What Ta-Nehisi Coates says about what black males suffer
in white America (quoted by David Brooks, NYT, 7-17) made me think of Socrates
right away. Coates and his fellows are clearly victims. But they,
like Socrates in prison, "are victims not of laws but of men."
And the distinction is important.
To right the injustice of victimization by laws you have
to change the system, maybe the whole thing, starting with a society that makes
laws like that. The culture could be wrong. Maybe you need a
revolution.
To right the injustice of victimization by men you just
have to change the men. That's hard, but it's a lot easier than changing
a whole society. In Ferguson it could be as simple as getting
whites out of the police force and getting blacks in. The town was behind
in having the ethnic make-up of the force reflect the make-up of the
community. (There had been a rapid change.)
That's physical change. The more important change
may be psychological, changing attitudes. That's what Coates and a lot of
other people, white and black, are trying to do.
Even before we start we know that change like this is
going to be difficult. On square one we had a lot of white people cruelly
enslaving a lot of black people. I mean really cruelly, worse than any
slavery before. They work them dawn to dusk, they break up their
families, they don't let them form families, they let them learn nothing
that doesn't make them agriculturally productive, they wipe out as much as they
can of their native culture, which was agricultural. It's a crime for
them to learn to read. They are victims of the white people in every way, and
this may be the worst way, the denial to them of education. They know
nothing of what's available to whites in their culture, none of the good and
power-giving and life-enriching things that other cultures have adopted, things
different from the cruel slavery thing, though that's part of this culture
too.
On square two blacks are freed from this slavery into
the society of the white people, but they are not fully free, since there are
many laws restricting them. Through many squares they remain victims of white
people. But over time the laws are changed until they step onto the
square where we can say, with Socrates, that they are "victims not of laws
but of men." That's a square closer to our own but how many
intervened or how many lie ahead is hard to say. Anyway we're somewhere
on that part of the board, and we're all together on the same square.
My colleagues in other departments — sociology,
psychology, government, history, maybe philosophy — are all trying their
hardest to determine just where we are, and where we should step next.
The help they offer varies with their training, which determines what they see
when they look at the square. What do I see? I see a lot of people
crowded together talking as persuasively as they can to change attitudes.
I'm in English, where we're trained to examine talk.
So, what needs attention? Too much for here, but
we can attend to one problem: the use of the word "deficient."
It's clearly the accurate word for the black's original condition with
respect to these good and power-giving and life-enriching things whites have
access to in their education but have denied blacks access to. But going
forward it's a word nobody can use easily and confidently. Recent black
slaves can use it but it's difficult for them, being uneducated, to know what
they are deficient in. Recent white enslavers know what that is, and can
identify deficiency more easily, but the word is too close to
"inferior" for them to be able, without discredit, to use it.
"Inferior" was used too often by whites in power contests (lawmaking,
for one), making sure that blacks would lose.
"Inferior," though discredited when it
is used categorically ("My culture is superior to yours"), gains
credit as soon as it is used conditionally ("My culture is superior to
yours at preparing young people for hardship in a whaleboat").
Adoption of an end obliges us to discriminate among means, and where cultures
are means — raising chances of landing a whale, or a spot at Harvard, or a job
— to discriminate among them. (I go through this in greater detail in
Post 77.)
The end here is more black young people in Harvard and
other colleges. Whatever it is that gets other young people there,
whatever those other cultures have that improves their chances, would-be
helpful whites want to say that black culture is deficient in it. That's
the first step toward any sufficiency, an accurate statement of the deficiency.
It's all very Socratic and scientific and the best way
to solve the problem of Black education, but oh how hard it is to make that
initial statement in the talk arena. We're still too close to categorical
"inferior" and all the feelings it provokes.
Better, most educated whites seem to agree, to play it
safe. They might try softeners ("challenged,"
"lacking in," "insufficient"), hoping they won't be seen
through, but they never use the words "deficient" or
"inferior" with respect to blacks. And that's too bad because
we're clearly on a square where black attitudes toward education need to
be talked about accurately. Along
with all that contributes to those attitudes, in family or culture. Any
person who tries to do that now, though, apparently can't or won't use his most
accurate words, not freely. Let's
hope we'll soon get to a square where he can.
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