Final

Mahad M. Hassan

Prof. Richard Cheney

12/8/2010

Question 3

Narratives and Images

Why are we bombarded constantly with same negative and stereotypical narratives of

black man? Why are even the so called positive narratives and portrayals essential the same

modern variations on what Author Donald Boggle called (Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, and

Mammies & Buck) indentified as modern version of the like “coons” and brutal black “bucks”? I

believe the reason is that even this age of so-called (Post-Race America) racial enlightenment our

narrative of race still rests on somewhat shaky foundation drawn out of our past. The so called

stereotype of the black buck according to Bogle goes back atleast to The Birth of a Nation, D.W.

Griffith 1915 film that presented black men to use Bogle’s language as , “brutes, subhuman and

feral….. big baaddd niggers over sexed and savage “ ( Bogle 83-85).

When Malcolm X talked of what he described as even well-educated blacks being

“niggers”, he was making a point about how the white society of that day saw them. He was not

suggesting that we turn ourselves into modern-day black bucks. But many of us seem to have

confused his message. So in the year 200 we get the spectacle of Allen Iverson, the Philadelphia

76er and would be rap artist, insisting on showing down rapping can be by, “ Man enough to pull

a gun, be enough to squeeze it, “.

 “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer’s Inceandry 1957 essay, explored the appeal of

black lifestyle to hipsters. Along the way, Mailer explains why from his point of view, American

blacks are uncivilized. “ Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but a

war, the negro ( all exceptions admitted ) could rarely afford the inhibitions of civilization, and

so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted

for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory

pleasures of the body” ( Mailer ). It easy to understand why educated yet unfiled whites might

trade a boring existence filled with middle-class responsibilities for a walk through America’s so

called cultural wild side.

But to define such a lifestyle as black is to reduce black people to the status of

unthinking, violent, primal creatures. This narrative, it is worth noting, comes to us courtesy of a

self-declared friend of the black people. What Mailer is really saying is: even though black

people are simpleminded and uncivilized, we love you anyways, but in the way we might love an

exotic beast or a crude untamed wild child.

Indeed, we might even love you more than our fellow whites, or at least would prefer

going clubbing with you, precisely because you are so crude, because you are so wild. But sadly

the joke of course is on us. For while the white hipsters of the fifties and sixties even today so

called “wiggers” can shed their so called “black” identity whoever they tire of. However, many

of us have taken this perverted characterization to be the essence of who we are.

There is a scene in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man where the protagonist accidental bumps

into a white stranger, who responds with an epithet ( Ellison p 118-121). Angered, the black man
attacks the stranger violently, demanding an apology. Instead of apologizing, the white man

curses him out. Moved to rage by the stranger’s refusal to acknowledge his demand, the black

man beats him brutally and is at the point of slitting his throat but suddenly recovers his senses.

Shaken by his action, and by the fact he had come to the verge of murdering a fellow being, the

man stumbles away in horror.

The horror soon gives way to human, as he observes, “Something in this man thick head

had sprung out and beaten him with an each of his life” (Ellison 119). Stereotypes do have a way

of taking on a life of their own. And sometimes they beat the life out of people- and not only or

even primarily whites, as attested by the fact that black men, murdered at six times the rate of

white men, are killed for most part by other black men and more than eight times more to be

convicted of murder than white men in the same age range.

To be a black in America, especially a young black is to risk being seduced by popular

cultural narrative of innate street toughness. It temps most of us with its acceptance of our

beingness, offering us a sad place that we belong in, the only place or so we are to make believe

that we alone can occupy. From the moment our brains are capable of cognition, we are primed

to embrace it as our presumed destiny. I am not talking about conscious conspiracy. The truth is

more mundane and also more insidious than that. For the conspiracy (if we choose to call it that),

it is unconscious one, yet it shapes our psychological environment and effects at times our

control and perception of reality. Movies, television, and radio bombard us with images of the

black with non-stop repetition of black man as a streetwise, trash-talking operator, as the polar

opposite of the cerebral white male.

 One of the most unfortunate realities of growing up as a black male in America is that we

are constantly told to lower our sights, unless we are lucky and privileged, in the direction of

mediocrity. The natural reaction of many young black people is to feel threaten, intimidated, or

simply to be dismissive if you’re trying to do things that people around you have not done. It

wouldn’t be so bad if when people talked of acting black, they meant acting like a genuine and

dignified human being- acting like someone who is determined to stay out of jail, get an

education, and try to carve out a path through a world that only see us ending up in the basketball

court, or football arena, or even a soundstage.

America in the words of Malcolm X has sold a lot of us “a bogus bill of goods”,

convinced us that the only avenues available to us are hustling, selling dope, pimping, or

engaging in other illegal activities that general land many of us behind bars. Many who have

bought this bill of goods, owe it to themselves to reconsider, because what that says is, at the

base, you have very little confidence that you can do anything other than fail. We must face this

insidious fact, and then discover that you we are capable of more than they have us believe.

At this point, I have heard all the explanations: poverty, poor schools, low self-esteem,

high unemployment, lack of role models, self-hate, misdirected anger at white society, etc. But I

doubt that anyone really know why the disparity is so large, or what particular factors account

for what percentage of it- one way or the other. Yet it is clear to me, and I suspect to other

thinking people as well, that one reason has to the broader cultural environment, where racial

narrative refuse to go way from our collective societal mindset.

Question 2: Unforgivable?

This is an extremely difficult thing to write and assess. Perhaps it begins for me in 2005,

when my best friend took his life. He was a young man of 19 years old, whose future it has

seemed to all of us who knew him would be unfailingly successful. He and I were close, as most

friends hope to be and we shared the same dreams and convictions, and were working hard

towards embracing better lives than those our parents.

We may have evinced more conviction than intelligence or skill, and more youthful

arrogance than either, but we, nevertheless, had gone to school together- rode on several buses

everyday together in order to attend a better schools than our neighborhood schools, filled out

college application and tutored each other on the subjects we were each most apt back in high

school.

But for some time before his death, troubles grave had laid hold of my friend. Not only

did the world (United States) stubbornly refuse him his place; it despised him for his intellect,

and scourged him for his skin color. Of course, I know this nation despises and scourges me, too,

but I am different from my friend in that took me nearly no time to despise this nation and

decided to accomplish, in time, with patience and by become indestructible, what I might not, in

the moment, achieve by force or persuasion. My friend did not despise anyone. He really thought

that people were good, and that one had only to point out to them the right path in order to have

them, at once, come flockin to it in droves.

Before his death, we had quarreled very bitterly over this. I had lost my faith in religion,

in right paths; if there were a right path, one might be sure that whoever was on it was simply
asking to stone to death- by all the world’s good people. I didn’t give a damn, besides, what

happened to the miserable, the unspeakably petty world. There is probably not handful of decent

people in it. My friend looked very saddened by these reflections.

He said that it seemed to him that I had taken the road which ended with more deaths,

sorrows, tyranny, and blood. So I told him, one day, you’ll realize that people don’t want to be

better. So you’ll have to make them better. And how do you think you’ll go about it? He said

nothing.

He asked me another a question? What about love? His question threw me off guard, and

frightened me. With indescribable authority a nineteen year old, said love! I smiled a little. Told

him that he better forget about it. The moment I said this, I regretted it, for I remembered that he

was in love: with a young white girl, whose family were not happy with their courtship.

He looks at me and I wanted to unsay what I had said, to say something else. But I could

not think of anything which would not sound, simply like fake consolation. I never saw my

friend frightened as he was that day. We had come through some grueling things together, and I

had never seen fear in his face – one borne out of despair and unwilling resignation of hope. He

was my best friend, and for the first time in our lives I could do nothing for him; and it had been

my ill-considered rage which not only hurt him.

I wanted to take it back, but I did not know how. I would have known how if had been

insincere from the start of our conversation. But, though I know now that I was wrong, I did not

know it then. I had meant what I had said and my unexamined life would not allow me to speak

otherwise. I really did not, as far as I know, believe that love exists, except as useless pain. I will

never forgive myself for what I said to him—or did to my friend, nor do I want to.
Question 1

The obvious question is "Why bother?" Even if forgiving does make you feel better, the

road is so arduous, the process potentially so difficult. There must be easier ways to release

oneself from emotional turmoil than to embrace the one who harmed you. And what of those

who have already been deeply traumatized by wrongdoing or betrayal? Dare we risk making

them feel even worse by insisting they forgive the transgressor?

For some people, forgiveness is part of the process that helps to set their world right

again. For others, it is a step that can only be taken - if at all - once a sense of normalcy and

security have returned. I don’t see forgiveness as an automatic or necessarily natural

development. If the injury is deep, attaining a state where one is free of resentment, where one

can consider embracing one's tormentor, can be an arduous, even painful, process - which is only

one of many reasons why you might ask whether certain people, certain acts, should be forgiven

at all.

Professor Luskin, sees forgiveness as a route to personal freedom, a way of rejecting the

self-imposed, self-reinforcing label of victim and escaping an ultimately soul-destroying maze of

anger and resentment. He suggests that practicing forgiveness may even lower your blood

pressure, while relieving other ailments - physical and mental - traceable to the stress of chronic

anger.

Luskin tries to explain what forgiveness is and what it is not. It is not giving up the ability

to hold people accountable or letting wrongdoers off the hook. It does not mean forgetting the
wrong that they did, or becoming complicit in continued abuse. It does not mean turning your

head as a pedophile abuses children or a violent husband batters his wife. Obeying religious

principles is only one of countless possible human motivations for walking down the path of

forgiveness. There are those who want to save or resurrect a relationship with a parent, a lover,

or a spouse.

And the price of resurrection is often forgiveness - a forgiveness that, in some sense, may

be harder to grant than forgiveness to a stranger. For a stranger, even a stranger who murders

your daughter, had no relationship with you to violate. He committed a terrible act; but there was

no betrayal of trust, since he had been granted no trust to violate.

Still, even in the absence of contrition, forgiveness is possible. Indeed, Luskins

prescription for forgiveness does not assume the perpetrator meets the victim halfway, or even

that she cares whether she is forgiven or not. He believes forgiveness is worth the effort, quite

apart from anything the guilty or offending party might do. And that effort, as laid out in four

stages and numerous steps within those stages, is considerable.

This stages, conceptually are straightforward enough. First comes the acknowledgment of

anger; for anger - and its effects on a person's mental and emotional well-being -- must be

acknowledged before it can be effectively assuaged. In acknowledging the hurt or betrayal, in

stripping away the defenses that keep pain at bay, you must be prepared for the resurfacing, the

reliving, of trauma as scars that never properly healed are exposed anew.

Second stage according to Luskin comes the decision to forgive. Implicit in that decision

is a commitment to forgo even small attempts at revenge. Luskin suggests that you might want to
come up with your own definition of forgiveness, one that fits the particular circumstances of

your case. At any rate, in the second stage, you are opening yourself up to the possibility of

answering abuse with compassion.

The third stage begins the process of implementing the decision to forgive, which most

likely means engaging the person who caused your distress. It is also the phase in which you

accept the pain but then begin to move on, perhaps with the help of a supreme being. You may

try to put yourself in the other person's shoes. You may even offer a gift, a small token, such as a

greeting card, symbolizing the rejection of bitterness.