Black American Resilience and the “We Can Do This” Mood

This is Part Two of a two-part excerpt from Reimagining American Identity, a free ebook about Albert Murray’s Omni-American vision that I coauthored with Greg Thomas and Jewel Kinch-Thomas. Read Part One here.

Get the free ebook here.

Amiel Handelsman: What we are responsible for is what we do in our own lives, and one place to start is to take responsibility for our moods. Here’s where Murray is so valuable.

Greg Thomas: Break it down, man.

Amiel: As I see it, The Omni-American vision calls for two moods that are important to all human beings and especially useful for what we’re talking about. Those moods are determination and curiosity. Determination is the assessment that “I can do this” or “we can do this.” It’s an emotional tone that leads people to persist through enormous obstacles. Think of it as the mood behind the habit of resilience. The Omni-American vision is all about determination, about battling long odds by improvising in practical and intelligent ways. It’s the story Murray tells about Americans as a people and Black Americans in particular.

For so-called white folks answering the call today, we could do a lot worse than inhabiting the mood of determination. It’s an alternative and antidote to resignation. And it’s a force that can keep us in the game over the long haul. And this isn’t easy. Because no matter how dedicated you feel to combating racism and healing the country’s wounds, there are a thousand things pulling you away from that. There’s the acrimony of the conversation, the shrill voices on many sides. There’s the sheer weight of the challenge, which can appear bigger, not smaller, the more you read history and study the problems. And then, beyond that, are all your other life commitments.

As the historian Richard Flacks once wrote, there’s making history, and then there’s making life. If you’re like me, making life takes up a big portion of the day. So determination becomes important. The Omni-American vision offers this, but so does Murray’s own life trajectory. Here’s a man who was an intellectual powerhouse yet, due to work commitments in the military, didn’t publish his first book until he was in his mid-fifties. And then he kept going writing, teaching, and mentoring — and the man lived until almost a hundred. That’s determination!

And then there’s the mood of curiosity. This is the assessment that there’s something valuable here and I’m ready to find it. “Hmm, what is it that I’m not seeing?” One of the things I most appreciate about Murray is how much curiosity he stirs in me. That’s the beauty of someone with a vision that’s both refreshing and unusual. It makes you think, “Wow, this idea that there would be no American culture without Black Americans makes total sense. Never would that particular idea in that particular form have occurred to me, and I consider myself a thoughtful person!” Which then can lead to the question: what else hasn’t occurred to me? If I’m locked into a particular ideology, narrative or mood, this question can release me from its grips and open up a lot of generativity.

Now, this is tricky territory, because it’s this very question that may have launched me on the antiracist journey. Because for years I’ve been loosely aware of police violence, but never really thought a lot about it, never saw it as central to my life. Like I remember hearing about Rodney King decades ago. And then there was the OJ Simpson trial, and the Million Man March fits in there somewhere. But when it comes to things I think and talk about regularly, police violence hasn’t been on the list.

Then a bunch of people get killed, and I watch the videos. It’s like, wow. How has this not occurred to me? Why have I been ignoring this? And I stay with these questions. I read Ta-Nehisi Coates on the low value placed on black bodies. Then I get interested in the criminal justice system. I read The New Jim Crow and watch the movie 13th. I go to rallies. I put a Black Lives Matter sign on my lawn. I start a book club. And I do all of this because I’m dedicated to filling in the gap of this thing that until now didn’t occur to me. Taking these actions feels good. It’s a new place. I’m correcting my error. I’m better.

But this is a trap. Because now I’m so determined to fill one particular gap in my seeing that I put on new blinders. I see how Black Americans have suffered for hundreds of years but not how they’ve contributed. I see how racism hurts Black Americans but not how it hurts people identified as white. I see how Black Americans have been excluded from wealth generation, legal rights, and political participation yet falsely translate this into cultural deprivation. I can see George Floyd but not Louis Armstrong, Breonna Taylor but not Bessie Smith.

Then I read Albert Murray or listen to Greg, and my curiosity is stirred anew. Instead of being subject to all of those assumptions, they start to become an object of awareness. Wow, what five minutes ago I felt certain about now…I’m not so certain about.

So I wonder: how have I been influenced by Black American culture? What have I gained from being an American? What if the story of resilience is an asset to combating racism and imagining a better future? What if there is no such thing as universal black culture, but only Black American culture? Asking these questions isn’t always easy. It calls for mindfulness and presence.

So, that’s mood. Let me speak now about another gift we get from the Omni-American vision: the ability to see how even noble-minded liberals and progressives can get caught in counterproductive mindsets that echo the very destructive ideas we aim to be fighting. As I’ve said, one thing Murray does really well is take on supposedly liberal thinkers and reveal the hidden pathologies in their thinking.

Now, in case you think I’m pointing the finger at other people — well, I am! But I’m also talking about myself. And, again, this isn’t shaming as much as naming. It’s observing an unhelpful thought pattern that can get lodged in my nervous system and then working to dislodge or heal it.

A good example of this is reading Ta-Nehisi Coates or listening to historians talk about, say, the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War, which is that it had nothing to do with slavery. When I do these things, I get angry. Really angry. And the angrier I get, the more I want to right the wrongs of history.

By itself, of course, there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s what you might call noble moral outrage. And it fuels me to act. But then something interesting happens. The folklore of white supremacy starts to infect me against my own will. My mind creates a simple story of history in which black-identified people have been screwed, white-identified people have been largely complicit, and I have to do something to make it better. It’s funny, because even as I say this, it sounds like a solid way to look at things. It feels like I’m making good use of my life, way better than 90 percent of the other things I do.

But notice what’s happening in the story. Who’s the protagonist? Me. I’m the protagonist. As are other good people, liberals and progressives, who, it just so happens, are largely white. Who is largely not a protagonist in this story? Black Americans. They’ve been screwed, so they’re part of the story, but they’re in the background without much agency. In this story, they show up as a problem for me to solve, as suffering for me to alleviate.

So, here you have the human mind at work: within maybe 5 seconds a perfectly reasonable and noble intention to heal America’s original sin has morphed into a paternalistic and even patronizing narrative. Just like that!

Catching myself doing this doesn’t always feel good, but it also doesn’t bring me down. I don’t feel shame or guilt about it. Why not? One reason is that I hold it in a particular way: it’s in the air we all breathe. It’s the folklore of white supremacy. I didn’t invent it. I don’t want to propagate it. But it floats all around and sometimes passes through my mind and body, preferably not sticking around for long!

A second reason has to do with Murray. He’s not just saying that white supremacist ideas are widespread and damaging. He’s saying they are false and ridiculous. He’s laughing at them. So for me, catching myself in a patronizing view is a bit like realizing I’ve messed up on a math problem. This doesn’t feel morally wrong so much as factually incorrect. And, in a sense, I’m laughing along with Murray.

Let me mention one final lesson Murray offers to all of us answering the call. Call it the crap detector. It’s the device Murray uses to criticize black nationalists for speaking of “white man’s country” and social scientists for blaming society ills on the black family. We could use a bit of that crap detector today.

For example, today’s equivalent of “white man’s country” is the phrase “white culture.” As in, there is this “white culture” in the United States, and then there are black folks. A Venn diagram with no overlapping circles. In some groups, believing in this dichotomy is the price of admission. A good crap detector would point out that what they’re calling culture is actually political participation and economic power — let’s not be lazy with our terms. But if the speaker really means culture, then we can remind ourselves that there is no American culture without Black American culture. So enough with that false dichotomy.

Another example is the story of slavery. That it was a brutal and immoral system is without question. But some versions of the history are simplistic and false. Like the idea that the bad guys were all white, the good guys were all black, and Black Americans were inherently better off in Africa. This certainly was what I learned growing up. And there are many versions of this going around today. When we listen to Murray — or many reputable historians, for that matter — the story is more complex.

A good crap detector would point out the following: one, that the Middle Passage and slavery, as horrendous as they were, were not a fall from Eden, because Africa was no Eden. Two, that even in the midst of enslavement, Black Americans were, in Murray’s words, “living in the presence of more human freedom and individual opportunity than they or anybody else had ever seen before.” Not that they were more free, but that they were in a country that, unlike any other, held this out as a promise and something toward which they could strive.

That’s how I read Murray’s words here. This is the background for tremendous determination and improvisation, which brings me to, three, that the story of enslavement is also a story of heroism. What’s more heroic than the Underground Railroad? As Murray says, the Mayflower, unlike enslaved people trying to escape, didn’t have anyone chasing after it.

Now, as I say all of this, I can imagine some friends of mine thinking, “Amiel, it sounds like you’re de-emphasizing the history and present day reality of racism.” Because that’s what all this nuance seems to do.

But what this is actually about is clearing misleading narratives and false assumptions out of the way so we have a clearer vision of the future we are creating. Because reimagining America works better when it’s built on true facts and grounded assessments. That’s what the Omni-American vision offers us.