UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 5 : THE PATH TO RECOVERY : EMPOWERMENT : People of Color Must Embrace Their Own Diversity

At least two horsemen of the apocalypse must be named description and prescription.

From honest observers--Rep. Maxine Waters, most notably--we’ve had sound analyses of the causes of the apocalyptic nights that followed the acquittal of four white Los Angeles Police Department officers charged with illegally beating Rodney G. King.

We know that the continuum of rage in America--running from the totally alienated, who looted, burned, stoned and killed, to those who seethed in their home at the shocking verdict--stems from systemic injustices that cut across class and race.

The American landscape, and that of multiethnic California, are more complex than the “two nations, black and white” depicted in the Kerner Commission report that followed the summer riots of 1967. Yet, the black and white division remains central to understanding the problems of race and class antagonism, because so much devolves from it--especially a conflict like the one between blacks and Korean-American merchants.

While relief from the hell to which the government has consigned blacks, other minorities and the poor can be found in enterprise zones for the inner city, full employment, free universal health care, a commitment to provide the best education available to everyone, severe penalties--rigorously enforced--against discrimination in hiring, education and housing, these do not constitute the full prescription.

Liberation from hell requires that we do it ourselves. As some would like to pretend, this is not a novel notion in the African-American community, which has been lifting itself up by its bootstraps without boots for generations.

Intellectual clarity alone will not enable African-Americans to organize themselves and form alliances that could compel an intransigent government to make social change. We have the power, but we don’t have the consciousness.

We are too distressed by the day-to-day negotiating of hell to think clearly and consistently enough to address the external and psychological effects of oppression--though in recent days, the truce between gangs in Los Angeles show that the most disaffected have the power to see clearly who the enemy is.

But we will only perpetuate our sense of victimization--and its reality--if we don’t pay serious attention to the psychological wounds that divide us internally. The same wounds that keep us engaged in the politics of distraction by scapegoating other minorities scrambling for the same crumbs of the nation’s economic pie.

The roots of the uprising are identical to those that cause these internal divisions. They are planted in the tricky terrain of the psyche, cultivated daily by internalizing the attitudes, beliefs, myths and misinformation the dominant group propagates to justify their subordination of minorities.

Among the consequences of this internalized oppression are the ways in which blacks put each other down. The ways in which we play out the dehumanization that was inflicted on us. In this scenario, the captains of oppression can sit back and let us self-destruct. Our minds remain the last plantation.

We blame ourselves and attack our leaders for seeming to fail us. Popular political discourse suggests that we are always blaming someone else, but our behavior suggests otherwise. In support groups in which people have the safety to reveal their anguish, I hear African-Americans and other people of color talk about their experiences. They inevitably talk of feeling worthless, of being told all their lives they are stupid, of feeling powerless when dealing with whites.

We are so fed up with our own seeming impotence, we’ve developed a class of professional black apologists for white racism--Clarence Thomas is one.

It doesn’t do any good to tell persons to take responsibility for their lives and then blame them for something they didn’t create, which is what conservatives do. Black people know they didn’t create the system of oppression they live under, and acting as if they did ensures the perpetuation of the cycle of victimization.

But we do have power. We can heal some of our most serious internal divisions if we understand them. And color prejudice is one of them. It is also one of the most denied.

“Hysterically overstated,” says Stanley Crouch. “If that were really true, most Afro-Americans I know of couldn’t even have Christmas dinner, ‘cause they’d have too wide a range of people in the family. I mean the light-skinned ones would have to meet on Avenue L, for light, and the dark-skinned ones would have to meet on Avenue D, for dark.”

Two recent studies concluded it is not hysterically overstated--the significance of color still remains for African-Americans. Whites still give preferential treatment in the workplace to light-complected blacks and blacks continue to prefer light-complected mates.

I get attacked whenever I publicly address this subject, which writer Alice Walker called “colorism”--the prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based on skin color. But everywhere I go, I hear and see evidence that we are caught in the shifting, irrational nuances of a seldom acknowledged but constantly reinforced color hierarchy.

“See the guy Pat brought to the party last night,” asked a guy I overheard in a beauty salon.

“No, I was too busy getting busy,” the other man said.

“Well, if you had seen him, you’d remember. Nigger looked like 11:59.”

I looked toward him, winced and asked: “You mean a shade shy ‘a midnight?”

He laughed. “You got it, sister.”

I recently met a woman who spent all of her adult life in mortal fear that her very light-skinned child would grow up rejecting her and leave her because she was so dark, dark, dark.

No one can convince me that such hurt, installed by a larger system of oppression and played out among us, doesn’t undermine our daily relationships.

A phenomenon similar to colorism plays itself out with people of mixed heritage--a growing population--who may have African ancestry but do not identify solely as black. Both the traditionally defined African-American community and the emerging multiracial community are going to have to come to terms with one another.

Multiracial Americans, including those with African ancestry, increasingly demand that an official census designation be created for them: multiracial. They are tired of checking other.

Because so many blacks could legitimately claim to be multiracial, and might do so to avoid the social stigma of a black identity in the United States, African-American leaders fear a new census category would pull large numbers from their ranks, affecting political representation and the allocation of government funds based on the census count.

Official recognition of a multiracial group would raise issues about the substance of African-American identity. We are essentially a monocultural group but have a diverse ethnic heritage. Most of us are a mixture of African, European and Native American. For historical and political reasons, our mixed ancestry has not been officially recognized. We’ve lived by the little-dab’ll-do-you school of genetics: any known or perceptible African ancestry usually made one “Black” in America.

As multiracial Americans of African descent challenge this slave master’s definition of race, perhaps the time has come for African-Americans to discuss their connections to other ethnic groups and foster a more open attitude toward diversity within our own community.

I would love to think that multiracial Americans of African descent would be welcomed into the African-American fold if they chose--without having to deny their non-black ancestry. But is that possible in a community that more and more embraces Afrocentrism, and with it the science fiction that African-Americans are a “pure” race? Now everyone claims descent from an African king, queen, prince or princess. (How is it that no one is ever descended from the village thief?)

Once again, internalized oppression often has us staking out reactionary positions that may ultimately undermine our ability to make common cause with those who should be our allies.

But we have the power to resolve all these conflicts and change our social reality. We are not merely prisoners of history. We have changed our fates in the past--the civil rights movement is but one example--and we can again.

We need to develop support groups in our community--block-by-block, church-by-church--in which we can take turns listening to each other--not just venting. We need to talk about our grief--over the uprising, over our daily hurts, over the fact that we have had no safe place to share our pain. And once we put some attention on the grief, we need to commit ourselves to developing specific plans of action for our neighborhoods. We have to make everyone in the African-American community a leader responsible for our mutual liberation.

If we cannot reach into the African-American community and heal, and reach out to other people of color, the demographic graffiti on the wall spells disaster. The African-American population is declining relative to the growth of other minorities. The nation’s power elite will exploit intra-minority group conflict and could permanently marginalize blacks. The system is well aware of this, if we aren’t. That’s why so many whites smile indulgently at the notion of a browner, newly multicultural America. They understand what the last plantation is, too.