URBAN MAROONS: DISENGAGEMENT AND BLACK SURVIVAL

On Sunday, March 20, 2006, the New York Times published an article entitled “Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn,”1 which presented the findings of a string of studies by “experts” at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, and other universities. These studies report that “poorly educated black men are becoming even more disconnected from the mainstream [American] society . . . ”2 amidst “an economic boom and a welfare overhaul . . . [that has] brought gains to black women . . . ” The article sites “terrible schools, absent parents, racism, the decline in blue collar jobs and a subculture that glorifies swagger over work . . . as causes of the deepening ruin of black youths.” To combat this, social programs are placing emphasis on life skills, such as “parenting, conflict resolution, and character building,” in addition to job training. While providing a slew of misguided analyses and ill-informed proposals, the article does manage, unknowingly and ironically enough, to call attention to a social phenomenon that deserves greater attention: Black disengagement.

The article begins by establishing a dangerous, and false, dichotomy between Black men and women, as it works from the erroneous position that Black women and men operate independently of one another, treating us as if we are two distinct and isolated populations whose social conditions are not interlinked. The urban centers that serve as the foci of this article are inhabited by both Black women and men who share living, social, cultural, historical, and political spaces, in other words, a community.

Beyond this, to suggest that social programs have created a “turnaround” for Black women and thus dramatically improved their lot (not so subtly implying that for whatever reasons, perhaps a pathology of Black male culture, Black men just can’t get it together) blatantly ignores recent statistics that show, for example, that Black women face the fastest-growing incarceration rate in the United States3 and are the primary population to contract HIV/AIDS4, not to mention a long and persisting history of isolation, depression, and a series of other physical and mental illnesses. Ultimately, the article fails to address, let alone treat, the systemic shortcomings in which these conditions find root, shortcomings that affect an entire community, not merely a single gender.

But what is particularly telling is that this article was published approximately seven months after Hurricane Katrina struck the US Gulf Coast and exposed the great American “secret” of race and class inequality in one of the most blatant disregards for human life within the borders of this country. Government officials left the sufferers, overwhelmingly poor Blacks, unattended on rooftops for five days in a genocidal display of neglect. Public officials, scrambling for a scapegoat, eventually blamed the victims as the media’s deliberate depiction of the survivors as Black criminals, rapists, and heathens undoubtedly called national interest away from the reality of the thousands who continued to die.

But this was just the most overt contemporary event in a long history of Black genocide. Other more subtle forms include increased incarceration of Black men and women, harsher prison sentences despite decreasing crime, continued outsourcing of labor, scarcity of jobs (especially those paying a livable wage), the elimination of social welfare programs, restricted access to healthcare, urban gentrification, lack of affordable housing, enduring police violence, decadent school systems, and merciless military recruitment. All of these elements paint the present landscape of working (and middle-) class Black American reality.

It is with this reality in mind that I take issue with the concept of “disconnectedness” as treated in the New York Times article. The use of this term seems to suggest that Black people’s “inability” to remain or become connected to the mainstream society is indicative of larger, cultural incapacities. That is, “disconnected” and other key words such as “underdeveloped” become a sort of modern way to refer to the “uncivilized.” After all, when we speak of “mainstream,” are we not really talking about white supremacy? And is not white supremacy, among other things, an oppressive relationship established on the dichotomy of white and non-white, rational and irrational, civilized and barbarian or uncivilized?5 Black people, as the epitome of non-whiteness, then, are by default the epitome of the “uncivilized,” those in need of white protection, guidance, and wisdom (i.e., “white man’s burden). Let the New York Times tell it, or academia more generally, this becomes a crisis because the “uncivilized” are no longer falling in line with the established order. They are breaking with the “civilizing” project. They are “disconnecting.” But the article establishes this distancing of Black people from “society” in a falsely chronological manner. This is nothing new. Black people have always been nominal participants in mainstream American society. What we are currently living is historical: as national repression increases, Black participation decreases.

The phenomenon that is incorrectly called “disconnectedness” is, upon closer analysis, in fact disengagement, the active self-removal from a society as a means of self-defense and collective survival. Understanding that the dominant power structure is antithetical to collective Black community, Black people in the United States are disengaging. This Black disengagement, motivated by a desire for a more complete and collective existence, is rooted in a radical legacy that dates back to, and even pre-dates, New World chattel slavery. Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition, writes:

Where we cannot retreat to such far off locations, we find means of disengagement.

But disengagement is not a clear and definitive break. It is a process by which one first recognizes the contradictions of the system under which s/he finds her or himself, and then proceeds to transform her or his reality to one more in accordance with her or his moral standards. It includes the self-distancing from said society in the quest for an alternate one. It must be underscored, once again, that disengagement is a process.

When the teenagers with whom I work at Rikers Island, New York City’s largest penal colony, expound upon the inadequacies of this power structure, cite countless injustices found in the criminal justice system, demonstrate a deep awareness and understanding of the racist underpinnings of their detainment, and then proceed to glorify the merciless attainment of material goods by any means, thereby validating the system they just rebuked, it should come as no surprise. The current racial capitalist/imperialist power structure is one that imposes limits upon the imagination as a means of preserving hegemony. In many instances, we cannot imagine ourselves outside of the current system, for we have not yet gained the vocabulary to articulate nor the tools to construct that which we seek. As the process of disengagement matures, however, the vocabulary to purport a vision is developed, which the collective then becomes ready to enact.

But if this disengagement is and has, indeed, been taking place, where can we find it? What does it look like? I believe that we can find it all around us. When conservative elements criticize Black youth culture for its blatant disregard of the education system, for instance, we are seeing the evidence of this disengagement. What critics claim to be a “culture of anti-intellectualism” is in fact a very intellectual culture, in that an intellectual is one who reflects critically upon her/his situation. This culture understands that the current education system in the United States serves as little more than a source of Black self-hatred7 and an organized attempt to prepare Black children for life as menial workers or prisoners.8 As such, Black youth want no part. Unfortunately, what we do not always see in Black youth culture are articulated and productive alternatives.

Further evidence of this disengagement can be found in another recent New York Times article reporting a significant shift in the Black population of New York City. The article states that “an accelerating exodus of American-born blacks, coupled with slight declines in birthrates and a slowing influx of Caribbean and African immigrants, have produced a decline in New York City's black population for the first time since the draft riots during the Civil War...”9 In search of more space, lower cost of living, and family roots, a large share of migrants leaving not only the city, but the region, and heading for the South are ‘lower income’ and ‘less educated,’ the same population cited in the earlier article as being “disconnected.” Black people are leaving New York City, the epicenter of global capital exploitation, for more space and family roots. We are disengaging from urban centers and then moving to environments that facilitate an improved quality of life and connect us to our family traditions. What plight are these studies referring to?

Above all else, disengagement is a source of hope, as it demonstrates that, even in the height of State repression, Black people are still resisting white hegemony, that we have still not yet been conquered by a society that has nothing more to offer us than urban death chambers, rural peonage, imprisonment, and enslavement. It is not hopelessness. It is intelligence, the comprehension that this society has nothing for us. Of course the New York Times, as a tool of white supremacy, would publish these academic findings. Who knows? Perhaps it will generate funds for NGO’s who will implement programs which only serve to disillusion, deceive, and misguide Black people by teaching them the errors of their ways and upholding mainstream (read: white supremacist) cultural values. Disengagement is one means through which the space is created to enable us to discuss the terms of our realities, plot and plan. It is a collective understanding that the current order is not working. We are slowly coming to realize that what we need can only be found in our own traditions and experiences.

Notes and References

1 Eckholm, Erik. “Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn.” New York Times (20 March 2006).

2 Emphasis mine.

3 Davis, Angela Y. “Women in Prison: African-American Women Have Fastest-rising Incarceration Rate in US.” Essence, September 2000.

4 Fears, Daryl. “U.S. HIV Cases Soaring Among Black Women: Social Factors Make Group Vulnerable.” Washington Post (7 February 2005).

5 Ani, Marimba Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of Eurpoean Cultural Thought and Behavior. Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc., 2000.

6 Cedric J. Robinson Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983, p. 310.

7 Though published many, many years ago, the content of Carter G. Woodson’s Miseducation of the Negro (Trenton, New Jersey: African World Press, 1990) still finds great relevance.

8 It has been said that prison population projections are predicted by 3rd grade test scores.

9 Roberts, Sam. “New York City Losing Blacks, Census Shows.” New York Times (03 April 2006).

Amari Chris Johnson. “Urban Maroons: Disengagement and Black Survival,” PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 6, 2007.