White Folks: First Humility, Then Strengths

Amiel Handelsman, executive leadership coach

I’m sharing this week’s post with my colleague in leadership development, Amiel Handelsman. After his short contribution, which originated as a newsletter post he delivered to his email list last week, I’ll share how we met and exactly why I’m sharing it: a call to civic and cultural leadership on the issue of race.

Here’s Amiel’s title:

Attention, fellow white people: first humility, then strengths

By Amiel Handelsman

As support for Black Lives Matter grows, many white people are asking themselves, perhaps for the first time, "What can I do?" A good initial step is humility. That's where I start. But step two just might be tapping your strengths. Remember StrengthsFinder? How about VIA Character? Dust off the report. Remind yourself of your virtues and signature talents. I’m pretty sure your African American friends and colleagues don’t want you to suddenly forget them now. Mine sure don’t. How might these strengths help you rise to this moment?

The African-American experience is also a hero’s journey

One way to describe the African American experience is intergenerational racialized trauma. This is what Diane Woods taught me in the interview I shared last time. An equally powerful interpretation is the hero’s journey. Consider Harriet Tubman. Is there any more quintessential American hero? This theme ran through my 2018 interview with Greg Thomas, which is even more timely today.

Greg highlights how different the metaphor of the hero’s journey is from the orientation of Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin. We also discuss the uniquely American—and African American—tradition of stomping the blues. These ideas stand on the shoulders of Albert Murray, the great 20th century American writer and close colleague of Ralph Ellison. Murray’s first book, The Omni-Americans, was described by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates in his New Yorker profile of Murray (“The King of Cats”) as “so pissed-off, jaw-jutting, and unapologetic that it demanded to be taken seriously.” Please listen to my conversation with Greg here.

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Thanks, Amiel, for sharing our interview from 2018 with your readers . . . and ours.

Albert Murray

On the podcast page featuring the interview, Amiel shares a useful outline of the major nodes of our conversation:

Interview Highlights

·        6:00 Albert Murray’s influence on American culture and art

·        13:30 American identity synthesizes multiple roots

·        20:00 Murray’s devastating critique of “ghetto-ologists” and “safari technicians”

·        35:00 Decoding ancient fairy tales and applying them to life today

·        39:00 The blues idiom as life compass

·        43:00 The hero’s journey in American cultures, e.g. Harriet Tubman

·        46:00 Hero’s journey is an alternative orientation from Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin

·        55:30 We fear difference and are attracted to it. Can we integrate this into ourselves?

·        59:00 The Jazz Leadership Project

·        1:10:00 Apprentice, journeyman, and master craftsman

The Integral Backstory

I met Amiel several years as part of a community of students of a body of knowledge called Integral.

I first became aware of the Integral model and philosophy in the late 1990s. I was a doctoral student in NYU’s American Studies program. After a class session, I bopped over to East-West Books on 14th and Fifth Ave. I’ve had an abiding interest in various forms of philosophy and spirituality for all of my adult years. While perusing a table of books there, I saw a title and cover that intrigued me: A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber.

What an audacious title, I thought. I was intrigued. Did it live up to its billing?

To be candid, the experience of reading A Brief History of Everything was astonishing, the historical sweep and interdisciplinary range mind-blowing. I’d read hundreds and hundreds of books by then, by heavyweights of 19th and 20th century thought. But the way, through Q&A, Wilber weaved the course of cosmic and human history into an arc inclusive of individual, cultural, and social trajectories of development, grounded in the evolution of matter, life, and mind, one phase transcending while including the other, was new to me. His integration and synthesis of knowledge was and is a grand achievement.

Wilber’s framing included the post-modern ethos I encountered as a student at NYU, and that today is raging as a prosecutorial, politically correct ideology of the left in the public sphere, while at the same time vaulting over its limited identity politics by leaps and bounds. While I appreciated, for instance, post-structuralist critiques by Foucault and Derrida, and was quite drawn to the rhizome-like thought of Gilles Deleuze, I had a grounding in the Ralph Ellison-Albert Murray Continuum, which inoculated me from some of the excesses of that anti-modernist frame of reference. One excess that really pissed me off was an implicit presumption that critique in and of itself was as, or even more, important than the writings and art works upon which a critique was based.

Anyway, as with any body of thought, criticism of the post-postmodern Integral model arose after the publication of the Wilber’s tome, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, which was the basis of the shorter summary work I bought at East-West Books. Be that as it may, Integral meta-theory remains for me a useful model and heuristic device to analyze issues such as race. But not only that: an Integral paradigm has helped me devise some prescriptions for the race-racialization-racism dynamic that still threatens to tear apart our nation.

This is why I’m stepping up and stepping right into the debate and discourse over race.

Answering the Call

In the last few weeks, I’ve been interviewed and have participated in panel discussions about the demonstrations and uprisings over the brutal killing of George Floyd. A popular Internet channel based in the UK, Rebel Wisdom, of whom we’ve written in a recent post (in early April), released a video interview with me two weeks ago that has been viewed by nearly 20,000 people. The Integral Life website, which has featured my writing on Integral theory and jazz over the last decade, has a program called Integral Justice Warrior, hosted by Diane Musho Hamilton (who was featured prominently in the just-mentioned blog post on Rebel Wisdom.) In the first of several conversations utilizing an Integral model to make sense of what’s happening in the world, I joined several other folks of color to converse about the ways race—historically and right now—matters to the way to see, think about, and behave in the world, and to begin contemplating how to transcend its horrible impact while embracing a larger human vision of togetherness.

In the coming weeks, there are several more platforms and podcasts on which I’ll be participating. I especially look forward to a conversation with Peter Limberg, curator of The Stoa, on the connections between the philosophy of Stoicism and blues idiom wisdom on June 29. I feel called to add my voice and perspective based on decades of study and conversations with thoughtful people about race, culture, identity, and wisdom tools to unlock the gordian knot of race and racialist thinking. Such thinking becomes values and behavior inimical to not only black folk, but to the cultural, civic and civil advance of American civilization—period.

As a black American citizen, and as a writer-intellectual-entrepreneur, I embrace the ancestral imperative to envision a future where the better angels of our nature overcome the bedeviling human capacity for evil and sociopathic lack of empathy. Such a vision, and the attendant strategies to enact them, are my focus and intent.

I’ll keep you posted on the journey. Wish us the best, for the road is filled with potholes and the fields of battle with booby traps. Yet and still, the call of civic and cultural leadership beckons.

I’m happy to answer that call. Hope you are too.