Cultural Authenticity
To understand culture and any particular culture one must first examine how culture content accommodates the needs of mainstream society and its individuals, because the fit and rules of culture are meant to best accommodate the mainstream. One must also look at how a society’s culture is responded to by groups and persons not in the mainstream. It is here that the authenticity of the beliefs, values, and norms of a given time are often questioned and challenged. Does the culture content remain suitable for enough people for the society’s survival and possible flourishing?
Sometimes efforts, informal or formal, are undertaken to change the content and power of a culture to better suit the times and needs of more or fewer members of a society. Democratic societies seek to make their respective cultures more inclusive; autocracies favor less inclusion. When minority persons join the mainstream, they expand the inclusivity of society. In doing so they call into question the authenticity of mainstream culture. Members of minority groups, especially those from groups that have been historically enslaved, persecuted, and discriminated against, must consider not only the tenets of mainstream culture as it suits the whole of society as any responsible citizen must. They must also consider how mainstream beliefs, values, and norms impact their lives in principle and through mainstream social behavior and the enactment and enforcement of laws affecting them.
White Americans evaluate the fit and appropriateness of American culture differently from Black Americans. For Whites, American beliefs, values, and norms are the standards they aspire to, live by, and deem appropriate for everyone. Historically, when the content of America culture became lacking in this sense and in need of change it was most often transformed for what they believed was for the wellbeing of society, especially them. When an African American considers the authenticity of American culture at any given time, he must do so ideologically as well as from a reactionary stance.
In his brilliant 2021 essay “The Fake Book of Negroes”[1] Gerald Early, professor of English and African and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, explores individualism, originality, and collective identity pertaining to African American realities. Black Americans, he says, have “long mythologized their experience as one of exile and return.” Claiming this may serve to sharpen their sense of destiny, Early says Black Americans “still embrace the exodus story as a defining trope of their collective experience.” Central to that narrative, he claims, is the idealized figure of Moses who “scorns the blandishments of his people’s oppressors, strikes down the slave master, and rejects assimilation, choosing instead to assert his authentic identity and lead his people from the land of oppression to the promised land of freedom.” Early reminds us that Harriet Tubman and Marcus Garvey were called Moses, as was Martin Luther King, Jr. In leading the US civil rights movement King was “leading not just his own people but an entire nation to the promised land of a more perfect union.”
Early suggests “instead of thinking of going home as a form of authentication, of rebirth, blacks should fully accept the idea that they have arrived, and where they are at home. They have had their rebirth.” Early does not deny Moses his place as epic hero of anti-slavery and civil rights movements. But he sides with African American novelists Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison in expressing skepticism about “charismatic race liberators” and believes blacks must “stop thinking of themselves as damaged goods in need of repair. They are a new people.”
For Early, African American authenticity within white-dominated US culture may only be found by “taking what you choose from your oppressor and making it part of who you are.” He cites Murray’s view that every Black American should use his “inner resources and the means at hand to take advantage of the most unlikely opportunities to succeed in the circumstances in which he finds himself; [in doing so] he also makes himself indispensable to the welfare of the nation as a whole.” That authenticity, as Early puts it, derives from a person’s “capacity for self-invention, self-definition.”
This capacity was expressed in the mid-1600s by philosopher Baruch Spinoza as his “model of human nature.” This model or template, claimed Spinoza, is true for and inherent in every individual, regardless of one’s culture, time, place, education, intelligence, or political persuasion. It also contains a moral stance. An individual, on the basis of his “adequate ideas” – a clear and distinct and true understanding of things, as opposed to the inadequate ideas that come (passively) by way of sense experience and the imagination – actively does and pursues only what is truly beneficial and useful for himself as well as for others. This clear, distinct, and true understanding of things and moral stance do not allow one person or group to take away another person or group’s freedom to strive and persevere toward a state of joy, happiness, and freedom. The moral stance of Spinoza’s model of human nature is based on his notion of the free person. Becoming a free person is to have maximal striving power and to act according to the dictate of reason. A person becomes free through his active personal effort to obtain adequate ideas, not in response to external causes.[2]
Ralph Ellison’s thinking on self-actualization and cultural authenticity is expressed in his 1952 novel, Invisible Man. There the Black narrator relates the words of his grandfather as the elder lies on his deathbed.
Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.
In calling himself a spy in a war where his grinning and agreeing is meant for the enemy, says Early, the grandfather is trading in a spy’s “inauthenticity of identity, its mutability” to mount a form of resistance different from the more valorized forthright, uncompromising resistance of Moses.
This reckoning of Black Americans with US society and culture is ongoing. For an African American to establish her identity and find authenticity within an American society dominated by White culture, is having to make a difficult choice characterized by relatively less of the freedoms of the founding documents of the US. One must choose between joining a majority of Black liberals who condemn any resemblance of kowtowing to White dominance or exercising their individualism as Black conservatives and incurring name calling such as Uncle Tom, house nigger from Black and White liberals.
Conversely, name calling, says Early, “provides the clarity of contempt, makes explicit the stakes of claims to authenticity or accusations of inauthenticity. In response, conservative or moderate blacks have come up with their own names for the black activists, academics, and leaders who hate them: race hustlers, race whores, race charlatans. While lacking the lash-like sting of ‘Uncle Tom’ or ‘house nigger,’ the epithets are cutting and clearly racial. ‘I think the NAACP are the classic house niggers,’ the conservative, free-market economist Thomas Sowell commented in the early 1980s. ‘Their support comes from white liberals in the press and philanthropy.’ Sowell accused liberal and leftist Blacks of selling out to an array of foundations, universities, government agencies, corporations, and rich donors and celebrities, a network that he suggested was far more extensive than the ones supporting conservative blacks. In other words, he was saying, those blacks were the inauthentic, phony ones.”
Early continues by claiming “perhaps the savagery of this conflict results from a secret realization: that for blacks there is no escape from the need for white validation. Even to rage militantly, uncompromisingly, against whites is a perverse way of courting them, of drawing their attention, of appealing to their sense of power by insisting they pay for their wrongs. … In the black quarrel over authenticity, each side accuses the other of selling the fruits of racism as good. Interestingly, they both sell blacks as victims: One side says blacks are victims of white oppression, the other, that blacks are victims of the dependency fostered by white welfarism. Each side calls itself heroic, and each vigorously asserts its own victimhood.”
First of all, my position is a split one. I’m black. I’m a man of the West. These hard facts are bound to condition, to some degree, my outlook. I see and understand the West; but I also see and understand that non- or anti-Western point of view. How is this possible? This double vision of mine stems from my being a product of Western civilization and from my racial identity, long and deeply conditioned, which is organically born of my being a product of that civilization. Being a Negro living in a white Western Christian society, I’ve never been allowed to blend, in a natural and healthy manner, with the culture and civilization of the West. This contradiction of being both Western and a man of color creates a psychological distance, so to speak, between me and my environment. I’m self-conscious. – Richard Wright, 1957[3]
Earlier, Wright said “there is in progress between black and white Americans a struggle over the nature of reality.”[4] He was correct, and the struggle continues. The early 21st Century controversy over critical race theory, Early rightly notes, is only the latest skirmish in that struggle. Among Black Americans, says Early, “the conflict between a desire for individual self-authentication, on one hand, and a longing for authentic solidarity, on the other, has become an inescapable and often exhausting feature of the black American condition.”
For any society and anyone trying to study it, the question of what a society’s authentic culture is has no easy answer. When thinking about a culture, including one’s own, one must try to think of it from every angle, every subgroup’s perspective. From every facet dark or noble it presents to its members and nonmembers. Done properly, this is a lifelong self-enriching effort, best engaged in daily by every citizen during every person-to-person encounter. JEL
[1] “The Fake Book of Negroes” by Gerald Early, The Hedgehog Review, Fall 2021.
[2] For more on Spinoza’s model of human nature, adequate ideas, and the free person see Think Least of Death - Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die by American philosopher Steven Nadler. Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition, 2020.
[3] Richard Wright, “Tradition and Industrialization: The Historic Meaning of the Plight of the Tragic Elite in Asia and Africa,” in White Man, Listen! (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1964), 47. First published 1957.
[4] Richard Wright, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” 1953, in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, Angelyn Mitchell (ed.), Duke University Press, 1994.
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