Page 237 - Contribution To Phenomenology

230 STANFORD M LYMAN & LESTER EMBREE

Black texts that already have been recognized as such to a special mode
of deconstructive analysis that exorcises from them the characteristics of
the era of White hegemony in which they were produced. These texts are
not truly Black, because they have been racistically contaminated. To
extract the Blackness that is hidden below the White, hegemonist, facade
of those Black texts requires a structuralist archaeology of the works in
question. Gates is a cultural "archaeologist" who is "digging into" older
Black literary works.
Of course, if one wants to form or strengthen a group around its own
self-proclaimed ethnicity, these techniques can be effective. Take, for
example, Jewish literature in the United States and peel off its ^American-
ness" to get at its Jewish core; or, take Latin American literature in the
Southwest, written in English, and remove the Anglo element to uncover the
pure ''Chicano," This helps build group consciousness and solidarity, it gives
.
it a literature, it gives it a history . . " What Giddings called *a con-
sciousness of kind.* Right
One more thing, an hypothesis of mine, relating to philosophical-
political theory: If one examines the two idealized images of American
society, the assimilationist and the pluralist images, it seems each has its
own internal contradiction or dilemma. We know enough about the as-
similationist process to recognize that, in its pristine promissory vision, it
rarely occurs. In its place are the several ethnoracial senses of identity
and community with varying degrees of legitimation, thymotics, and power.
If these many consciousnesses of ethnoracial kind, with their appropriate
senses of pride, were to develop as each group would like its own to do,
what would constitute the basis of the general Social Contract in this
country? Here is my tentative answer. I think it is a philosophical answer,
but one that requires both a sociological understanding and a politi-
cal-juridical institutionalization of some sort Hidden beneath this struggle
over ethnicity is an unwritten covenant that defines the limits of
ethnoracial expression and action. In the absence of such a covenant,
which may, of course, be implicit, one risks the current situation of the
former Yugoslavia. The presence of it, so far, is revealed in the praxes
of ethnoracial conflict and accommodation in the United States. In the
latter, though, the terms of the covenant are being modified grudgingly
and without a clear understanding of the terms that limit either
expression or action. I see a social contract problem in all of this.
There seems an assumption here, namely, that making such a contract
explicit would be good. Maybe leaving it implicit, in such tacit rules as