Nihilism in Black America

During my first week of high school in the Mississippi school system, I sat with my older sister for lunch in the cafeteria. As we were talking, I noticed an older white student walking up to place his tray in the receptacle wearing one of those white “Dixie Outfitters” shirts with a confederate flag on the back and a camouflage, frayed-brim hat hanging out of the back pocket of his jeans. Subsequently, an exceptionally powerful-looking African American student sauntered calmly toward him. When approximately five feet were separating them, the black student took a long, forceful step, simultaneously placing the lunch tray up to the white student’s face and punching it so hard that the front of his white shirt turned completely dark red within seconds. I looked to my sister immediately, and she humorously responded, “Welcome to high school.” I did not recognize the symbolism of his blood soaked “Dixie Outfitters” shirt until later, but this was the ironic beginning of a physical and mental race war that continued through my entire schooling in that horrible state. While reading Remembering Jim Crow, one can only attempt to understand a fraction of the immense impact of this 89 year period and to identify the overarching and implicit manifestations of Jim Crow in today’s socioeconomic and cultural status quo. Witnessing these intense physical and mental battles first-hand continues to fuel an interest to explore the mindset occurring throughout today’s poor African American communities. Thanks to Dr. Cornel West of Princeton University and his book Race Matters, I discovered a particularly profound analysis of the issue that directly relates to my own philosophical and emotional struggles throughout my life in the Confederacy.

My birth followed the time of Jim Crow by decades, yet my life in modern Mississippi induced a strong bitterness and contempt toward this oppressive Southern “society.” After years of experiences like the one mentioned, my hatred of all the absurd values, racism and blatant stupidity was cultivated by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and my subsequent nihilism initiated an intense self-destruction. The significant realization here that I never comprehended fully was the fact that my nihilism was not simply a result of hating any particular concept, but, more fundamentally, it was a reaction toward the oppression of the Absurd. Thanks to Dr. West, I believe that I finally am beginning to understand the fundamental idea of what is happening in today’s economically poor African American society and the factors causing this shift toward the violent and apathetic mindset that manifests itself in crime and unemployment through the scope of this period in my life.

In Race Matters, West opens unexpectedly with “Chapter 1: Nihilism in Black America.” Throughout this first chapter, the general population is quite accurately placed into two main groups depending on their theories of how to rise and overcome called the “liberal structuralists” and the “conservative behavorists.” On the one hand, the “structuralists” believe that the burden on black society exists as a result of political and economic oppression. In other words, this camp upholds that disparity in the black community is society’s fault. On the other hand, the “behaviorists” place the blame on a lack of “Protestant ethic” in black society. More simply, this camp upholds that disparity in the black community results from a lack of “hard work, deferred gratification, frugality, and responsibility.” This idea of a “Protestant ethic” should seem familiar and is, in fact, conceptually identical to our phrase “politics of respectability.” My previous post discusses the shift from my inchoate behaviorist ideologies to what I thought was an ethically and rationally justifiable response of blaming society for everything as a structuralist. Both of these camps have obvious merit, but for various reasons they both miss or ignore the pervasive and pathological mindset within the community which he aptly refers to as “the nihilistic threat.” From the context of African American history and culture, he forms his own more appropriate definition in terms of nihilism as a lifestyle, a very familiar consequence of the ideology:

“Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority; it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness.”

Still in ignorance of the fact that I was just voluntarily indulging in the existential struggle forced upon non-white society, I had always considered finding some unifying theme that could explain the complex status quo of today’s stratified society as too complicated to even know where to begin. Particularly, I often wondered if all this violence and anger could simply boil down to a community rebelling against a constant and never-ending unjust society. Again, I did not have a single idea of where to start and often shrugged off the question/theory as being overly simplistic and completely unfounded. Yet the way Dr. West uses “nihilism” as a pragmatic ideology in combination with my own personal experiences, everything is beginning to make perfect sense.

I hate how obvious the answer to a question seems after it is revealed. That debilitating nihilism that consumed me for those years stared me straight in the eyes when thinking about how predominantly poor African American communities could turn on each other with such fervor. My question of whether it resulted from a community rebelling against society was in fact overly simplistic and idealistic. It followed from a more concrete investigation of what shifted music within the community from the beautiful genres of blues and jazz to the horrifying “gangsta rap” of today (which West argues is a result of the same nihilism but shifted correspondingly with America’s transition to hyper-capitalism). Regardless, I was infected by nihilism as merely an onlooker of injustice, acting as if I was some Camusian Absurd hero for simply watching Sisyphus grapple his rock, and felt the overwhelming rage toward everyone including those who shared my struggle. This fact contextualized all of these questions of gang violence and hateful lyrics and showed that this violence was not the result of a community against a society as I had naively hoped but, instead, an individual against society, signifying a transition from the transcendental Civil Rights Movement to the deterministic chaos seen on History Channel’s Gangland and NWA music videos. Throwing away all the redneck trash about slaves being freed 148 years ago and Jim Crow ending 46 years ago implying social equality, I am beginning to see the Absurd horror experienced in these time periods flowing over into today. Just ask Cornel West how it feels to see your uncle lynched and tied to a tree with an American flag. It makes you realize how little 46 years actually is.