The Intellectual Validity of the Black Experience

(This speech by Martin Kilson, Assistant Professor of Government, was given at the Black Studies Symposium at Yale, last May 10th and 11th.)

MARY McCARTHY, the novelist and penetrating critic of the grotesque Vietnam War, has recently remarked in the New York Review of Books that whatever intellectuals do with their skills and cleverness, they should never shy away from doing what they can do best--namely, to smell a rat, metaphorically speaking, and to dissect its nature and character, letting the chips fall where they may. To some extent, this is what I should like to do in my comments on the "Intellectual Validity of the Black Experience."

I think the best approach in addressing this topic is to assess conceptually what the Black Experience has been. Such assessment is, I think, difficult. For one thing, what contemporaneous yardstick does one use to define the historical limits--the starting point and the context of the Black Experience? How do we decide what is meaningful and valuable in the social, cultural, and political realities of the Black Experience?

Furthermore, what community or segment of Black Peoples should be used as representative of whatever the Black Experience is or has been? Should we use as typical the Republic of Haiti, where black men have ruled a sovereign state since the early nineteenth century, but where also such Black Rule or, if you prefer, Black Power, has been oppressive and dysfunctional for the black masses or lower classes? Or should we take the present-day state of Nigeria, where the polity is rent asunder by fratricidal warfare that was sparked by a grotesque genocidal act committed by one against another in this largest of all black societies? Or should we take as typical of the Black Experience the Afro-American community which was subjected to chattel slavery for over 200 years, and in the past century has been denied the elemental attributes of modern citizenship and humanity by devious, grotesque, and brutal forms of white racism?

Black Racialists

Now for some Negroes--particularly for those imbued with an intense black racialist outlook--the answer to these perplexing questions is, unfortunately, rather easy. Thus white police brutality against blacks in Harlem and Mississippi and in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia should constitute the contemporaneous yardstick for the historical delimitation of the Black Experience. With this yardstick, therefore, it would be unthinkable if not treasonable to use the Haitian political experience as an historical example of something relevant and meaningful to the overall Black Experience. Instead, one would have to turn to an historical event like the slave trade to the Western Hemisphere in order to find ideological and emotional sustenance for what I can now call the black racialist or nationalist view of the Black Experience. In this view of the Black Experience, the slave trade is seen as the beastly act of beastly White men--or, in Malcolm X's memorable phrase, "White Devils"--who without pity or remorse wrenched millions of Negro Africans from their ancestral homeland for enforced and dehumanizing labor in the Western Hemisphere.

Moreover, this horrendous historical act by "White Devils" has, in the black racialist view of the Black Experience, endowed the Black man with a special aura of righteousness--that same righteousness indeed that has been applied to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth since the birth of Christianity. Of course, the typical black nationalist would not today attribute to Christian doctrine his view of the special righteousness accruing to the oppressed and despised Black Man. Yet it is one of the striking ironies of the black nationalist approach to the Black Experience that the Christian doctrine, now considered an historical agent of the Black Man's degradation, actually informed the notion of righteousness now considered a special preserve of Black Men and the Black Experience.

IN THIS connection, it can be remarked that all men--black and white, yellow and red--accept those historical paradoxes or ironies found suitable or useful for a given occasion, and reject those lacking such utility. In this respect, therefore, the Black Experience is, I daresay, little more than an offshoot of the Human Experience--no better and no worse. Perhaps I can put this point in sharper relief by reference to other features of the slave trade to the Western Hemisphere that seldom appear in the black nationalist view of this horrofying historical event. To those who take the historiography of the slave trade seriously, it is commonplace that leading and entrepreneurial groups in Negro African societies were voluntarily privy to the slave trade. These groups saw the trade in slaves as an economic relationship, from which enormous wealth and political advantage could be derived. When such gain is available, I submit men will always seek it; they are not likely to let cultural or racial bonds stand in the way. What is more, the African brokers in the slave trade--of whom there were tens of thousands--were not restrained by knowledge that perhaps 40 per cent of the human cargo in Middle Passage perished before reaching the Western Hemisphere. In short, I would suggest most firmly that the Black Experience is truly nothing more than a valiant of the Human Experience. Put another way and rather cynically, power is what power does.

Smelling A Rat

Now I trust that what I have said thus far illuminates some aspects of the intellectual validity of the Black Experience. I have purposely refrained from defining specifically what I mean by intellectual validity of the Black Experience: It happens that I hate definitions! I have also consciously refrained from attempting to deduce a conception of the intellectual validity of the Black Experience by emphasizing the oppressive aspects of this Experience as exemplified preeminently in the past three centuries of black-white relationships. I am, I think, reasonably knowledgeable about the bloody and dehumanizing record of this oppressive relationship. But I consider it neither unique nor startling: All men are capable of it, and indeed all men--black and white, yellow and red--have been privy to such.

Moreover, I cannot quite accept the viewpoint that the black man's experience with white oppression has endowed Black Men with a special insight into oppression and thus a special will or capacity to rid human affairs of oppression. I would argue in fact that this viewpoint is largely a political one which certain groups find serviceable in the contemporary conflict between Negro and white in American society. Indeed, it is a common fallacy to believe that what is momentarily politically serviceable is ipso facto intellectually virtuous. Even though I understand this viewpoint as held by black nationalists and am indeed compassionate toward it, my intellect rejects it. Like Mary McCarthy, I begin to smell a rat--metaphorically speaking--and feel compelled to dissect it for all to see.