We all practice identity politics. Some of us just don't know it.

By R. T. Andrews

Sundays are for many of us a day of rest and reflection, even though in this quarantine the days sometimes seem indistinguishable — what do weekends mean when our homes are our workplaces and our Friday and Saturday night rituals are on hiatus?

Paul Robeson's Here I Stand was part memoir, part manifesto.

Lately, I have had some thought-provoking exchanges that speak to our current chaotic condition. And when I say “our” I refer variously, simultaneously, and collectively, to shared statuses, or identities I bear as human, global citizen, American, and black man.

Many of you are talking, I'm sure about the same subjects, even though far fewer of us are visiting barber shops and salons these days. 

Right-thinking talking heads — “right” addresses their political vantage, not the merits of their contentions — often demean much of today’s political agitation as stemming from “identity politics”. They suggest that our common status as Americans trumps everything, and want to dismiss as parochial, peevish, or unimportant any concerns or issues some of us wrestle with because we are black, brown, pregnant, gay, transgender, differently abled, immigrants, or just garden variety capitalist fodder.

Most people who advance that proposition in this country are white, relatively well-off and Republican, or long for the accouterments of white privilege. One of the privileges of being white is the freedom to be ignorant of the history of this land and its people. Or perhaps to put it more charitably, white Americans have the luxury of being selective and sanguine about U.S. [and world] history, for example, to accept without inquiry the myth of American exceptionalism.

The twin health crises of Covid-19 and racism have upset that applecart for millions of white Americans. As to the covid crisis, it is impossible to ignore or dismiss or reconcile America’s wealth, 'greatness' and world leadership with the fact that our five percent of the world’s population has more than 25% of the world’s coronavirus infections. 

The world is aghast at how badly the U.S. has mismanaged this situation. Even the most cynical of us would have had difficulty imagining only three months ago that foreign countries of all political stripes would be banning travel by U.S. citizens. In a manner reminiscent of the fate of Nazi occupiers of a tiny town as depicted in Steinbeck’s novella, The Moon is Down [1942], a Trump administration that rode into office on the propaganda of building a wall to keep others out, has fostered conditions that have resulted in the U.S. citizens being presently exiled from the world community.

I’m reluctant to call the public health menace that is racism a “crisis”. Dictionary definitions of crisis suggest there is a timing element, a turning point or a stage in a sequence of events. America’s racism is less a crisis than a foundational element. Our challenge is finding a way either to remove it from our DNA or finding ways to bring it under control, perhaps like insulin for our diabetes.

I offer here a pair of short videos that speak to both our July 4th and our DNA. The first is a series of excerpts delivered by the descendants of Frederick Douglass from one of his greatest speeches, “What to the Slave is your Fourth of July”?

The second video is a re-enactment of testimony by the renowned activist and protean talent Paul Robeson delivered in June 1956 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities [HUAC]. It is a testament to knowing who you are. It’s going to send me back for a fresh inoculation of Here I Stand in preparation for the continuing struggle.

Have a Soulful Sunday!

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Black History: Real, Personal, Necessary

Black History: Real, Personal, Necessary

My father was a minister.

He came to his chosen profession relatively late in his career, during what turned out to be the last third of his life. For most of his ministry, which lasted from his ordination and installation in 1953 until his death at 61 in 1974, he wrote his sermons out in longhand, using a fountain pen and 5” x 8” loose leaf lined paper. He stored them in a series of thick black leather binders. Later on, some of his sermons were taped using reel-to-reel technology that preceded by several iterative generations the digital world we now know.

As his preaching matured, he would on occasion depart from his printed text. This would most often occur when he knew that someone in his congregation had been touched in some deep and personal way — perhaps the death of a spouse or a child, the loss of a job, or the revelation of a deathly diagnosis. A scholar of both the Bible and of literature, he had a way of way of relating the personal to the eternal. Even though his sermons were peppered with quotes from such abstruse or mystical sources as Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, Tillich, and Thurman, he nonetheless shared their insights in a way that made sense to the hardworking middle class strivers and strainers who filled the pews every Sunday in the 1950s and ‘60s. And he did it so well that people of disparate backgrounds would come up to shake his hand or receive an embrace in the narthex after service and tell him they felt his words had been addressed specifically to them.

They might have been right, since in those days before mega churches were invented, he knew every member of his flock, had likely been in their homes, and perhaps more tellingly, had invited all of them to his home, because it was literally their home.

You see, from 1953 until 1967, the year following my mother’s death, our home was the church parsonage [google it if you are under 40]. He moved into an apartment after that; a widower with one son in the Air Force and the other mostly away at school, he didn’t want the space, the memories, or the parsonage stairs. So he bid goodbye to 9703 Parmelee Avenue in the heart of Glenville and moved into a new apartment building on the outskirts of the city limits.

But in the fifties, with a congregation growing by leaps and bounds, he started a tradition by hosting an Open House for church members and friends on New Year’s Day. Hundreds of people of all ages, sizes, and dispositions trekked to that three-bedroom colonial to eat, drink [punch], socialize, satisfy their curiosity about how their pastor lived [very modestly], and sometimes plop down to watch one of the classic bowl games [Rose, Sugar, Orange, or Cotton]. I thought those Open Houses were one of the coolest perks of being a preacher’s kid.

I didn’t know I was going to write any of this when I sat down. I just finished listening to the broadcast of today’s Civic Commons show, which ends with my trying to accelerate the pace of my mellifluous drawl in order to cram 500 words about black history into my allotted three minutes. At the conclusion of the show, one of the hosts says that you can find my just-delivered commentary in this space. And that evoked this reverie.

My dad understood that writing a message for the ear is different than writing for the eye. It was principally for this reason that he never wanted his sermons published. A second reason was that he occasionally departed from prepared text.

Many of the sermons that survived him in physical form [the notebooks and the tapes] now rest in the archives of his alma mater, the Howard University Divinity School in Washington, DC. One day I discovered a few of his written sermons in my possession. I sat down and transcribed them over a fortnight or so. As I did so, I could hear him speaking. Where the handwriting was near indecipherable [he was a converted left hander], I had the filial satisfaction of knowing that I was a sympathetic editor.

I think it is partially by virtue of the experience of having typed out those sermons that while my memory of my mother is visual and tactile, my sense of my father is aural.

Well, I have now subjected the more loyal or physically fit of my readers to a preamble to a commentary on black history that is longer than the commentary itself. If you are still with me, you can read the commentary below, or listen to it at the end of this podcast [the discussion about sustainability that precedes my commentary is pretty good, too!].

I’ll be back later today [I promise!] with my thoughts about who should be the next prosecutor in Cuyahoga County.

• • •

Remarks prepared for airing at 12:30PM February 28, 2012 on the Civic Commons Radio, WJCU 88.7 FM. [podcast on iTunes]

Warning!! Dangerous Curves Ahead! We are about to discuss Black History. Don’t worry: there won’t be a lot of dates to learn. This is more a discussion about your attitude towards black history.

From one perspective, these are the best of times. To begin with, there is that brilliant, handsome, Christian, family-centered, hard-working, compassionate, high achieving black man in the White House. His very presence there connotes the progress  now possible for the descendants of the captured peoples brought chained together through the terrible Middle Passage to an unimaginably bleak future, their histories, identities and lives stolen and tossed overboard. 

By some cultural alchemy President Obama has internalized and represents that history even though his hereditary tree is not the typical African American one.

Through perseverance and scholarship, a good portion of black and African history continues to be recovered, even as black history continues to be made. New achievements abound for Africans in America on almost every civic, cultural, commercial and social front. New identities have also been established, tied to the old in ways we don’t always comprehend. 

We especially don’t understand them when we consider that these are also the worst of times, with so many fellow citizens chained to plantations where the new slave quarters are poisonous schools that multiply ignorance, ghettos whose zip codes are predictors of ill health and quickened existence, and where too many pathways are pipelines to despair and incarceration.

This new Jim Crow is also part of our American history. 

When our great grandchildren study our era, they will learn that underneath an America of wealth and privilege and unprecedented possibility for some, there existed another, mostly darker, America with virtually no access to those prizes at any point from birth to death.

They will learn these things only if their history books are more inclusive than the ones I saw in the nation’s best schools. In those books notions of Manifest Destiny basically kicked to the gutter anything that didn’t support the United States as the home of the free and the land of the brave.

It was that narrow chauvinism, admittedly present in just about every society, that led Frederick Douglass in 1851 to ask, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, to say on that Independence Day in Rochester, New York: “Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them.”

A similarly informed understanding led W. E. B. DuBois in 1903 to write in The Souls of Black Folk of the “double consciousness” of black people, and prompted Carter G. Woodson in 1926 to establish the Negro History Week that has now become Black History Month which may one day be known as African American Heritage Month.

Until all Americans consider this month’s focus to be a part of their history, this annual period of celebration and study will be needed.

• • •

Mini-pieces: Reflections on Cleveland black leadership, etc.

This is a day for Real Deal mini-pieces.

1.   Blogging daily Sunday through Friday is more than a notion. Phone calls, reading, research, getting out & about, piecing things together — in short, doing the work of reporting before the actual writing, can skew your senses. Which is why in Wednesday’s column, when I meant to say that I would be talking about state house redistricting the day after tomorrow, i.e. Friday, I wrote "Thursday".  I realized my error a couple of hours after I published Part II. With blog technology, I could have just changed Thursday to Friday but I knew that some of you would come back today expecting what isn’t here, go back and double-check Wednesday’s promise and say, "hmmm." So you have this long-winded apologia in the name of, all together now: transparency.

2.   Our discussion of black political leadership has obviously touched a sore spot with many of our readers. We know this from the volume of off-line emails and the phone calls we are receiving.  This public conversation would certainly be more invigorating if more of the comments were placed on site instead of emailed to me. Just so you know, I will never quote an email writer by name, but I am growing more inclined to post some of your comments. My takeaway from many of the comments is that many people resent the notion that any three unelected persons could be posited as speaking for such a widely diverse community. People are glad that The Real Deal is willing to call out the PD and Brent Larkin for a horrible piece — somebody has to do it, you say — but unwilling or unable themselves to get down and dirty about it.

3.  One thing I can say about Messrs. Stokes, Forbes, and Pinkney is that they understand power and are not afraid to use it when it suits their purposes. The mostly private debates center on how often, how well, how wisely they have exercised power on the community’s behalf.

4.  With respect to former Cleveland City Council president [1974-1989], current satrap of the Call & Post and current NAACP president Forbes [1992-way too long], much of the discussion centers on the abuse of that power. I went off to college in 1963, the year Forbes was first elected to public office, so he has been a constant presence on the Cleveland scene my entire adult life. He has become a fixture on the local landscape much like one of the obsolete manufacturing plants that dot many Cleveland neighborhoods. You remember when they belched smoke and soot during your childhood. Today they remain as monuments to a different era, their windows boarded, the doors rotting, the premises littered with broken bottles and mountains of trash, amid the weeds. They will not go away by themselves and many cannot be retrofitted.

5.  In my Cleveland, George and Arnold and Lou are as much one-name icons as the player who took his talents to South Beach. They are actually quite personable and charming when they want to be. But charming is not what is needed these days. As one of my correspondents wrote me at 0430 today, “Keep in mind what is really important. Not this notion of who is the leader but what can we do [to] address the sorry socioeconomic state of affairs and hopelessness of many everyday black folks.”

Another reader asked rhetorically why the triumvirate would want to proclaim their leadership over the black community, given its current socioeconomic and cultural state. Either they weren’t leaders or they failed, he said.

6.  During my travels around the community over the years I have had several informal encounters with George Forbes. He has said things that are real windows into his worldview. For example, simple arithmetic led to his accumulation of power at City Hall. He knew as long as held eastside black councilmen together he needed only one white vote to hold the reins of power. A primitive and cold calculus to be sure, but realpolitik in late-twentieth century Cleveland.

7.   Many black people are very fond of quoting the Frederick Douglass, perhaps the first and certainly one of the most exemplary national African American leaders. In an 1857 speech, Douglass said:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

    The Douglass quote was obviously pre-Civil War and applicable to the struggles for emancipation. During the civil rights era it was a rallying cry for collective action against the tyranny of Jim Crow, de facto segregation, and all sorts of invidious discrimination, much of which continues to this day.

      Forbes understands the first sentence of the Douglass quote. But insofar as Greater Cleveland’s black community, however defined, resents the implications of Larkin’s statement about their leadership, they should consider themselves the subject of Douglass’s third and fourth sentences, and respond appropriately.

• • •

The entire Douglass speech is worth a read. Find it here.