Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

2.1 A Stateless People:Then and Today: DuBois,Mandela,Malcolm X,Ellison,Hughes

       How effective is democracy today? Must we live under the cloud of civil strife that threatens the safety of our own homes and families to wake up to reality? Are we living in a period of transition to a New World Order? Are we all represented or just the prosperous few? Hannah Arendt described the dilemma as "the incredible plight of an ever-growing group of innocent of people [that] was like a practical demonstration of the totalitarian's cynical claims that no such thing as inalienable human rights existed and that the affirmations of the democracies to the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy, and cowardice in the face of the cruel majesty of the new world. The very phrase "human rights" became for all concerned--victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike--the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy." This week a federal judge sought to overturn   a previous law under President Trump denying asylum rights for immigrants. This information comes from Bloomberg Law June 3, 2022. Arendt describes the "right of asylum as "the only right that had ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of Man in the sphere of international relationships," one whose "long and sacred history dates back to the very beginnings of regulated political life" (Arendt 280). If I were living in the Ukraine today, these passages from Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, in all probability, would echo my sentiments regarding their war-torn country, a country whose present, and past were being decimated, erased, effaced forever. In  The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt  describes  what the terms "the problem of stateless people," those whom the post-war treaties failed to represent because they were either forced out of their countries or  considered a minority  basically unrepresented or protected by the new postwar agreements (Arendt 276-277).  According to Arendt, "Their existence can hardly be blamed  on one factor alone, but if we consider the different groups among the stateless it appears that every political event since the end of the first World War inevitably added a new category to those who lived outside the pale of the law, while none of the categories , no matter how the original constellations changed, could ever be renormalized" (277).  Although this passage alludes to a different segment of the population from an earlier time, in many ways it also applies to the condition of the African-American in US society today.    Despite the existence of current laws that supposedly protect them, the proper execution of the laws fails to guarantee their protections or represent their needs.  In other words, "It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect. " This passage from W. E. B.  Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk suggests the need for an active dialogue between both races (113).  This is not to suggest white condescension,  Uncle Thomism, socialism, opportunism,  or militarism, as Wright points out in Black Boy, or separatism, as Marcus Garvey advocated in his appeal for Negroes to return to their roots. In Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin  goes beyond reconciliation when he compares the  coming to terms of fathers and sons in European film with those  of  Americans. As he watches Igmar Bergman movies, Baldwin explains,  "I did not say that such a reconciliation had probably a great deal to do with one's attitude toward one's past, and the uses to which one would put it. But I now began to feel . . . that what was lacking  . . . was the American despair, the search, in our country for authority." In his Autobiography, Malcolm X expresses a similar criticism that racial conflict did not exist in Europe as it did in America. In his interview with Alex Haley, Malcolm X says,  "My brother Muslim, who could speak enough German to get by, would explain that we were Muslims, and I saw something that I had already experienced when I was looked upon as a Muslim and not as a Negro, right in America. People seeing you as a Muslim saw you as a human being, and they had a different look, different talk, everything" (Haley 328).   For Baldwin, this "confusion" includes both races and their quests to define themselves (Baldwin 145). In essence,  he depicts a lost race in a lost country. Nevertheless, Baldwin is optimistic. In the final portion of a chapter entitled "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel," he says, "Now this country is going to be transformed. It will not be transformed by an act of God, but by all of us, by you and me. I don't believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we're living in and we have to make it over" ( Baldwin 126).  In Black Boy, Richard Wright comes to a similar conclusion when he looks back upon the events of his life and realizes an inner truth: "I returned to my room and sat again, determined to look squarely at my life" (Wright 452).  His life had been one of suffering and misunderstanding.  Abandoned by his father  (32) and being bullied and beaten at a young age (19), an alcoholic by age six (25), living on the streets (33), facing intense hunger and fear (34), sent to an orphanage (33) ,  learning his uncle was shot and killed by whites (63),  witnessing the mistreatment of blacks on a chain gang (68), and  experiencing a growing callousness toward religious hypocrisy (121) were just a few of the horrible conditions Wright endured during his early years. Nevertheless,  his suffering from these experiences made him  cynical and hostile (189), yet tough and determined (168-173). Wright thinks to himself, "Ought one to surrender to authority, even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it" (194). In Chicago he enters an existential world, a city of "insecurity in the personalities of the people" he met (308-309). Wright later gets a postal job and meets a liberal group that persuades him of the futility of Garveyites (334-337).  He soon realizes that Communism  holds no hope for the black man either, since it merely use him for its own purposes (348).  Living in a rotting building and having little food, Wright realizes that he must fight against those who exploit his race (354-356). His misery and "hunger for a new way of life" motivated him to write, to tell the story that would create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human" (453).In Shadow and Act,  Ralph Ellison says, "As a writer Richard Wright  has outlined for himself a dual role: to discover and depict the meaning of Negro experience; and to reveal to both Negroes and whites those problems of a psychological and emotional nature which arise between them when they strive for mutual understanding" (Ellison 77).In his autobiography I Wonder as I Wander ( Hill and Wang 1956), Langston Hughes uses the tightrope metaphor to express the racial and ethnic conflicts which he faced in his lifetime, According to Hughes, "In the last few years, I had been all around the embattled world and I had seen people walking tightropes everywhere--the tightrope of color in Alabama, the tightrope of transition in the Soviet Union, the tightrope of repression in Japan, the tightrope of the fear of war in France--and the war itself in China and in Spain--and myself everywhere on my tightrope of words. Anybody is liable to fall off a tightrope in any land, I thought, and God help you if you fall the wrong way" (Hughes 400). In The Life We Prize (1951), Elton Trueblood says, "Racial equality is not a doctrine which stands alone, but one which is a corollary of the more fundamental thesis of respect for persons as persons. It is only as we become sincerely loyal to the primary thesis that the race problem will begin to be solved. What is important to say, and to mean, is that the life we prize will never be realized until men and women, regardless of color, can enter places of refreshment, of entertainment, of employment, of education and worship, without the nagging fear of being expelled or ignored.  Until this is achieved, at least, in great measure, we cannot expect the critics of our kind of life to take our high pretensions seriously" (110). As Rainer Maria Rilke suggests, "The only journey is the one within." Clearly, now is the timefor a rebirth of values.  In Adventures of Ideas (1933), Alfred North Whitehead also warns us, particularly in cultures that rationalize its existence through their  perverted  interpretation of religion. According to Whitehead, "Human Sacrifice, Human Slavery are instances of great intuitions of religion and of civilized purposes expressing themselves by means of inherited brutalities and instinctive behaviour. Direct religious intuitions, even those of the purest origin, are in danger of allaying themselves with lower practices and emotions which in fact pervade existing society." The free exchange of ideas and their consequent applications in social instances of conflict or change provide the sole modus operandi for alleviating or even eliminating the presence of oppression. In the Whitehead's words: "The history of ideas is a history of mistakes. But through all mistakes it is also the history of gradual purification of conduct. When there is progress in the development of favourable order, we find conduct protected from relapse into brutalization by the increasing agency of ideas consciously entertained. In this way Plato is justified in his saying, "The creation of the world--that is to say, the world of civilized order, is the victory of persuasion over force'" (Whitehead 30-31). As Arendt suggests, "No paradox of contemporary politics is filled  with a more poignant  irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists, who stubbornly insist on regarding as "inalienable" those human rights, which are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous  and most civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves" (Arendt 279). :When a governmnt fails to support and protect its people, those supposed "inalienable rights" vanish as quickly as they were conceived. In essence, in many ways, the plight of the African American parallels Arendt's description, making them the "displaced persons" as well.