spokenbeats asked: I'm taking a course in African American Diaspora in Communities and Cultures, and today I was asked to critique the ideas of a sociologist by the name of Frazier. He believed that in order for Black Americans to prosper in America, we should fully assimilate to the mainstream (white) American culture. Anyways, I was just wondering how you would respond to this, and is full assimilation needed, partial, or none?
I’m assuming that you’re talking about E. Franklin Frazier, the pioneering black sociologist and author of The Negro Family in the United States, a book that was challenged and largely supplanted by Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, and many of whose findings (and the presuppositions/assumptions on which these findings were based) were largely put to rest by Angela Davis in a short but incredible essay called “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.”
All of which is to say, I think my response would be to say that this is a really, really old debate, and I would ask what the relevance is of asking questions that were being asked in the 1930s, in the context of legalized and institutionalized segregation, and acting as if those are the same questions that are going to be relevant to black Americans today.
I would ask what it would mean to “prosper in America,” and I would seriously ask, in response, if it’s reasonable for black folks to think that they can prosper, as a group, within the same capitalist system that put economic value on their ancestors, and that continues to find spectacular ways of devaluing black life.
I would also point out that much of mainstream white America isn’t doing great right now. Even though folks of color have disproportionately felt the burden of the financial crisis, white America, and especially the better part of white America, isn’t doing that great. American mainstream culture, it might turn out—if we looked at it from those perspectives that are not provided for us by white bourgeois America—might actually be more damaging and alienating for the majority of Americans who are not at all prospering from America.
So, to put it too briefly here, I think that if assimilation is given to you as an easy or obvious answer, it was probably a bad question to begin with. We don’t need assmiliation, we need alternatives. Additionally, what is white American culture? Does that mean having jobs, fair wages, and a real chance at a living well, loving, and opportunities to maintain and cultivating meaningful relationships? To feel like what you do matters? What’s “white” about that except for the fact that white people—because of racist society—have had disproportionate access to these social goods and/or the means to create them?
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lowendtheory posted this
