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To put it more simply, it is the myth of heritage (formal identity)
that allows an African-American man to speak of his present circumstances,
and all of those life circumstances up to that point, as being the
result of "immigration," while it is culture (functional identity)
that allows that same man to assume in a particular social situation that
everyone in the room, except maybe himself, is a "nigger" and that his
use of the term will be embraced rather than rejected.
If the term African-American is anything, it is an artifact of the struggle between the formal and functional identities that "we" have constructed for ourselves. In another America all people are created equal, and in that world the term African-American may be appropriate. But the use of the term in this particular America—an America that has not yet lived up to its own ideals—implies a thorough transformation that has not yet been accomplished. No matter how much the hope of this change exists, its practical realization in society may not. In any case, what would it matter if every black person in this country could situate his or her past explicitly? What do we do then? What do we do now? What do we do tomorrow? It is possible that any construction of heritage denies poignant realities of history and culture. It would seem impossible to speak of a black culture, even if one chooses to call it African-American, without speaking of an American (United States) experience, the very same experience that makes it necessary for a new race term to present itself. Furthermore, it would seem impossible to discuss the conception and refinement of any American institution without addressing or suppressing this inherent black experience. Therefore, any term used to define blackness must not be judged by the way it looks when pinned to an appropriate chest, but how it stands up to present sociopolitical criteria. The naming or renaming of a condition does not necessarily indicate, in a socially meaningful sense, a distinct change in status. Thus the terms slave, African, colored, Negro, black, and African-American are labels that may anticipate change but in no way are empirical (functional) evidence of a change in a socio-economic sense. In essence, depending on individual circumstances, functional realities may reveal absolutely no difference in meaning between these terms. From this perspective, the process of moving from absolute suppression to nonsuppression presents an amalgam of shifts and phases that embody a myriad of consistencies and inconsistencies available for viewing "identities." To ignore these life circumstances is to be willfully ignorant of "other" possibilities or even one's own confrontations with history. It has been argued here that race terminologies are quite arbitrary and therefore insignificant. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss these terms altogether. To do so would be to deny the significance of the circumstances from which these terms have arisen. Although the distinction between such terms may be questioned, it is not possible to challenge their sociological origins. If one speaks of black culture in this country, one of its major determinants is its ongoing struggle against stereotypical, formal, and historical definitions that attempt to limit or conceal it. This struggle is continuous and pervasive, and it is the process that binds us, in one way or another, to our identities and vice versa. This process of binding and unbinding, and not the race terminologies themselves, are indeed the most significant, for it is in this functional process that culture gains its social rather than formal definition. By way of its formal definition, the concept of "race" is certainly believable. However, functional realities and the identities arising from them resonate incessantly with disbelief and challenge, on a moment-to-moment basis, the (a)moral mechanism that would otherwise continue to function without seeing any necessity for modification. |