Afrocentrists, Evangelicals, Hebrew-Israelites and the False Revolution

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Afrocentric, Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Authority Figures, Black Action Society, Child Abuse, Covenant Church of Pittsburgh, Cross of Gold (1896), Dick Oestriecher, Domestic Violence, Estelle Abel, Evangelical Christianity, Frances Cress Welsing, Frederick K.C. Price, Gospel of Prosperity, Hoteps, Jack Van Impe, Judah ben Israel, Karl Marx, Kenneth Copeland, Kufi, Marxism, Maurice Eugene Washington, Molefi Asante, Neo-Marxists, Ostracism, Prosperity Gospel, Racism, Rapture, Religion, Wendy Goldman, William Jennings Bryan

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Believer’s Voice of Victory television broadcast, November 23, 2011. (Carpetsmoker via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

For nearly all of my life folks with even a kernel of authority have tried to convince me that there was one right way to live, one true path to liberation. Mostly religion has been the means through which others have attempted to box me in, although ideologues around Marxism, Afrocentricity, and Capitalism have all been in my figurative kitchen over the years. And like any well-meaning human being, at times I tried real hard to adapt myself to these right ways of thinking, of living out the one correct way to live. Only to fail, or rather, to recognize that none of these ways are the one right way, unless you are a closet right-winger, a conservative (non-ideological) wearing revolution-esque clothing.

My introduction to this madness began with my years as a Hebrew-Israelite, from April ’81 to April ’84 (although I wore my kufi until September ’84). That any parent could suddenly impose a new religion on their kids without explanation is abusive enough. When combined with vague notions about the Lost Tribes of ancient Israel and the wearing of clothes that set us apart culturally while in the middle of puberty, it was a forced societal ostracism. Even still, I tried to live by these strictures. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Eat kosher food, don’t use Ivory soap, shop only at Black or Hebrew-Israelite stores, avoid “unclean issues of blood.” But the physical abuse and poverty that came with being a Hebrew-Israelite in the Judah ben Israel madhouse of contradictions at 616 made me despise anything involving Hebrew-Israelite pretty much for all time.

Molefi Asante speech, Philadelphia, PA, September 13, 2014. (AP photo/file).

Fast-forward a few years to the early 1990s, to the rise of Afrocentricity and the Afrocentric ethos. After three and a half years of being around Hebrew-Israelites, these kente-cloth wearing fools made me weary more times than not of their exclusionary our-way-or-no-way Blackness. Molefi Asante and the late Frances Cress Welsing were just the tip of a much larger iceberg in search of revolutionary “authentic” Blackness. From the Afrocentric undergrads who hijacked the Black Action Society leadership at the University of Pittsburgh in 1991 to folks who picked arguments with me for “sounding White” while I was in grad school, I saw them the same way I saw my now idiot ex-stepfather and the obnoxious Estelle Abel from my high school days. They were well-meaning but stupid. As far as I was concerned, they thought that their words alone would foster a revolution, that being Black meant turning one’s back on the world while also indirectly embracing an ethnocentric capitalism. Or at least, a Black American collective individualism, otherwise known as an “Afrocentric cool.” I could not, I would not, exchange one form of oppressive uplift in Hebrew-Israelites for the shiny fool’s gold that mostly represented the Afrocentrists.

The neo-Marxists I met in Pittsburgh throughout the 1990s were no better. For all their revolutionary rhetoric, theirs was a world of theoretical activism, of scholarly examples of past oppression. Most of them didn’t know poverty and didn’t comprehend oppression beyond their own limited experience. Most of all, they couldn’t find a connection between American racism and class oppression if I gave them an industrial strength magnet. The fact that most of them hadn’t read Franz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, C. L. R. James, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Derrick Bell, Angela Davis — but could quote Karl Marx the way Hebrew-Israelites could quote the Torah and Afrocentrists could quote Asante and Welsing — I found troubling. That’s putting it nicely. I found it contemptuous that folks who didn’t know my experience or who would all but refuse to read folks who written about experiences like mine would expect my allegiance to an ideology that was never meant for people who look like me.

The evangelical Christian part of my life was literally the last of the major dogmas to go. It was the hardest for me because I literally had given my life to Jesus in the midst of the whole Hebrew-Israelite crisis, Easter Sunday ’84. With my Mom coming down the same path by the late-1980s, it made it easier to not interrogate my Christianity as thoroughly as I would excoriate Afrocentrists and Marxists in graduate classes and in articles and papers a decade later. But even at nineteen, I realized that the Van Impe’s weekly predictions of the Apocalypse were as ridiculous as Welsing’s exulting of the magical properties of melanin. Or, for that matter, a fake Balkis Makeda cautioning against the use of Ivory Soap among her Hebrew-Israelite flock because of a dream she had.

Grant Hamilton cartoon for Judge Magazine on William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, Democratic National Convention, Chicago, July 9, 1896. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

I went along to get along for years, until the hypocrisy of evangelical Christianity’s Gospel of Prosperity became too much. They took the metaphor of William Jennings Bryan’s cross of gold and actually went literal and nuclear with it. Somehow being Christian now meant blind patriotic allegiance to anything US and fully supporting capitalism, and yet an exclusionary separation between “true” evangelical Christians and the rest of the world. Especially on Rapture Day.

The last time I sat comfortably in a pew was in January ’97, although I’ve been to churches of various denominations dozens of times since. I still believe in Jesus, the life and the death and even the resurrection. But I don’t believe in most who claim to represent him, yet turn around and ignore the vulnerable standing right in front of them, making weak claims around individualism and poverty in the process.

In so many ways, evangelicals, Marxists, Afrocentrists, and Hebrew-Israelites are more alike than different. They all insist on a singular path, a quintessential truth. While some aspects of their thinking are appealing, I find accepting their bullshit in entirety poisonous to my spirit, mind, and gastrointestinal tract. There still may well be a revolution or even a rapture, but it won’t be because of any of these groups.

The Progressive’s Karl Marx Altar

22 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Altars, Class Struggle, Conservatives, Cultural Imperialism, False Gods, False Idols, Ideology, Karl Marx, Marxism, Michael Eric Dyson, Political Imperialism, Progressives, Ronald Reagan, S-USIH 2015 Conference, Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The New Republic, White Progressives

A portrait of Karl Marx, age 57, approximately August 24, 1875, by John Jabez Edwin Mayall, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. (Quibik via Wikipedia). In public domain.

For so many things ideological in the US, there are more similarities than differences. That’s why the difference between most “liberals” and most “conservatives” is more issue-driven than an overall difference in philosophy or intellectual outlook.

On the issue of ideological altars, there are more similarities than differences as well. Democrats specifically — and leftists more broadly — often poke fun at conservatives and their constant invoking of Ronald Reagan as their intellectual guru and mascot. The idea that Reagan was a pro-life, anti-immigration and evangelical Christian conservative is as ludicrous as seeing Alexander the Great as a socialist muse. There’s no way that the once living-and-breathing Ronald Reagan would ever get along with most conservatives today, who tend to use his name in vain.

But if that’s true of American conservatives, many progressives are just as guilty, just as myopic, just as delusional. For them, though, their guru and intellectual Father has been Karl Marx (1818-1883), a Prussian-Jewish political philosopher and activist who found himself kicked out of Prussia, France, and Belgium before living out his final three decades in the UK. Of course, the father of Marxism makes sense, since class struggle has always been the very definition of being a progressive, a liberal, a leftist, no?

Well, class struggle has not always been at the center of being a leftist or a progressive. Standing against injustice and inequality, though, has. That is the distinction that most progressives — especially White progressives — all but refuse to make. Though Marx’s great intellectual and literary works were all about class struggle and the need to overthrow capitalism and return to the pre-classical, pre-imperialist days of communal living and economic equality, he left so much out. About the world outside of Europe, about slavery and women’s suffrage, about forms of inequality that weren’t just explained by human civilizations and class struggle. Not to mention, many of his predictions were just plain wrong.

Is your glass half-empty? – Optimism Quiz, August 2012. (http://oprah.com).

A question at the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians Conference last week reminded me of this over-reliance on Marx. At a plenary session on progressive public intellectuals, a graduate student asked a question about Black public intellectuals (particularly the freshly ordained Ta-Nehisi Coates and others identified by Michael Eric Dyson in The New Republic earlier this fall) and some idea about the need to return to Marxism. If I’d been on the panel, I would’ve responded, “Why Marxism? Why is this the only choice progressives, liberals, and leftist believe they have?”

Marx and his -isms don’t speak to me. I never thought to worship at his altar. I’ve almost always found White progressive attempts to make me see systems of racial inequality and discrimination as all part of class struggle ridiculous. I never saw Marx as having an answer to issues like intersectionality and Black/Latino/APA feminism, or in dealing with cultural imperialism (which is embedded in Marx’s own writings) via multiculturalism.

Stacks of money, April 13, 2008. (Allureme via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 License.

Plus, why do progressives need a White guy born in the nineteenth century as their utopian guide toward a twenty-first century revolution, anyway? Anybody ever heard of W. E. B. Du Bois or bell hooks, Edward Said or Erykah Badu? At this point in my intellectual life, Baduizm, Saidism or Sonia Sanchez-ism all fit where I am much more than Karl Marx. For me, Marx is just as much a false idol as Ronald Reagan and Baal.

Aside

What’s Up With These Leftist Labels, Anyway?

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"I Am 32 Flavors" (1998), Alana Davis, Anti-Stereotype, Class Struggle, Critical Race Theory, Derrick A. Bell, Dick Oestreicher, Evangelical Christianity, Franz Fanon, Graduate School, Humanities, JD, Karl Marx, Labeling, Labels, Leftist, Liberal, Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Pitt, Rosemary Martino, Stereotypes, W. E. B. Du Bois

Asian woman in nude breaking through a bar code, September 2010. (unknown author/woman, http://www.willeyelisten.com).

Over the years, I’ve grown tired of the idea that my social, cultural, economic and political beliefs could be summed up with one or two words. Like “progressive,” “Communist,” “neo-Marxist,” “leftist,” “liberal,” and/or “Marxist.” Why? Because like so many things American (or in this case, Western), ideologues and intellectuals take the easiest path and slap overgeneralized labels on groups of people without thought, without nuance, and certainly without an understanding of both people and history.

I’ve felt this way about these labels at least since my first year of grad school in the University of Pittsburgh’s MA and PhD programs (1991-92), and likely longer than that. But in that program, I was surrounded by professors and colleagues who were various shades of Marxism. At least that’s what they claimed. More to the point, they claimed that “the class struggle” was the defining feature of both human history and US history. “The class struggle” trumped slavery and America’s racial caste system, the near eradication of indigenous cultures in the US and around the world, it trumped the exploitation and exclusion of women in Western civilizations.

I admit it. It really, really, really pissed me off to be earning my MA and beginning my doctoral work around such ignorant thinkers. They would ask me about my Marxism, and I’d say, “I’m not a Marxist. I’m not a neo-Marxist. I’m not even a Groucho Marxist.” My Pitt grad school colleagues would laugh, sometimes a little too forcefully. My professors, for the most part, ignored me, since I was an African American history student who believed that race intertwined with class to be US history’s defining feature. How scandalous!

It wasn’t that I hadn’t read Karl Marx’s and Frederick Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). I read it via Rosemary Martino in twelfth grade, though I can’t remember if I read it for AP English or for her Humanities Philosophy class. I’d also read Marx’s much longer Das Kapital (1867), Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and so many other supposedly Marxist-leaning tombs by the time I’d taken my first full semester of grad-level courses (I took my first grad course my junior year at Pitt).

A basic world political spectrum chart (really, too simple), August 5, 2015. (http://www.endofprejudice.com/).

I just wasn’t that impressed on the Marxism part of things. I mean, I was well acquainted with oppression, exploitation and abuse long before I’d read anything by Marx and Engels, or George Orwell in ninth grade English, for that matter. I had a contrarian Humanities classmate in JD who espoused what I considered even at the time his version of Communist gibberish all through middle school and into our sophomore year at Mount Vernon High School. So how do you label someone a Marxist or Communist who both views it with disdain and didn’t grow up quoting from it? I’d like to know.

This last question, though, is bigger than just my own experience with poverty, race, racism, child abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, homelessness, cultish religions, and sheer willful ignorance and neglect. Historically, labeling anyone who had radical ideas about the falsities of human civilizations as civilizing the human tendency to spread inequality and oppression to the most vulnerable as Communist is a bit ahistorical, no? So-called leftists or socialists do that with Jesus and Muhammad almost every day. Maybe we should call Karl Marx an original, Asiatic Christian or original Muslim, minus the spiritual component of kneeling before God in prayer.

Portrait of Guy Fawkes (1570-1606), author/date unknown, August 5, 2015. (http://plus.google.com).

For me, growing up in a striving household that ended up in grinding welfare poverty didn’t make me a Communist. I went through several stages of belief, from my Mom and idiot stepfather Maurice hoisting the Hebrew-Israelite thing on me, to evangelical Christianity, to just plain Christianity, to critical race theorist adherent. I never completely gave up on capitalist democracy, because what would’ve been the point of that? By the time my son was born in 2003, I saw myself more in European terms, as either a Social Democrat or a Christian Democrats, believers in compromises and reforms from within that ameliorate the worst forms of racial, gender and other forms of oppression and poverty.

Yet even that is too big a label to hang on me or others, now and across history. What did people call those who wanted to rid the world of poverty and economic oppression prior to 1848? Or prior to the French Revolution, for that matter? Troublemakers? Radicals? Jacobites? Weird? Lunatics? To be honest, any of these terms fit me better than progressive, liberal, leftist or Marxist. Because ultimately, I don’t believe in any single economic or political belief system crafted by Homo sapiens. They’re all subject to corruption, all subject to be bent by those with the most power and resources.

So, who am I, ideologically speaking? To quote Alana Davis, “I am 32 flavors” and dim sum. Go ahead. Try to figure that out and come up with a label that fits!