Appendx 1 : Black on Black with Light Gray Interior : Ila Berman

Black on Black with
Light Gray Interior :
Ila Berman
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In "The New Cultural Politics of Difference," West discusses the motivation for providing such positive black role models, the necessary conditions of such models, and the problematic that such conditions introduce. He refers to this scenario as the "initial Black diaspora response. . . moralistic in content and communal in character," which endeavors to provide black positive representations as both a resistance to, and a way of displacing, past misrepresentations of black communities fabricated by self-serving white supremacists. West defines these efforts as "courageous yet limited" in that they are both "assimilationist" and "homogenizing," dependent on accepting uncritically nonblack conventions and standards while subscribing to a system of values that "subordinates Black particularity to a false universalism.³West continues by stating that these responses

were not simply cast into simplistic binary oppositions of positive/negative, good/bad images that privileged the first term in light of a White norm so that Black efforts remained inscribed within the very logic that dehumanized them. They were further complicated by the fact that these responses were also advanced principally by anxiety-ridden, middle-class Black intellectuals (predominantly male and heterosexual) grappling with their sense of double-consciousness—namely their own crisis of identity, agency and audience—caught between a quest for White approval and acceptance and an endeavor to overcome the

internalized association of Blackness with inferiority. And I suggest that these complex anxieties of modern Black diaspora intellectuals partly motivate the two major arguments that ground the assimilationist moralism and homogeneous communalism just outlined.

⁴

West continues by citing the work of Kobena Mercer, outlining how assimilationist moralism and homogeneous communalism, and the "Black positive images" that they attempt to generate, have been principally justified by the reflectionist and the social engineering arguments:

The reflectionist argument holds that the fight for Black representation and recognition must reflect or mirror the real Black community, not simply the negative and depressing representations of it. The social engineering argument claims that since any form of representation is constructed—selective in light of broader aims—Black representation (especially given the difficulty of Blacks gaining access to positions of power to produce any Black imagery) should offer positive images of themselves in order to inspire achievement among young Black people, thereby countering racist stereotypes. The hidden assumption of both arguments is that we have unmediated access to what the "real Black community" is and what "positive images" are. In short, these arguments presuppose the very phenomena to be interrogated, and thereby foreclose the very issues that should serve as the subject matter to be investigated.

⁵

West's arguments are indeed compelling, providing an insightful point of departure for the investigation not only of Jack Travis's stated intentions in compiling this work, but also of the methods that he employs to do so. There is more truth in Travis's statement that his book is neither critical nor complete than he might imagine. Yet its uncritical nature cannot be simply dismissed as beyond the scope of his intentions, for its representation of black architects, which relies heavily on the perceived necessity of blacks assimilating to specifically white social and cultural norms and standards of "professional" (and only secondarily architectural) success within a mainstream practice, implicitly undermines his very project. We must question whether such forms of representation at this particular moment in our collective cultural awareness are liberating, or whether they have already become part of a history of an awakening black consciousness, such that their anachronistic reemergence now appears stifling and regressive.

The historic shift I am referring to, which emphasizes the gap between Travis's logic and a more critically aware transformative consciousness, is one that has evolved by interrogating the assumptions of equality, questioning the requisite assimilation of all marginalized groups, and scrutinizing the supposed neutrality of values that informed the basis of the assimilationist mentality. This shift found its parallel in feminism, when women realized that so-called equality was in fact a myth; equality for women simply meant becoming like men. The perceived neutrality of the universal was brought into question by making conspicuous the relations between its power, its ubiquity, and its surreptitiousness, and by surfacing the absolute correspondence between the specific conditions of its constructions and the self-serving prototype of the WASP heterosexual male. For women, an assimilation to this norm could only be exacted at the price of a massive repression—a repression that endeavored to erase both the biological differences of women as well as their specific cultural and personal histories. As Jonathan Culler notes, "The most insidious oppression alienates a group from its own interests as a group and encourages it to identify with the interests of its oppressors, so that political struggles must first awaken a group to its interests and its experience."⁶

Within this oppressive assimilationalist model, all African-Americans—regardless of their internal differences—are expected to uncritically identify with the WASP heterosexual male's experience, which is presented as the most human one. In so doing, they are encouraged to identify with a subjectivity that historically defines itself in opposition to blackness, to relinquish their own cultural and materially inscribed histories, and to identify against themselves. It is this splitting that is partially responsible for the anxiety and double consciousness to which West refers. It is a wound that, to be healed, demands of those like Travis a resistance to, and critique of, the ideologically charged norms to which he apparently subscribes (an exorcism of the essential white male subject implanted within all of us); such a critique finds its basis in an appeal to the particular physical, psychological, and cultural heritage of black ethnicity as it is lived through the bodies of individual subjects, while privileging experience associated with this identity. Deconstruction as a critical operation has at least shown by its own strategy of hierarchical reversal how supposed universals can be exposed as specific historical and cultural constructions that are highly motivated and intended to serve and maintain the powerful center of a particular group. The operation of reversal is a way of displacing this center, so that one of the initial moves for a marginalized group is to understand its critical differences from this norm, to establish positive identities from within and not only from without, and to use these identities as both a position of resistance to, and a critique of, oppressive models demanding assimilation. This particular struggle against assimilationist anxiety is specifically historic, marking an emerging awareness of the need for an affirmative pluralism. It is not intended to devalue the work of those black women and men who struggled before us for equality, for it is only by their efforts that this particular moment has even been attained. Our work, however, should not simply be to repeat their past but instead to continue their work, which can only happen by the continual reopening of the assumptions laid out before us.