Taking Culture Seriously

I STILL cannot fail to erase from my mind a disturbing episode that occurred in my neighborhood grocery store one recent night in Queens, New York. A young African-American male, with his pants down below his waist, was yelling in fits and starts at an Arab grocery-store owner in the most virulent and distasteful manner – with expletives and all - about apple juice he had bought earlier, saying that there is something “growing in it” (it was a plastic container), and he wanted his money back. In the meantime a group of young African-American males loitered around the grocery store, some of them smoking “weed”, while the rapper Snoop-Dogg’s recent hit “sexual seduction” blared in a parked car. It was around 11:30 p.m.; I had just returned from attending legal classes, and I figured I’d purchase a jar of coffee. The neighbors didn’t seem to mind – or maybe they couldn’t tell these young boys to “cool it”; after all, after living for twenty-five years in a neighborhood once predominated by Italians, the new neighbors – mostly black and Latino – seem used to such a ruckus.

As I left the grocery store to my car a familiar train of thought came to mind: soon someone in the neighborhood will pick up the phone in the comfort of their own home and call law enforcement officers about the ruckus at a grocery store located at such-and-such a corner, and they will disperse the young men. Maybe, if things get a little tense, - if some of the young boys resist the police officers’ demand to disperse, - the police officers will get a little “testy” with some of them and arrest them all, if possible.

But that train of thought didn’t last for long. I began to think that these young African-American boys, like others throughout this nation, were unaware of the true meaning of “culture”. They seemed not to distance themselves from what kind of music they were listening to – a type of misogynistic blend of male sexual prowess enmeshed in a morass of sexual domination.

It is now safe to say that rappers often produce such deplorable lyrics at the behest of music producers – most of them white, some of them Jewish – who exploit the rapper’s potential for astronomical profits. This is what “culture” means to these young African-American boys. Recently I’ve had a chance to listen to a very popular radio show on WBLS featuring a black female host named Wendy Williams, the self-proclaimed “Queen Of All Media” and her male side-kick named Charlemange, who collectively feed hungry listeners (most of them African-American females) about sexual trysts and lurid tales of Hollywood celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Tyra Banks.

This type of “popular culture” is very popular indeed, as long as white political elites ask that the African-American community leaders refrain from asserting their distinctive cultural attributes, values and predispositions to the point of flexing distinct political muscles. I am speaking here of the Oprah Winfrey’s, the Tyra Banks’ and the Bill Cosby’s. These leaders, according to Shelby Steele, now occupy the position as “bargainers”. They strike different deals with white America in this way: “I will not use America’s horrible history of white racism against you, if you will promise not to use my race against me”. Everybody wins in this scenario; whites retain their “racial innocence” and blacks acquire some “transcendental” freedom from their prison – the color of their skin. These leaders are a stark contrast to previous black leaders such as Marcus Garvey and El-hajj Malik Al-Shabazz, who wield unmitigated power by making whites feel guilty about centuries of American racism.

Shelby Steele, who holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah and is now Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, specializes in the study of race relations and multiculturalism. He holds that much of what has been done in the U.S. concerning black civil rights in the 1960’s had more to do with the moral redemption or self-satisfaction of whites than with any real improvement in the lives of blacks. When Hillary Rodham-Clinton made the remark that, had president Lyndon Johnson not signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King’s “dream” would not have been realized, she literally swept almost a century or more of historic struggle, begun by African-Americans for civil rights, under the rug. In her words, “It took a president to get it done”.

Over two hundred years ago the German philosopher Neitzsche, in tracing Western culture from the Greeks to the formation of modern European nation-states, pointed decisively to and traced a marked decline in what I characterize a “practice in culture”. The practice of culture has now lost its force. Individuals are now reduced to a “herd mentality”. The Greeks, he argued, practiced a sort of culture in ways that accentuated its vitality, its zeal for life. It was in this philosophical “spirit of the times” that influenced the black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon to analyze and to eliminate as best as he could through revolutionary practice a perverse colonial situation that existed in Africa and the Caribbean some forty years ago. He hoped to unleash within individuals a sort of “cultural practice” among colonized peoples so that they can forge a new destiny. Modern political institutions now act to submerge all that zest for individual life and creativity; its aim to maintain political legitimacy through legal maxims. As Neitzsche is regarded as the first European philosopher-psychologist, today’s “liberal” social psychologists now realize his Nietzsche’s contention that democratic societies fragment the individual personality, sometimes to the point of psychopathology.

For now, however, I cannot help but imagine that this particular group of rowdy African-American males, like others throughout this nation, tap into much needed guidance on what “culture” really means, instead of engaging in destructive behaviors.

The writer is a recent revert to Islam and can be contacted at: drummondhugh@verizon.net