Jesse Williams: Revivalist for opposition (op-ed)

After preachers shout familiar scriptures following the phrase, “And Jesus said…” congregations respond with praise.

Recently, BET honored actor/activist Jesse Williams with a humanitarian award. His, now famous, acceptance speech addressed inequality, police brutality, and cultural commandeering.

One admirer said it was like his words were written by James Baldwin and delivered by Malcolm X, but if that’s the case then the actor/activist said nothing new.

(Like Jeremiah Wright said nothing new at the beginning of the Obama Era. It was just new to whites who never heard of black liberation theology.)

So why all the praise?

Social activism has a religiosity of its own and each cause has its own gospel.

So when Williams said:

-- Police manage to deescalate, disarm, and not kill white people…

-- I don’t want to hear anymore about how far we have come…

-- Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations, then stealing them… Trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit…

The audience whooped and hollered like each statement was reinforced by the phrase, “And Jesus said…” but each statement was recycled notions devoid of depth like repeated scriptures for sound effects.

But was this just a “call and response” reaction to redundant oratory or was the praise produced by something else?

Now, there was one new thing in this presentation of America, the culprit wasn’t white racism, it was the “invention called whiteness”. This is an academic critique singling out “whiteness” as a social construct. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates has a similar refrain “people that think they are white” in his award-winning book and refers to them as “masters of the galaxy”.

The suggestion here is that the social construct manufactured a false sense of superiority and racism is the ritual that maintains the delusion.

The acceptance speech was an “unapologetically black” sermon directed at this delusion, but it also activated the delusion’s byproduct, a form of blackness called oppositional identity, and this black byproduct produced the praise from the audience. But months ago this same black byproduct condemned Sports commentator Stephen A. Smith when he gave a speech telling black students racism, no longer existed as an excuse.

Smith was called delusional.

Williams’ was praised because oppositional identity is reactive. It’s formed in opposition to something. It draws its strength from the opposition’s delusion creating an ego of its own as a defense mechanism which serves as a rite of passage for “black consciousness” that matures into a permanent state of resistance fueled by the history of oppression.

But James Baldwin wrote white people are trapped in a history they do not understand, and until they understand it; they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years that blacks are inferior to whites. Many of them know better, but people find it hard to act on what they know.

Just like many blacks know better, but wear oppositional blackness like a costume to avoid ostracism like Smith.

But Smith’s approach was actually reverse psychology.

It stripped the black students of an omnipresent whiteness, and without this oppressor the oppositional egocentric blackness that appeared strong becomes weak, because it has no real content, no self definition, it’s just a counter balancing delusion to a white falsehood.

Absent of this reactionary consciousness an individual can make an honest effort to answer Malcolm X’s question, “Who are you? Don’t tell me Negro that’s nothing, what were you before the white man named you a Negro?”

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 7/6/16