Black Folk Could Fly by Randall Kenan

Author:Randall Kenan [Kenan, Randall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393882179
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Catch the foxes for us, the little foxes that are ruining the vineyards, While our vineyards are in blossom.

—Song of Solomon 2:15 (NAS)

Let us be frank: We Americans currently live in a culture that praises, oddly enough, anti-intellectualism. Serious thinkers don’t seem to exist in our popular media, and are certainly not in vogue, unless they have a gimmick, or some spectacular narrative (in which their intellect quickly takes the back seat and is belittled. Cases in point: the type of press and interest given to Stephen Hawking based on his Lou Gehrig’s disease instead of the fact that he is one of the most intelligent and productive thinkers ever; the fascination over John Nash not because he is a Nobel Prize–winning mathematician who came up with groundbreaking new game theories but because he was unfortunate enough to suffer from a dramatic case of schizophrenia. Pundits abound like kudzu, and are often amusing and charming, but how often do we see award-winning anthropologists, philosophers, and astrophysicists involved in our daily discourse? The Margaret Meads and Bertrand Russells and Richard Feynmans of our era? As television critic Tom Shales once mused: “Why don’t we see more smart people on TV? They would have to marry starlets and get themselves into drunken mischief to find the front page or the thirty-minute omnium-gatherum we call the nightly news.”

Accordingly, so much of what passes for racial discussion these days is a perpetuation of a notion of race rooted in the idea of skin color, not culture; it is superstition, not science. Race is an antique way of looking at the world involving brain size, penis size, notions of the primitive (“Soul!”), a vision cloaked in eugenics and faulty statistics (The Bell Curve). Negritude doesn’t even begin with the color of a Black person’s skin; is not dictated by phenotype.

Racism is the handmaiden of race, but it proceeds from a different impulse, a different set of fairy tales. Whereas race is the definition of the Other (“You are different from me in some fundamental way”), racism is the narrative(s) woven around that assertion. Each growing on each, creating, in the mind of the teller and in the ear of the hearer and the reteller, a vision of Self based on the differentiation of the despised Other (“We do not do as they do”)—and the Other is always hated for their differences, for not being Us, for having the gall to be alien, and therefore a threat. Threats exist to be feared. Hence what began as an excuse (“We can enslave them, for they are different from us”) evolves, and right before the teller’s eyes what was once a man transforms into a beast, as in the American South around the turn of the nineteenth century. After a series of rebellions and riots when Black folk let it be known that they were not interested in remaining slaves, they became in the eyes of their masters beasts, dim-witted, child-like creatures, at once sexually rapacious and lazy; a good cook, but in desperate need of Jesus—a creature to be feared.

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