[American Mind] I reject the terms of surrender offered by Jason D. Hill in his essay "Freedom From ’Blackness,’" recently published in The American Mind, in which he demands that blacks renounce their racial identity and "become a psychologically raceless people and open ourselves to the luminous potential of man and a new birth to the black individual as an individual." I’m not renouncing a damned thing about my life and heritage in the United States. Professor Hill calls on black Americans to empty themselves of any human identification. He supposes this will make us pioneers of a new "planetary ethic." This proposal is religious in nature. He wants blacks to be the new man of the new creation promised in the Christian Bible, but he wants to arrive at that glorified humanity without the Second Coming of Christ. Hill sounds like Saint Paul: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Or, to look at it from another perspective, he wants to remake blacks in the image of Homo Sovieticus, starting over at Year One.
Hill presents a warped view of black history and then can’t imagine why blacks embrace it. He pretends the only reason blacks coalesce around a "self hating form of identification" is a "fetishized history." But if Professor Hill weren’t in such a rush to bring about the new Eden he might have examined the motivations of the actual black leaders who were trying to save a people from an overwhelming flood of hatred. Richard Allen, for instance—a prominent black leader in the late-eighteenth century and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal church—said what knits the cause of blacks, from the prosperous and educated to the poor and discarded, is the "bond of suffering and wrong."
Hill’s polemic is also flawed for what it omits. Black Americans have no tribal affiliation. We’re not Masai, Yoruba, or Zulu. We assume whatever political moniker is affixed to us—from Colored to Negro to African American—but we are Americans foremost. Certainly the rest of the world sees us as Americans. The black soldiers I know who served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan can reliably report that when the bullets were flying on the battlefield the jihadis aiming the AK-47s their way certainly thought of them as American. Even wrongheaded and easily manipulated black athletes, from John Carlos and Tommie Smith to Colin Kaepernick, who took a stand against the flag did so because they wanted more of what they conceive to be America—not more of what they conceive of as being black.
American citizenship is our birthright. It rightly offends us when we think it is being denied. Throw away our particular American blackness and you throw away what makes us exceptional. It is odd that Professor Hill made no mention of the very real amor patria black Americans possess. Why not? Has he internalized the racist belief that blacks can never be fully American? Is he projecting his own black self-hatred onto the distant, dumb blacks he psychoanalyzes in his piece? That’s an uncharitable reading, but one worth considering because Hill wouldn’t be the first black in an elite position to look out in despair at the condition of his people and consider them too hopeless to continue as constituted and too embarrassing to be counted as the civil equals of white Americans.