Jews, because they were neither black nor Christian, were perhaps able to sense the connecting elements of the national soul, and to produce work that spoke with democratic accuracy to Negroes and whites. This, of course, is something that Negroes did as well. And when Negroes and Jews stared one another in the eye aesthetically, I can only say what Count Basie said of Lester Young, a single syllable that compresses the explosive vitality of this congress of form and human feeling: Wow.
—Stanley Crouch
To view the awards ceremony, which featured live jazz and tributes to the honorees Coleman Hughes and Danielle Allen—as well as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Albert Murray, Rev. Calvin Butts, Ralph Ellison, Benny Goodman, and the cultural legacy of Harlem—look here.