When a group of people is faced with a common enemy, rationality demands that the members of the group put their differences aside in order to surmount the common enemy. The question that many people have whether they will admit to it or not or whether they will formulate the question this way or not is simply: Why have not blacks done exactly that? Why have not blacks put aside any and all differences in order to engage a most massive form of cooperation between blacks in order to combat racism?
The usual move seems to be that racism itself is the explanation for why blacks have not engaged in massive cooperation to combat racism. In particular, the move is to blame racism itself for black-on-black crime in the black ghetto; for racism is said to have destroyed the will of blacks in the ghetto to take their lives seriously.
The problem is that this line of argument seems to be quite at odds with the way in which many blacks in the ghetto will affirm their love of black people and make much of having a common African heritage. Going by the tenor of that affirmation one would think that unfailing cooperation between blacks would be the order of the day.
What is most palpable is the manifest schism between blacks affirming black identity, on the one hand, and the horrendous lack of cooperation between blacks, on the other. The schism is so great and so systematic that it bespeaks a dysfunctionality. In what follows, I am going to offer an explanation for that apparent dysfunctionality. My explanation owes its inspiration to the phenomenon of multiple-personality disorder that is often occasioned by the systematic sexual abuse of a child.
Whatever else must have been true during American Slavery and the Jim Crow era, the survival of blacks was tied to giving the impression of being utterly sincere in their submissiveness to any given white, however the blacks might have felt. That is, it was in the survival interest of blacks to be extremely good at appearing as if they were quite content to comply with the wishes of a white. This was extremely adaptive behavior under the circumstances of American Slavery and the Jim Crow era.
My thesis is that what was extremely adaptive behavior under the above mentioned circumstances has since become extremely maladaptive behavior given the present circumstances.
The parallel to the systematic sexual abuse of a child is striking. One way to cope with such abuse is for a child to engage in a form of split-personality—a kind of doubling, if you will, on the order characterized by the Peter Jay Lifton in his important work The Nazi Doctors.
When the powerful male (and it has usually been a male) entered the room to abuse the child sexually, one way in which the child coped was, as it were, to become a different person. So emotionally and mentally the persona of Johnny disappeared while the persona of Jack absorbed the abuse. For the helpless child, invoking a different persona was an extremely creative and adaptive way of coping with the systemic sexual abuse.
As I have indicated, though, what is adaptive under one set of circumstances can become maladaptive under another. After a sexualy abused child has become an adult and is no longer coping with sexual abuse, the adaptive behavior of invoking an alternate personal becomes woefully maladaptive.
My move, then, is that while it was extremely adaptive for blacks to be able to appear sincere on-command during American Slavery and the Jim Crow era, this very adaptive strategy became a tremendous liability in the matter of black cooperation since these two periods.
The analogue to parental child sexual abuse is striking. The child never knows when the adult will walk into the room and pursue sexual behavior with the child. A black never knew when she or he would be approached by a white and have to appear utterly sincere in her or his compliance with the commands of the white.
Blacks are stunning in their ability to appear as if their commitment to black identity and their concern for the well-being of black people are both second to none. That is, the voice of blacks speaking about these matters—the tonality, the cadence, and so forth—would compel one to think that it would take heaven and earth to prevent them from cooperating in order to achieve these ends. Yet, precisely what we know is that such enormous cooperation is rarely if ever achieved among blacks.
Precisely what I have offered is an explanation for how it is possible for blacks to appear so convincing that they have a commitment to operating in order to overcome racism and yet there is precious little cooperation to that end.
Precisely what cries out for an explanation is the striking disparity between (a) the extraordinary display of emotional commitment on the part of blacks to cooperate in order to surmount the grip of racism and (b) the blatant absence of cooperation in this regard. The explanation for this disparity simply cannot be that racism still exists. For that explanation does not explain how we can start with (a) and end up with (b), when precisely what one would have thought is that if a group of people started with (a), then they would end up with (c) unshakable cooperation in order to surmount the grip of racism.
On the one hand, the explanation that I have offered does not blame blacks. On the other, the explanation should resonate with the reality of the experience of American Slavery and the Jim Crow era. Nothing would be more stunning than if it were true that the strategies for surviving in the midst of these two eras would be identical to the strategies for surviving when these two eras no longer existed. And surely a most effective strategy for surviving in the face of American Slavery and the Jim Crow era might very well be out of place when these two periods have long since vanished.
I have identified such a strategy, namely that of appearing in a most convincing manner to be utterly sincere when one was not. It was once to the enormous advantage of blacks to appear that way to whites. The problem, alas, is that this is how blacks so often behave towards one another nowadays; and this mode of behavior is a horrendous liability to blacks being the primary agents of their own progress by way of doing what is imminently rational, namely cooperating with one another.
