Critical race theory: Debra Dickerson argues it's time blacks stop worrying about what whites think of them

Washington Monthly, April, 2004 by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The End of Blackness By Debra J. Dickerson Pantheon; $24.00 In the run up to the war with Iraq, Harry Belafonte entertainer and potentate of the old black left, criticized Colin Powell for his role in the Bush administration war effort. Belafonte implied that Powell was a house slave, President Bush the master, and 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the big house. "In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and [there] were those slaves that lived in the house," said Belafonte. "You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master ... exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him. Colin Powell's committed to come into the house of the master."

The critique was a restatement of an old black-power notion, popularized by Malcolm X. Roughly, it asserts that docile house slaves were foolishly loyal to their masters, while cantankerous field slaves were the real rebels. The analysis is historically specious. Some of slavery's most violent dissidents--Nat Turner, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser--weren't exactly intractable field hands. Vesey was free, in fact. The house slave/field slave dichotomy makes for great mythology but always fell down under the weight of historical analysis.

Belafonte was roundly panned, even by his fallow black leftists, for effectively calling Powell a sellout. But beyond being just a vicious ad hominem attack, Belafonte's critique was woefully simplistic and outdated. Exactly who was Powell selling out and who are the slaves? Black people? Poor people? All Americans? Calling Powell a sell-out, tells us nothing about the complexity of an African American, who is popular among other African Americans, and yet is charged with carrying out the foreign policy of a president most African Americans hate.

Belafonte's analysis suffered from a problem of vocabulary, one that has struck many black thinkers over the past few decades. African Americans have entered into an epoch of history where, for the first time, Bull Conner racisin is the least of our problems. And yet "the problem of the color-line" still lingers. A gaggle of brilliant scholars from Robin Kelley to Cornel West to William Julius Wilson have sought to articulate this new world where race intermingles with all manner of societal problems to wreak havoc on black communities.

But no one has yet coined a language that describes this new reality in the way W.E.B. Du Bois did in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois essentially defined black America in the 20th century with his notion of "double consciousness"--the idea that African Americans experience everything in this world both as Americans and as black people. Scholars have come up shaky in their efforts to update Du Bois's simple, but ingenious formula.

In her new book, The End of Blackness, Debra Dickerson has a solution for our lexiconal conundrum--throw the entire damn dictionary of race out the window. Dickerson lays out her thesis in the book's introduction: "This book will both prove and promote the idea that the concept of 'blackness,' as it has come to he understood, is rapidly losing its ability to describe, let alone predict or manipulate, the political and social behavior of African Americans."

The idea that race has little social or political meaning is not a new line of reasoning in the debate around black America. But it's usually employed by conservatives--of all races--attempting to down-play the impact of racism, or black people cynically seeking to absolve themselves of social responsibility (read: Bob Johnson). Dickerson, to her credit, believes in discarding many of the pillars of black identity, not because it would further her individually, but because she honestly thinks that it's the only path of survival.

White people, according to Dickerson, are victims of "aversion therapy," in that they refuse to see their own complicity in racism. Furthermore, whites "assume their perfection" and exhibit "a continued refusal to see America as inherently, organically multiracial and multi-cultural." White narcissism, for Dickerson, is only one leg in a historical conspiracy. "Simply put," she writes. "Whites held hands across generations to hold blacks down long enough to ensure that their own heirs would ascend to as much privilege as possible while simultaneously keeping their hands clean."

But--as her very next sentence makes clear--Dickerson does not absolve the black community of responsibility in all this: "Blacks need to accept this and then get over it--and get even ... The know-nothingness required to keep blacks tilting at the windmill of white approval is no less odious than whites' determination to remain first among purported equals." For Dickerson, white racism is one giant head trip, and thus can only be as effective as black people's gusto for white approval allows it to be. Black people, she writes, are "complicit in maintaining white supremacy" because they hunger for "white approval or white apology rather than their own autonomy."