What does Mainstream mean?

 Oh jesus. There is enough to say every day to populate ten blog posts. 

In the afternoon we had our first class of Dis Doc, the shorthand that Dr. Breuggemann coined for her class "Narrative and Documentary in Disease, Disability and Illness." We watched the documentary "Vital Signs" in which people with disabilities respond to, among other questions, "what does mainsteamed mean?" 

One respondant says, "It's where all the abnormal people get together with the abnormal people. It's happened with race too - so who is normal? Who are the already mainstreamed people?"

This point came up again in the On African American Rhetoric book today. The authors point out that in African American rhetoric, there exist always the two strains, one advocating integration, the other advocating separatism. Which is not to say that they don't exist in the same people. The authors refer specifically to WEB Dubois, who seemed to oscillate between these standpoints, as implied in this paragraph from "Conservation of the Races," an 1897 essay:

WEB Du Bois

Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit. No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?

That last question especially seems key to me. Do Germans (or those with German heritage, like me) have a responsibility to wear their German identity visibly and proudly? Certainly not in practice. Do African Americans then? Well, yes, but who puts that expectation on them? 

The authors say, "Du Bois' fluctuations or multiple outlooks suggest, along with genuine existential grappling, varying degrees of optimism/pessimism regarding the prospect of social justice for Blacks within mainstream American society." 

I'm noticing one of the things that I guess I hope graduate school will provide: a larger framework for understanding the things I read and see today. Of course I'm aware that Black people in America today don't agree on the degree or type of integration that would be best for the Black community (and as Eddie Glaude points out, the idea of a monolithic "Black community" is misleading and flawed.) But reading about this history, and tracing the strains of opinion from Sutton Griggs' Imperio and Imperium published in 1899, to Douglass, to Du Bois, to Garvey, to King, to Malcolm X, to Michelle Alexander... is helpful for me to understand the persistence of this grappling. And it is so much more nuanced than just "join 'em" or "ditch 'em". 

Sutton Griggs

The authors are using the jeremiad term to follow the arguments of African American rhetors. 

The term jeremiad comes from the book of Jeremiah in the old testament, in which the prophet refers to the promise the people have made with God, then describes the nature of their declension on this promise, then prophesies the doom that will result from continued failure to fulfill the promise. Black writers and orators have relied on this structure to warn America of the stakes of their failure to live up to their moral ideals as stated in their founding documents. 

Interestingly, Malcolm X departs from the typical jeremiad form of his forebears David Walker and Frederick Douglass when he discounts any supposed morality among White Americans. In 1965, he wrote in "The Bullet or the Ballot": 

So I say, in spreading a gospel such as black nationalism, it is not designed to make the black man re-evaluate the white man–you know him already–but to make the black man re-evaluate himself. Don’t change the white man’s mind — you can’t change his mind, and that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America–America’s conscience is bankrupt. She lost all conscience a long time ago. Uncle Sam has no conscience.

So what can the Jeremiad do if it doesn't rely on our sense of morality? Well, maybe the same thing the old testament did - rely on our fear of annihilation. Indeed, in the same text, Malcolm X points out that "They don't try to eliminate an evil because it's evil, or because it's immoral; they eliminate it only when it threatens their existence." 

This reminds me of a concept developed in critical race theory - the idea that White people will only adopt anti-racist measures when they directly benefit White people. 

Black Power

The last part of this chapter talks about the debate on the use of the term Black Power in the 60's. It was used first at SNCC speeches. It quickly gained currency and stirred controversy. Leaders like Malcolm X and King had to publicly denounce or embrace the slogan. 

Stokely Carmichael

 The book says that just two days after Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks used it at a SNCC event, King was "forced to discuss" the slogan with Carmichael as they walked "through the Mississippi Delta." 

Part of rhetorical power, then, seems to lie in what we are forced to discuss. The Occupy Wall Street movement forced us to discuss the 99%: who it was, why it was, and who was the 1%. 

In class Dr. Robinson said we should think of analyzing rhetorical power as going beyond literary analysis. Literary analysis is looking at the parts of a text and making meaning of them. Rhetorical analysis is adding a step to this: considering the work that a text does on the audience. How is the audience changed by the text? How do they walk away differently? 

Initially, I think the "work" or "effect" could be very hard to define, but very worth discussing in a class. We watched a video this morning in class and considered the "effect" it had on us. I could tell even from our preliminary comments (before class ended) that the woman of color in the class had been affected differently than I had (not surprising). Talking about the difference in the effect of rhetoric is the power of classroom space, and it's the space I want to open up with both White students and students of culture. 

This phrase White students and students of culture. It sounds harsh. But I think it gets at the ways that the idea of "Whiteness" harms White people. What is my culture if I am White? I don't know. I don't know. I have had to subsume my cultural identity (as German, British, and what else??) for the privilege of being "White". I sacrifice my individual identity, it's the price I pay for the White label. 

If I maintained my cultural identity, I'd have to reckon with the harm done to my people by White people. The idea that I belong to Whiteness in the same way that Eastern Europeans, Russians, British people, and others do, would be untenable. There would have to be a reckoning, a reconciliation, with the fact of class division within White communities. 

Whooeee, and as Resmaa Menakem pointed out, we do not want to do that!