This question struck me as I was reading the essay, “Tuscaloosa,” in an issue of the Black Warrior Review, a literary magazine run out of the University of Alabama. The essay revisits the 1540 Battle of Mabila, in which the conquistador, Hernando De Soto, decisively beat the Choctaw warrior, Tuscaloosa, for control of central Alabama. Although Tuscaloosa lost, the fact that he fought back against the Spanish is interpreted by the essayist as “a refusal [to accept] the ideology of manifest destiny.”
The Battle of Mabila was, for many Black theorists, the beginning of the Intifada against “White supremacy” that continues to this day. I think it’s safe to say that a sense of embattlement is endemic in much of the Black community. A lot of the rhetoric of hip hop, for instance, reflects this feeling of being at war. We see and hear it in the form of angry activists such as Carroll Fife. In Oakland, where the Black Panther party was born and still holds significant sway, there is the perception that the White and Black communities are at war—and this perception, IMO, is not engendered in the White community. When a people believes it is engaged in a lifelong struggle against racism, it will find evidence of racism everywhere it looks—even when that evidence falls apart on closer examination.
In fact, paranoia is one of the most common psychological results of the feeling of being constantly embattled. The myth of “microaggressions,” a favorite topic of some Black activists, reflects the hypervigilance of Black people who scan the world in a state of high alert to discover proof of racial slights. So acute can this psychological distress become that it resembles PTSD. It can lead to misinterpreting reality and difficulty making logical decisions. When it is prevalent amont lawmakers, as it has been in Oakland for a generation, it can throw the entire city onto an aberrant legislative course. The sense of constant embattlement can even lead to civil unrest and, in the most extreme case, civil war. Al Jazeera, in praising the Black Lives Matter movement in America, claimed that Black Americans must act “in he only manner available to it”—violently. With “not much left to lose,” the “masses…will continue to rise against their oppressors…paving the way for a global intifada” that does not exclude the U.S.
It must be tedious to live in this constant state of embattlement. I can understand, in part, because, as a Gay man, I too have felt excluded and discriminated against in an America that is supposed to be “the land of the free.” However, all my life I have elected to change America through peaceful means, especially at the ballot box, and not through violence or crime of any kind. I have never considered myself “at war” with the greater culture.
I would urge my Black sisters and brothers to rethink their ideological underpinnings, if in fact they feel at war in our country. It is not a healthy way to live, nor is it at all productive. Its results include backlash, inappropriate anger and irritability, battle fatigue, anxiety and, ultimately, involvement in the criminal justice system. The Battle of Mabila occurred nearly 500 years ago. America has real wars on its hands these days; we must not be distracted by fake ones than merely divide us. It’s time for Black activists to leave this invented battle behind, and let us get on with the serious business of uniting to solve real problems.
Steve Heimoff