Page 105 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

EXPERIENCE, EMPATHY AND STRATEGIC ESSENTIALISM 99

undisciplined generalization in social science literature which has reinscribed
black as a signifier for poor, culturally deviant/deficient and criminal, even
where the intent has been to refute pathological depictions. It is a literature which
has ignored the diversity of black people’s experiences including regional, ethnic,
class and gender differences. Kennedy notes further that one of the hallmarks of
this social science literature asserts that ‘black traits are superior to white traits
or are functionally valuable to blacks given the social context in which they live’
[Kennedy, 1989:1817:n.304].
I am not suggesting that different types of cultural articulations—what perhaps
may be more usefully seen as styles—and specific institutional structures did not
develop among sectors of the African-American community in the United States
which were significantly different from various white European-American
communities. I am, however, insisting that these are practices and productions
which need to be specified, contextualized and problematized—not presumed.
Instead, texts dealing with African-Americans tend to romanticize, mystify or
dramatize behaviours as culturally distinctive black practices—a representation
further fostered and reinforced in the news media and entertainment world.
From ghetto studies of the 1960s to analyses of gangsta rap in the 1990s, the
black underclass has been marketed as representative of the authentic black
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experience. In the 1960s, social scientists targeted black communities without
problematizing and defining the criteria for privileging racial boundaries as
opposed to the specificity of class which would have furthered an inter-racial and
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intra-racial dimension. In the 1990s, as cultural critic bell hooks argues, there is
a remarkable resistance to viewing gangsta rap as ‘an embodiment of the norm
of [American] mainstream culture’ (hooks 1994).
In the 1920s and 1930s, a new emphasis on researching common links across a
black diaspora served the purpose of a project of vindication. In the context of
the United States, this also encouraged a conceptual segregation of blacks and
whites which has been more ubiquitous than spatial segregation. 12
With anthropologist Melville Herskovits’s ideas of acculturation—which
focused on the survival and diffusion of African culture within the black slave
population and inherited by their descendants—Herskovitz channelled interest
13
away from the process of inter-racial cultural dynamics. The American South,
for instance, a crucial site for researching continuities with Africa, was the one
region where the process of acculturation had an inescapable inter-racial dialectic
involving blacks, whites and Native Americans. 14 In retrospect then, the
objections of black sociologist Franklin Frazer to Herskovits were not without
merit. The culture concept never quite replaced race thinking—it merely
provided a new terminology which was less blatantly offensive. 15 But the
problem remains: how do we recognize difference without reifying it, and how
do we translate this recognition in teaching critical enquiry?
I suggest that in the absence of a conscious decision to assume diversity rather
than homogeneity—given the fact that diversity is both visible and invisible—
educators will continue to offend and silence some, and reproduce racialist