The Institute (協会)

dude you're a genius. Talk about spinning the whole thing on its head. absolutely brilliant.

No, I'm no genius, maybe just a "smartass"

Just one more reason to pick up ANY Thomas Sowell book...

I guess I wonder whether pursuing "authentic blackness" is really the way to cast the issue in the first place. I understand the point being made; what the culture calls "authentic blackness" is really white cracker culture. But I wonder how helpful it is to continue to conduct this debate about authenticity with the terms and contexts given to us by the culture. I mean, I don't want kids to get inspired to get behind authenticity, racially described, period.

The discussion of "authentic blackness" is such a huge conversation in the black community, of which you are not a part I'm assuming, that John McWhorter wrote an entire book on the subject a couple of years ago. This has been an intense topic in the black community since Dubois started to write about it in the 1920s and 30s. It's been an important, and regular part of black preaching in black churches directly since the civil-rights movement. For people of color, understand one's racial identity is important in a context with such a confusing conversation and is something that one wants to get behind, promote and validate as representing the "other" aspects of God's image. It's quite easy for those who do not come from a world where race matters (a title of yet another book) to see "what the big deal is" I guess. In other words, pursuing the questions of "authentic blackness" is meeting the black academic establishment exactly where they are. It's entering into their conversations about the issue that so defines much of their rhetoric and academic writing. It may be new to some or may seem like a "cultural thing" but it's been a part of the black in the black church conversation for at least 300 years or so. I most definitely what kids to view their racial attributes in a way that consistent with Christian anthropology--not be ignored in the ridiculous rhetoric of being "color-blind." I suspect that in a denomination of contrarians, just for the sake of being that way, many will struggle to understand legitmate conversations of our communities which seem to be, on the surface, minor. While some have the luxury of ignoring race others do not which may explain why Sowell has spent his career helping to rescue what "authentic blackness" is from liberals who have controlled the conversation for far too long.

Well, I don't know how fair it is to immediately assume I'm coming from a contrarian point of view here. And I'm certainly not trying to deny the legitimacy of a conversation that has a long pedigree, but I am pretty regularly confused by the things I read here on this blog. On the one hand, I read things here that almost sound racist to me. To give you an example, one time you wrote:

"Ah, the music. Sung by women who can really sing and not by women trying to sound like black women."

I read that back in April and thought "what the h?" The implication of that sentence is a. that there is a particular way that black women sing, and that b. the way black women sing constitutes "really" singing. I thought that was pretty insulting. A lot of your posts where you romanticized about Atlanta were very hard for me to understand.

So I urge you to teach us and contextualize these conversations. If your complaint is that many in the denomination are ignorant of the importance of these conversations, then teach us. But I didn't know that being color blind was a bad thing, so obviously I've not been caught up on some of the basic presuppositions of your approach to sociology. I guess even now I still need to hear more to understand why it is that racially described authenticity is not itself racist. I mean, I simply could not imagine urging my children to seek caucasian authenticity because the implication is that there should be some source of pride in their race.

And again, I definitely understand the part about engaging in the conversation that already exists. I mean, that's the clever thing you're doing - taking the question of black identity and subverting it by showing that some of the things liberals have included in the identity are really alien to it. My question was to you, as a Christian, not to you as a cultural apologist. Doesn't it make you uncomfortable to possibly perpetuate the idea that authenticity and race should be linked? Such that you would encourage your son to some kind of ideal of "blackness" rather than to some kind of ideal of humanness. Would you?