RELENTLESS READING MATTERS
Lebron, Christopher J. The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Lebron's book is eloquent, refreshingly readable,
philosophically nuanced, and profoundly troubling. It is "radical" in a judicious
sense of that word, because it exposes roots. We commend his turning back to
the rootedness in the writings of Anna Julia Cooper and Audre Lorde. His argument is superbly constructed and
provocative, an excellent invitation for a reader to confess her or his
prejudices in concert with Lebron's confession of his own preferences.
Lebron uses James
Baldwin's moral compass with greater precision than Ta-Nehisi Coates uses it in
Between the World and Me, and that
fact magnifies both the necessity and the horror of a reader's making cultural
and political choices. Coates allows us
to eavesdrop as he saturates his son with advice, straight out of his private agon with black masculinity. Lebron addresses his readers directly, straight
out of his need to articulate his investment in moral philosophy. He forces them to dwell on the vaporous efficacy
of Baldwin's compass and to question why , in the last decade or so, Baldwin is
so frequently referenced in discourses on race and moral correctness and so
seldom mentioned in robust, unromantic discussion of Realpolitik. If a reader is
honest and admits that she or he is guided more by the political wisdom or pragmatism of Machiavelli and by the logic
of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals
than by always delayed Biblical
platitudes and promises, he or she will live with bracing discontent during and after reading Lebron.
Lebron's accounting for the history of an idea is
scholarly. It is responsible, but it's a
little short of being the corkscrew of specificity that non-academic
participants might need to shape a constellation of emotive responses (i.e.,
#BlackLivesMatter ) into the black hole of a viable movement. We might suspect academic readers will be
happy with how the book puts them in
conversation (to use threadbare
jargon), puts them in a safe,
evasive conversation with people they would never invite to
dinner. Only an inattentive reader would
miss the class biases in Lebron's rhetorical gestures. Thus, The Making of Black Lives Matter stands
as an example of our need to transform language into actions which reduce the death-inviting
risk of being respectable, magnanimous, and morally correct all the time.
Failure to channel resentment sufficiently is the book's venial flaw.
Lebron is
forthright in his introduction about his motives for writing. He desires
"to provide the philosophical moorings of #BlackLivesMatter," and he
tries "to contribute to our moment by bringing to bear the forefathers and
foremothers of black American social and political thought on an urgent claim:
that black Americans are humans, too" (xiii). His aim is to provide just that analytic
narrative "we need to fully appreciate the depth of 'black lives
matter' " (xv). STOP.
In confronting the unavoidable messiness of inter-racial and
intra-ethnic features of intellectual histories, readers must ask to whom
"we" actually refers in the unfolding of the book. RESTART.
The structure of Lebron's unfolding is fascinating. He begins Chapter 1 (American Shame and Real
Freedom) with timely remarks on the writings of
Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells.
He moves in Chapter 2 (Cultural Control against Social Control: The
Radical Possibilities of the Harlem Renaissance) to refreshingly intelligent
albeit debatable commentary on Alain
Locke, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston
and the characteristics of the era of the New Negro. He focuses on "the present uses of black
urban performance to make a stand for social progress and then goes back to a
foundationalist moment in black arts and letters ---the Harlem Renaissance" (xvi). It is not original for Lebron to contend that
Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly
is an act of rebellion, an act that may have forecast the making of
revolutionary lemonade. It is original
for him to not consider that Lamar's performance may not be quite so free as it
seems, particularly in light of how an overwhelmingly non-black entertainment
industry manipulates consumers, and it is likewise original that he directs no
attention to the lessons Harold Cruse taught in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967)about how myopic the Harlem Renaissance
was with regard to social control or to the lessons Houston A. Baker, Jr.
taught two decades later in his extended
essay Modernism and the Harlem
Renaissance (1987) regarding cultural control. The idea of "renaissance" or
"rebirth" is far too central an issue in what matters about black
life to avoid swiping cognitive fingers over its jagged grains.
Lebron does a better job of according due diligence to
gender and sexuality in Chapter 3 (For Our Sons, Daughters, and All Concerned
Souls) by way of examining the arguments and struggles of Anna Julia Cooper and
Audre Lorde, dwelling appropriately on their groundbreaking work. He set the stage for more sustained inquiry
about what is groundbreaking and exceptionally relevant for #BlackLivesMatter
in the writings of Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Barbara Smith, Mari Evans, Angela Y. Davis, and numerous other writer/activists
for whom lives mattered/matters tremendously.
Chapter 4 (Where Is the Love? The Hope for America's
Redemption) deals fairly with the ideas of James Baldwin and Martin Luther
King, Jr. and with the painful moral assessment that begs to be made of what
Dylann Storm Roof did on June 17, 2015 at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Even if one concedes that Lebron is fair in dealing with the ideas of agape and philia, the chapter leaves a most agonizing question without an
answer: Does Malcolm X matter so little
in philosophical mooring and concern for love and redemption that he receives
only scant mention on pages 119-120, 122?
The absence speaks volumes about our needs and the contours of Lebron's
thinking.
Chapter 5 (The Radical Lessons We Have Not Yet Learned)
directs us to black conservative arguments (Thomas Sowell, Randall Kennedy and
black respectability politics, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter) in order to alert
us "to the need for a refreshed black radical politics" (129). Lebron rings the alarm bell gingerly,
however, because he writes nary a word about a premature forgetting of lessons
in radical politics created by Cornel
West! He does give us an indirect clue
about why there may be no space for West in the kind of intellectual history he
wants to write. He uses what he calls
the mechanics of Nietzsche's accusations about ressentiment to critique errors in conservative discussions of
#BlackLivesMatter. It might be argued
that Nietzsche was a quintessential pragmatist, and mentioning West would make it necessary to
comment on The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(1989) and West's conviction that a deep investment in pragmatism is essential
for a revolution in American society and culture. Such notice would deconstruct
what Lebron seems to want us to remember about reform, reforming, and what
matters.
In the coda (Afterword: Nobody's Protest Essay) , Lebron
most accurately predicts how many of us will misread his unfolding of
intellectual history.
The most likely
misreading of this essay --- and likely
due to some fault in my presentation --- is that I am ultimately calling for
black Americans to turn the other cheek, but really, nothing could be farther
from the truth. Rather, it is me trying
to make my anger more intelligent and precise, and nothing has ever been more
destabilizing to the status quo than that ---the discipline to smile to keep a
conversation going just so you may ultimately win the argument rather than
storm off without the goods you came for in the first place….
If the discipline
is well-honed then we also come to realize when it's really revolution time,
which is something quite opposite from turning the other cheek. (164)
Lebron gives us one frame of reference for critical
thinking about what Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi set flowing
in 2013 under the sign of #BlackLives Matter, but it may be necessary to
misread the frame in order to take appropriate action. Like Baldwin, Lebron insists on believing
"the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice" (159). Lebron does not incorporate Amiri Baraka's
2001 poem "Somebody Blew Up America" in his discussion of what it is
essential for us to know, but that
evidence of what is not seen in his text doesn't provide reason to
believe the status quo he would destabilize is still standing. When we read The Making of Black Lives Matter relentlessly, we recognize the arc
of the moral universe bends toward chaos and the status quo in the United
States of America is a dystopian wasteland, the civility of philosophy
notwithstanding.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. June 23, 2017
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