An Alternative Black Perspective

Earlier this evening, I was reminded once again of Chinua Achebe’s 1959 novel Things Fall Apart. Though it probably sounds counterintuitive, Senator Tim Scott’s response to President Joe Biden, or rather people’s reactions to it, evoked Ekwefi’s story about the tortoise and the birds, a seemingly innocent story she relates to her daughter Ezinma. But the folktale is really a story about the power of language. In the story, the tortoise tricks the birds into assenting to a technicality that enables him to eat nearly all their food at a great feast in the sky. They eventually exact a level of retribution, but the statement that echoes inside my mind is Ekwefi’s line: “Tortoise had a sweet tongue.” That he did; and so, too, does Senator Scott. I’ve only seen a few critical statements here and there. But every comment I’ve seen or heard—on cable news, Twitter posts, and other social media sites—has pointed to various contradictions or explained in detail why Scott’s statement was immoral or misleading. But such criticisms are quite beside the point, and they betray political ineptitude.

Like other members of the GOP, Senator Scott operates in the subcutaneous realm of human emotions. He’s not concerned with truth; he wants to shape people’s perceptions of truth—what Marxist theorists once called ideology and older Black folk called tricknology. But regardless of the terminology, facts fall short in conflicts like this. The most effective response is to clap back and tap back into people’s gut-level feelings because emotions are often averse to contrary views and information. In a political situation like this, reciting catalogs of factual data is counterproductive. It’s like putting money in a pocket with a hole in it. The real challenge is to lampoon and thus illuminate Scott’s contradictions w/ such razor-sharp satire and irony, so that they appear to be as ludicrous as they really are—even to some of his supporters potentially. Progressives are quite adept at academic politics: most are very good at battling so-called moderates and various rival figures on the left against whom peer-reviewed articles and books are much more effective. But in the bare-knuckle world of right-wing politics, progressives’ dependence on conventional academic strategies is analogous to bringing boxing gloves to a bar fight. By and large, the critical reactions to Scott demonstrate how thoroughly many of us have internalized bourgeois paradigms as constitutive of knowledge itself.

Achebe’s elaborations on traditional Ibo narrative forms and the philosophical constructs therein exemplify the wisdom engraved in the grooves of African Diasporic cultures, and our great wordsmiths are prime examples. The hilarious Black queer woman comedian Moms Mabley came of age during Jim Crow when Black artists suffered legal and extralegal consequences for criticizing public officials. But she would’ve had a field day responding to Scott. She may have even elicited a chuckle from Scott himself or perhaps some of his supporters. After all, the greatest Black wordsmiths could always provoke laughter and thus minimal concessions from people who fundamentally disagreed w/ them. Hence Richard Pryor’s early 1970s recordings. Or even Gil Scott-Heron’s classic song-poems (incidentally, this is one of the reasons why “the godfather of rap” is too narrow to accommodate his legacy). They were all experts at using wit, satire, parody, and so forth. Academics often talk about the lack of a mind-body split, but this whole situation typifies how deftly GOP politicians exploit that aspect of human phenomena.  

Which brings me to my final point. Another omission in current discussions is Scott’s main objective. Considering the premium on “theory” in academic circles, such an omissions seems rather ironic, especially since so many thinkers describe themselves as “radicals.” The inordinate talk about the senator’s “carrying water for the GOP” is misguided. This is a symptom of the problem, and talking about it incessantly ignores the fundamental fact that Scott’s strategy worked. He effectively deflected and sidetracked discussions about the most terrifying experiences in recent history: the living nightmare of state violence. Police officers are shooting and killing us with virtually no legal consequences, and it’s happening in our homes, in our streets, and increasingly in live and living color on tape. These are modern-day lynchings; and if we borrow a basketball-analogy for our discussion, Scott’s response was a prototypical pump-fake of GOP obfuscation. His speech was as predictable as voter suppression in red states, which is calculated, in all honesty, to transform the nation into an official state of white supremacy. In a word, a uniquely American form of fascism. This is what’s at stake.

Yet progressive pundits, professors, and corporate broadcast journalists fell for Scott’s trick. GOP tricknology is gangster to the max: Three-card Monte—find the red card. As with the birds in Things Fall Apart, progressives’ gullibility can be remarkable at times. It’s easy to disprove a boldface lie or to correct statements that are more subtle and misleading. But this is isn’t a classroom or a debate. Republicans’ refusal to accept Donald Trump’s defeat in the presidential election has precipitated violence and vitriol fueled by racist propaganda. This is the subtext of Scott’s rebuttal to Biden. The challenge for leftists, then, is to create discursive aversions to misinformation. That is to say, make it less rewarding. Obviously, accomplishing anything along these lines would be exceedingly more difficult, but the political payoff would be commensurate, especially in terms of mobilizing our people, not to mention providing a critical context for local discussions of politics wherever people gather. Indeed, mobilization will play a decisive role in our efforts to stave off full-blown American fascism, regardless of its terminology (e.g., autocracy, white nationalism, etc.). Indeed, the rancid seeds are being sown at this moment. It is therefore vital to engage people’s emotions and to counterpunch rhetorically via signification or other cultural devices. Given the circumstances, this is the least we can do.

Such are the political insights implicit in Ekwefi’s folktale. When Tortoise instructs Parrot “to bring out all the soft things in [his] house and cover the compound with them so that [he could] jump down from the sky without very great danger,” Parrot altered the message and told Tortoise’s wife to bring out “the hard things” instead. Hopefully, we can come up with more resourceful ways to respond. As Achebe understood all too well, racial capitalism presumes that we are little more than parrots who are doomed to repeat their narratives. In the context of modern U.S. politics, concentrating solely on disputing Republicans’ bogus claims ad infinitum is tantamout to the stereotype. Such reactions are futile and self-defeating. Counterpunch—this is the legacy we must learn from Achebe and other resistance writers throughout the African diaspora.

All too often, the commentary on Trump’s refusal to concede is as useless as third-grade math books in a quantum physics class. American pundits, politicians, and broadcast journalists have consistently missed the mark, particularly regarding Trump’s logic, mindset, and strategies. Indeed, the conventional wisdom is that he has no logic or strategies. And his recent, explicitly political, maneuvers have been dismissed and discounted in somewhat simplistic, psychological, and thus exceedingly misleading terms: zany, infantile, petulant, narcissistic, etc. I think this view is shortsighted, though. Neither narcissism nor petulance is mutually exclusive of ruthlessness, callousness, or despotism. Indeed, given the significance that postmodernists attach to nuance as an intellectual criterion, it is both curious and ironic that pundits and politicians tend to invoke parochial notions of psychology in their assessments of Trump’s political machinations. To better understand what’s happening, let’s use a sports analogy.

Imagine a championship Superbowl game. You have the ball. It’s fourth down with one yard to go, and it’s late in the fourth quarter. You’re seven points down, on the twenty yard line, in the enemy’s territory—and you have the finest defense in the world. What do you do? Kick a field goal? Especially when you need a touchdown? In other words, do you give the ball back to the other team? Or do you go for broke and bank on your defense? Of course, many people would point out the faulty nature of my analogy—and rightly so. Trump lost according to the rules.

Nonetheless, my larger point is that, in the current moment, given today’s political climate, Trump has very little to lose and almost everything to gain. Though he faces significant legal jeopardy without his presidency, there’s no indication that he will face penalties—legal, financial, or otherwise—for refusing to concede. The most likely fallout, it seems, is that his supporters will be more fiercely impassioned, more intensely outraged, and more thoroughly hoodwicked by Trumpism. In which case, they’ll even be more likely to disregard Joe Biden’s legitimacy as President and more likely to do Trump’s evil bidding in the form of violence, intimidation, and more. On the other hand, even if the odds aren’t especially favorable, and I’m not sure they aren’t, he might still manage to orchestrate a coup and win the Holy Grail—which is to say, the political power, economic privilege, and (extra) legal protection generally afforded to dictators.

It may seem counterintuitive, but Trump and other GOP politicians are playing the “long game” against a cadre of centrists who assumed the mantle of the left while banishing genuine radicals to the peanut gallery where their lucid commentaries on the right couldn’t be heard. Thus Trump has nearly everything to gain and virtually nothing to lose. I believe this is the logic that best explains our current situation.

Alexander Burns’s article, “Could the 2020 Election Be Postponed? Only With Great Difficulty. Here’s Why,” published in The New York Times on March 14, 2020, exemplifies the sort of naivete that has characterized much of the intelligentsia in recent years. Indeed, just a few days ago, Peter Wehner published an article in The Atlantic titled “The Trump Presidency Is Over.” The reality is that most intellectuals have developed on university campuses, and theoretical frameworks therein have provided inadequate preparation for the likes of Donald J. Trump. Many contemporary thinkers have been bewildered by Trump’s political strategies, and relatively few have understood the full ramifications of his presidency—until now. In 2016, for instance, Marc Lamont Hill stated, “I would rather have Trump be president for four years and build a real left wing movement that can get us what we deserve as a people than to let Hillary be president and we stay locked in the same space …” Clearly, this was wishful thinking. Trump’s presidency didn’t spawn a left-wing movement; the opposite occurred—he emboldened right-wing bigotry.  

     Burns’s perspective is similarly misguided. Alluding to the Presidential Election Day Act that Congress passed in 1845, he states that the general election could only be postponed “with enormous difficulty,” because “[i]t would take a change in federal law to move that date.” But it’s important to distinguish between de jure and de facto because legality doesn’t appear to be Trump’s primary criterion. Thus the question isn’t whether postponing the election is illegal, or whether legal structures would complicate doing so. The question concerns enforcement of the law. Given the rise of autocracies in the twenty-first century in many regions across the globe, the lesson of Donald Trump’s presidency—if he’s taught us anything—is that the political paradigm has shifted dramatically. Two days ago he called himself a “wartime president”; and now that the coronavirus is creating more chaos and confusion, there’s no telling what Trump might do. As such, these are the fundamental questions: Will Trump honor the Presidential Election Day Act; and if he transgresses it, would Republicans and the Republican-controlled Supreme Court continue to protect him?

     This is the bottom line. And it’s important to emphasize here that I am not predicting events in November. It is my sincere hope that we’ll have a free and fair election. My only point is that this isn’t a given. Almost everything these days becomes a partisan issue. Even the Rona is a partisan issue. And while there are many reasons for this, the underlying reason is that ever since Barack Obama became President in 2008, the GOP has been engaged in a civil war by proxy. Blackness is a metaphor for liberalism, and everything associated with it is vilified as evil. This ideological strategy has been remarkably effective. White ontology is largely predicated on opposition—white people tend to formulate their sense of identity based on differences from other social groups. And when pushed to the extreme, this predilection to “see” people as fundamentally different and morally inferior can be applied to almost anyone. Such animus renders large sectors of the public indifferent to factual data that contradicts deep-seated feelings and points of view.

     Equally important, though, is the role of corporate media outlets. Ralph Ellison, hardly an apostle of black radicalism during his lifetime, presciently describes what happens when the media spins racial animus in his 1952 novel Invisible Man. After the young narrator threatens to be a whistleblower, the black college president tells him: “‘These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them that you’re lying, they’ll tell the world even if you prove you’re telling the truth. Because it’s the kind of lie they want to hear …’”

     Sound familiar? To date, neither the GOP nor Trump’s voters have given any indication that they’ll demand accountability for any of his lies, or that there’s a line in the sand he cannot cross. In previous eras, blatant disregard for the law and flouting age-old political norms were taboo in American political culture. Likewise, overt and tacit support for extreme forms of castigation and stigmatization were generally reserved for racial, religious, gendered, geographical, and sexual Others, notwithstanding white communists and socialists. It was almost unthinkable for white citizens to vilify, or tolerate the vilification of, a decorated war veteran like Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman before Trump’s presidency. But there was little outcry when Vindman was dismissed from the National Security Council and escorted out of the building in utter humiliation.

     So, again, the paradigm has shifted. We must be realistic if we hope to provide meaningful insight for readers today and tomorrow. Richard Wright was correct when he stated many years ago that “the Negro is America’s metaphor.” And we would do well to revisit 20^th century black writers like Wright, Ellison, and many more, including Margaret Walker, Alice Childress, Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Jayne Cortez, and a long list of others who’ve been neglected by scholars and forgotten by the public. But for now, the most important question concerning the fate of the nation isn’t whether a law prohibits presidential actions. The question is who will enforce the law? 

Tony Bolden is Editor of The Langston Hughes Review and author of Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture, The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture, and the forthcoming book Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk.