The Failure of “Contemporary Black Culture”
A lot of people today are saying “Black Culture” is trash. Well…yes, it is. But why?
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Some will suggest that the cold, clinical and kitschy art of Kehinde Wiley, the overrated, rudimentary Basquiat; the purple prose of Stanley Crouch or the stale, sclerosed and derivative ramblings of Ta Nehisi Coates; or that the warmed over middlebrow Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Esmeralda Spalding or, God forbid, Kendrick Lamar collectively constitute the cornerstone for a “New Black Renaissance.” I say NO.
I won’t speak on Colson Whitehead right now. Nor on Basquiat and how the Warhol industrial complex orientalized him to death. I’ll also refrain from discussing the political and aesthetic disasters that Stanley Crouch made of his writing career. My primary focus is upon the cultural disasters of the 21st century.
We are nearly twenty-five years into the 21st. Even the most casual glance back twenty years shows us that culturally speaking, we are nowhere near anything that can be rightfully termed a “Renaissance.” The appellation itself is laughable. Nothing that has been done this century — especially in the field of music — comes close to reaching the level of artistic achievement of the 1990s. Everyone knows this. However, few people say it with words; they say it with their choice in music streaming. Most young folks in their late teens and early twenties prefer to listen to music from — the 1990s.
Let’s leave aside the Black Elite’s awkward and pretentious efforts to push art into the 21st Century, since to be truthful nobody really pays either them or their “cultural achievements” too much mind. I only briefly touched on this group because (politically, culturally and ecomomically speaking) they still play a critical role in financing, upholding and shaping mainstream “black culture” as it exists today. Yet naturally all this talk concerning “black culture” and the sorry shape that it’s in begs the inevitable question: just what in hell IS “black culture” or better yet, what is “culture”?
This is a question that even sends me, Mr. Uber-Erudite, running to Google for the right answer. I guess it’s necessary because while nearly all of us who talk about “culture” can visualize it and to an extent even contribute to it, we may not actually define it in layman’s terms. So here it is:
A CULTURE is a collection of ideas, customs, behaviors, beliefs, institutions, artistic and intellectual achievements of a particular group of people.
Going by the above definition as to what constitutes culture, one has to be frank about our current situation as African Americans. The sad truth about Black mainstream culture today — and no one cares to admit this — is that it is, quite possibly, the most worthless culture in the world. Our “culture” no real intrinsic value for anyone, besides making its corporate purveyors increasingly wealthy…while its practitioners scrape by with penny-ante royalty payouts. It happens more often than you think and yes, I’m referring to the fucking bling-bling, drill, cash-money gold-toofus crowd. (Some will get in here and argue that SexxyRed, Meek Mill and their ilk don’t represent “The Culture,” but I’ll argue that any culture that allows for something like that to flourish is a culture that needs replacing.)
Having said that, I realize that various non-mainstream Black cultures — particularly in the Deep South — still exist, are intact and still functioning, however marginally. However there’s no point in looking away from the hurricane to gaze out upon the blue sky just behind it. The hurricane is still headed in our direction, and a hell of a lot of Black people are not only caught up in it but already lying in its wake, dead or otherwise buried beneath the wreckage.
Outliers such as the Gullah/Geechee, or the cultures of rural North Mississippi, or the Black Seminoles, are simply invisible to much of the world majority. They can thank the curse of mass media for this, as well as the relative indifference of African Americans to their own collective self-image. Gullah culture itself is increasingly orientalized and exoticized to titillate white tourists to the Georgia Sea Islands. Furthermore, Gullah-Geechees — no matter what their individual or collective flaws may be — are just too goddamned civilized for white tastes. They’re kinda lame, you know. They’re not edgy enough, not violent enough, not erotic enough: nobody wants to masturbate to a group of old fat people in bandanas and overalls.
Therefore the Gullah nation can’t really make that true “hardcore” contribution to this blackfaced juggernaut that is our “culture.” After all, where’s the fucking swag? The tacky clothes? The cash-flashing? The spread pussies? The guns and gold? This is precisely what it all boils down to, the whole meaty core of what we think we are, how we wish the world to see us and how we (Blacks) insist upon viewing ourselves. Much of “The Culture,” so-called (meaning all that “urban hood” crap) is simply another wing of the global porn industry.
A lot of mainstream Black Americans loathe this “culture,” but to be frank we don’t appear to have any real incentive to change it. We look on rather helplessly as this so-called “culture” continues to fester like a rotting wound. Our “culture”—as it is marketed worldwide—is a toxic brew of cornpone minstrelsy, crass materialism, cheap populism, slapstick violence, and a hyper-sexuality that borders on the comical. It’s like the state of “Israel” in its own little disgusting way: a grossly distorted reflection of who we really are and designed specifically to serve the interests of white supremacism. (However, one might adequately refer to this culture as a kind of global Invisible Empire like, for instance, the Ku Klux Klan.) Much of our “music” today makes the coon shouts of 125 years ago sound like Duke Ellington.
The Black Elite’s attempts at “culture” — both past and present — are typically stymied by pretense, artifice and an unhealthy obsession with respectability politics. This elite spends a lot of its time defining itself in opposition to the suffocating machismo and blatant stupidity its arbiters think is typical of lower-class Blacks. Naturally, there is a concomitant obsession (on their part) with homosexuality that is more than merely neurotic. This obsession is a mystery only to those who are unfamiliar with the deep rooted class and caste prejudices of the Black bourgeoisie, who utilize as many alibis as they can to put high walls betwen themselves and the rest of Black America.
The queer alibi, on the part of the Black bourgeois cultural arbiter, is that his/her/their queerness somehow sets them apart from the stinking rank-and-file of “inferior Negroes,” and a few steps closer to a more urbane, sophisticated and “superior” white world. If this is by way of the neoliberal fraud of “multiculturalism,” then so be it. (In the mind of the Black cultural elitist, anything is better than just “plain old black.”)
However, the majority of Black Americans generally don’t care much for the pretenses of armchair Marxist Negro academics. In fact a fair number of armchair Marxist Negro academics themselves don’t care too much for their own pretentious creations and rightfully reject — as do many Black Americans — the silly respectability politics of conforming to white, middle-class expectations.
Unfortunately, they’ve fallen into an even more dangerous trap by doing just the opposite: rejecting white bourgeois “respectability” altogether in favor of “that life” — that is, the lifestyles of the black American lumpenproletariat.
This dichotomy between the Black Elite’s “respectability politics” and the ignorant clownishness of the most backward-minded of Black Americans is a false one. Neither side has a correct stance as to what constitutes “authentic blackness.” Both sides are a negative reaction to institutional and structural anti-Blackness, and far too many black people feel they need to chose between “respectability,” which is how they’ve been trained to understand “white” — that is, everything (supposedly) proper, decent, clean and morally upright — and “coonery,” which is, of course, precisely the opposite.
The shower cap, t-shirt and flip flop epidemic among many black people in America evolved out of misguided notions as to what constitutes “authentic” black culture. Some of these black people are self-styled “revolutionaries,” “intersectionalists” and “Marxists.” They have come to define “Blackness” as everything in opposition to white upper-class culture — or, truthfully, what the bonnet bumpers think white upper-class bourgeois culture is.
These bonnet-bumpers have an extremely limited, highly emotional and rather childlike view of the world around them, as if they cannot see past their own genitalia. They are generally out of shape, overweight, sloppy, impulsive and ill-mannered. They think that their behavior constitutes a radical rejection of white middle class “respectability politics” when, in fact, their behavior is completely reactionary, if not downright stupid — though on the surface it may not appear that way to anyone not familiar with the history of American sartorial politics.
Everything in America is political and politicized. The bonnet bumpers don’t realize that their slovenliness and ignorance have less to do with rejection of bourgeois culture and more to do with the fact that — frankly — they have accepted their designated place in the evil American racial hierarchy.
Needless to say, it was white supremacists who designated that place for them. The bonnet bumpers don’t get it because they don’t really know their history that well. They are also — in a clinical sense — very sick people, whose pathologies have nothing to do with Africa or African Americans, and which should not be heralded as “cultural authenticity”—in other words, “real Blackness.”
“Real Blackness,” according to a sociological study done in 1973 by D. Philip McGee, is simply a set of “behavioral patterns” which are, psychologically speaking, “dependent and unnatural.” Long story short: “Real Blackness” is not “culture”; it is a Stockholm Syndrome, a slave mentality, a plantation mentality. These same type of behavioral patterns can be found all over the world and in every society that has a deeply impoverished lumpenproletariat. The grossly racist implications of such a ridiculous statement concerning “real blackness” (and which were rightfully challenged by countless Black writers) are clear: blackness is equated with poverty, with violence, with impulsivity, with an absence of self-control, an absence of intellect and refinement. To be black — for antiblack racists — is to be a “straight savage” or some dumb cunt in a cheap, Chinese wig babbling about the color of one’s asshole. Blackness is everything unnatural, everything dependent, everything silly, negative, with the id, with stupidity and filthiness.
On the other hand, the European World View — allegedly — greatly encourages individualism, uniqueness, self-expression and individual rights. Ideally it is within the framework of individualistic Western culture that “man” was able to be “himself” and not a dot among other dots. However, let’s be honest about how “Western individualism” and “humanism” functions in real time. Only a very small number of people on this planet really benefit from it, and nearly all of them are white and affluent. Everyone else has had to toe the line and do what their “individualistic,” “self-expressing” Western elites tell them to do. And who are these “individualists” and “self-expressors”? Your Elon Musks, your Richard Bransons, your Jay-Z’s, Dave Chapelles, Beyonces, Cardi Bs, Whoopi Goldbergs, Barack Obamas, and all of their lot. Apparently nobody ever told you that Western “individualism” comes at an impossibly steep cost.
Untold billions have been deeply alienated and atomized by this European World View. Western society is empty, asexual, mediocre and cultureless, a plastic dystopia mollified only by Netflix, alcohol, weed and internet porn. It is a murderously lonely Hell ringed by AI generated sunsets and palm fronds.
However, the pitfalls in the African World View have resulted in the creation of some of the most timid, narrow-minded, parochial, bigoted and conservative people in the entire world. The African World View, while prioritizing commonality, collective responsibility and strong in-group dynamics, also encourages a sameness, group-think, a herd mentality that one also finds (in its grossly perverted form) in Nazism and the ultra-Stalinist lunacy of Pol Pot and Enver Hoxha. It also seems to have been an incentive for Europeans and Arabs to make us humanity’s shit-shovelers.
If anything great has evolved out of the troublesome mass of contradictions that is our historical African-American Culture, it is (or was) a somewhat imperfect synthesis between a need for community, for collective responsibility, cooperation and commonality found in African worldviews and a desire for individual self-expression, uniqueness and the recognition of human rights which — ideally — are found in the ideas of European humanism.** That synthesis was best realized in African American musical culture—particularly in Jazz and its attendant subculture of the c.1920–1970 Negro Renaissance.
Racism, as partly defined by Ludovic Slimak, is the refusal of difference: the oppressor demands a kind of sameness to our human species. Yet to be truthful, Racism is also a coin in which this refusal of difference Slimak speaks of is merely one side: the other side is, of course, an absolute emphasis on difference, making of your fellow human The Other. To stop racism one must get rid of the coin.
This applies in full force to black elite America’s reckoning with the majority of black Americans. The Black Bourgeoisie, while embracing their own whitified individuality, freely lump all the other poor “niggers” together into one banana boat. They are just like their white racist overlords, for whom they act as perpetual overseer and for whom they do the dirty work in keeping us under the white supremacist heel. In fact it is the job of the Black Bourgie to inform the entire planet that the rank-and-file African American is just a filthy, lazy, criminal-minded, oversexed little “Pookie”. He does this with so-called “Contemporary Black Culture.”
In the same breath, he will turn around and say that this “culture” is “trash.” The penultimate answer to the question as to why it is “trash” is simple: “Much of the American confusion, if not most of it, is a direct result of the American effort to avoid dealing with the Negro as a man.”
James Baldwin spoke those words in 1966. Nothing has changed since then, of course, except that in the last six decades Black people have allowed the white man to fool them all over again, to dictate to their black hides just what a “Black man” is supposed to look like. They, too, are incapable of seeing each other as human beings. This is what makes Black culture worthless.
Hardheim-Berlin, Nov. 14, 2023
**Coincidentally, however, they are also embedded in the Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, a document upon which the white “American” one was implicitly modeled.)