Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Batstone, Eduardo Mendieta

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Good Citizen

Routledge

Chapter One

The Moral Obligations of Living
in a Democratic Society

* * *

Cornel West

One of the fundamental questions of our day is whether the traditionof struggle can be preserved and expanded. I refer to the struggle fordecency and dignity, the struggle for freedom and democracy.

    In Tradition and Individual Talent (1919), T. S. Eliot claims thattradition is not something you inherit -- if you want it, you must sacrificefor it. In other words, tradition must be fought for.

    We live at the end of a century of unprecedented brutality and barbarity,a period when more than two hundred million fellow humanbeings have been murdered in the name of some pernicious ideology.Nazism was at the heart of a so-called civilized Europe. Stalinism wasat the core of a so-called emancipatory Soviet Union. European colonialismand imperialism in Africa, South America, and Asia have leftpalpable and lasting scars on fellow human beings. Patriarchal subordinationof sisters of all colors and all regions and all countries is evident.The devaluation and degradation of gay brothers and lesbiansisters across race, region, and class, as well as the marginalization ofthe disabled and physically challenged.

    What kind of species are we? What leads us to think that the traditionof struggle for decency and dignity can be preserved into thetwenty-first century? Or will it be the case that we shall witness in thetwenty-first century the unleashing of new, unnameable and indescribableforms of agony and anguish? At the moment, we are right to fearthe emergence of ancient tribalisms that are revitalized under theaegis of an uncontested global capitalism, a movement accompaniedby the "gangsterization" of community, nation, and the globe.

    What attracts me to the Black-Jewish dialogue is the potential thatis inherent to our respective traditions of struggle. It has nothing todo with skin pigmentation per se, nor with ethnicity in the abstract.Rather, it is because these two communities have developed a set ofresponses to combat the fundamental problem of evil.

    The problem of evil refers to working out a response to undeservedsuffering, unmerited pain, and unjustified harm. It is impossibleto talk about Jews or Blacks, symbolically or literally, withoutdiscussing the problem of evil because these groups have been consistentlydevalued and subjugated, if not downright hated and despised.Indeed, the history of that treatment raises very alien dilemmas forAmerica.

    Henry James was correct when he declared America to be a "hotelcivilization." In fact, this is the reason James left the country; heexperienced American society as being too bland and culturally impoverished.At the turn of the twentieth century, America did not want todeal with the problem of evil, let alone the tragic and the comic -- itwas too preoccupied with the melodramatic and the sentimental.

    A hotel -- the fusion of a home and a market -- is such a wonderfulmetaphor for America. The warmth, security, and motherhood ofthe home exists, as does that patriarchal tilt that burdens sisters of allcolors, to caretake men who must forage in the marketplace. The mengo forth into a heartless world, in a quest for mobility, liquidity, andprofit-making. This fusion of home and market has its own distinctethos: privatistic, individualistic, tribalistic, ethnic-centered, raciallysubscribed, distrustful of the nation-state, distrustful of bureaucracy,and marginalizing of public interest and the common good.

    It is no coincidence then, that the best of the Jewish and Blacktraditions has consistently infused a sense of the tragic and the comicin order to expand the precious traditions of their struggle. In my owncase, I began to struggle with the problem of evil by grappling withthe absurd, the absurd in America and the absurd as America. I did nothave to read a book by Jean-Paul Sartre or see a play by Samuel Beckettto understand what the absurd was. I had a black body in a civilizationdeeply shaped by white supremacist perceptions, sensibilities,and institutional practices. When something as irrational and arbitraryas skin pigmentation is the benchmark of measuring one's humanity,then that state of affairs is totally absurd.

    What is distinctive about this precious experiment in democracycalled America is that it has always been inextricably interwoven withwhite supremacy and its legacy. Although some scholars call it anirony, I call it a hypocrisy. John J. Chapman described it accuratelywhen he concluded that white supremacy was like a serpent wrappedaround the legs of the table upon which the Declaration of Independencewas signed by the founding fathers. It haunted America thenand nearly 220 years later it still does. The challenge for America todayis whether it will continue to deny, evade, and avoid various formsof evil in its midst.

    In any discussion about race matters it is vital to situate yourself ina tradition, in a larger narrative that links the past to the present.When we think of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Buelle, WellsBarnett, A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Ella Baker, James Baldwin,and so many nameless and anonymous ones, we cannot but be movedby their standards of vision and courage. They are wind at one's back.

    The recovery of a tradition always begins at the existential level,with the experience of what it is to be human under a specific set ofcircumstances and conditions. It is very difficult to engage in a candidand frank critical discussion about race by assuming it is going to be arational exchange. Race must be addressed in a form that can dealwith its complexity and irrationality.

    Perhaps no one understood the existential dimension of being humanand African in America better than W. E. B. Du Bois. He recognizedthe absurd in American society and realized that being Black in Americais to be a problem. Du Bois asserted that race in this country is thefetishization of a problem, black bodies in white space. He understoodwhat it meant to be cast as part of a problem people rather than peoplewith problems. Once the humanity of a people is problematized,they are called into question perennially. Their beauty is attacked:wrong hips, lips, noses, skin texture, skin pigmentation, and hair texture.Black intelligence is always guilty before proven innocent in thecourt of the life of the mind; The Bell Curve is just a manifestation ofthe cycle. Perhaps the gravest injustice is the image of the welfarequeen. Looking at the history of black women in America, on the plantationtaking care of white children in white households, how is it possiblethat they could become the symbol of laziness? All of theforegoing are signs of a humanity that has been problematized.

    Du Bois also underscored that to be part of a problem people is tobe viewed as part of an undifferentiated blob, a monolithic block.Problem people become indistinguishable and interchangeable, whichmeans that only one of them has to be asked to find out what all therest of them think.

    It is rare in human history, of course, that...