“The arguments advanced by Cruse call for serious review and critique. Still a number of things are clear. First, our need to be clear as to our grounding as black thinkers. That ground, given present realities and the near and mediate future, is the long history of struggle on the part of our people for an increasingly liberated existence. Out of this grounding emerges our first task: the effort to achieve a critical understanding of our situation: of our real needs and the means by which they might be met. In working to meet these mediate responsibilities we must struggle against the tendencies leading to deformation and particularly we must be prepared to commit ‘class suicide’ in order that our energies be given unequivocally in service to the historical struggles of our people, here and elsewhere. In this regard there is a particular turn that we must make in our development, a turn whose importance is heightened by the debate regarding black folks and philosophy and its context. That turn of development and its ground of necessity is clearly set out by Cruse: ‘Every other ethnic group in America, a ‘nation of nations,’ has accepted the fact of its separateness and used to its own social advantage. But the Negro’s conditioning steered him into that perpetual state of suspended tension wherein ninety-five per cent of his time and energy is expended on fighting prejudice in whites. As a result, he has neither the time nor the inclination to realize that all of the effort spent fighting prejudice will not obviate these fundamental things an ethnic group must do for itself. This situation results from a psychology that is rooted in the Negro’s symbiotic ‘blood-ties’ to the white Anglo-Saxon. It is the culmination of that racial drama of love and hate between slave and master, bound together in the purgatory of plantations. Today the African foster-child in the American racial equation must grow to manhood, break the psychological umbilical ties to intellectual paternalism. The American Negro has never yet been able to break entirely free of the ministration of his white masters to the extent that he is willing to exile himself, in search of wisdom, into the wastelands of the American desert. That is what must be done, if he is to deal with the Anglo-Saxon as the independent political power that he, the Negro, potentially is.’ “The insights of Cruse make clear our historically conditioned vocation, which is fixed for us even more specifically by Vincent Harding: ‘The fact still remains that for the life and work of the black scholar in search of vocation, the primary context is not to be found in the questionable freedom and relative affluence of the American university, nor in the ponderous uncertainties of ‘the scholarly community,’ nor even in the private joys of our highly prized, individual exceptionalisms. Rather, wherever we may happen to be physically based, our essential social, political, and spiritual context is the colonized situation of the masses of the black community in America.’ “The vocation of the black intellectual/scholar thusly grounded structures, in Harding’s words, our calling: ‘To speak truth to our people, to speak truth about our people, to speak truth about our enemy—all in order to free the mind, so that black men, women, and children may build beyond the banal, the dangerous chaos of the American spirit, toward a new time.’ Lucius T. Outlaw “On Race and Philosophy” Page 27
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 22:15:56 +0000
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