Human Dignity, Dark Skin and Negro Dialect
Black History Month is a time not only to honor our past but also to survey the progress yet to be made. Why does the black underclass continue to struggle so many years after the civil-rights movement? Martin Luther King dreamt about an America where women and men are evaluated on the basis of character rather than skin color. The fight for equal dignity, however, was derailed by a quest for political clout and "bling." The goal of equality measured by outcomes, sought by means of government-directed racial inclusion programs, overshadowed the more challenging campaign for true solidarity based on widespread recognition of the inherent dignity of all people.
Beginning in the 1980s, many civil-rights leaders began to identify justice on the basis of social cosmetics, including how much "stuff" blacks did not have compared to whites-size of homes, number of college degrees, income disparities, law school admissions rates, loan approvals, and the like-instead of whether or not blacks were treated as equals in our social structures. Equal treatment by our legal and social institutions may yield unexpected results, but it remains a better measure of justice than coercively creating results we want.
When Democratic Senator Harry Reid spoke the truth about President Obama being particularly electable because he neither had "dark skin" nor used "negro dialect," it served as a prophetic signal that Americans still struggle to embrace the dignity of many blacks. Reid's comments expose what many know but would not publically confess: namely, that having a combination of dark skin and "negro dialect" is not only undesirable but also damages one's prospects for social and economic mobility. After all-some would ask-are not the stereotypical dark-skinned folks with bad English skills the ones having children outside of marriage, dropping out of high school, filling up America's prison system, murdering each other, and producing materialistic and misogynistic rap music?
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Civil-rights leaders would do well to restore the priority of fighting for black dignity so that having dark skin is respected and improving one's syntax is encouraged. Theologian Nonna Harrison in her 2008 essay, "The Human Person," offers a clear framework for unlocking human dignity by stressing human freedom, responsibility, love for neighbor, excellence of character, stewardship of creation, and human rationality. Imagine an America where resurgent civil-rights energies were dedicated to creating the conditions that support the life-long process of formation and transformation into citizens who know and love our neighbors, regardless of race or class. Imagine a resurgence of dignity that orders our passions, impulses, and reason to excel in moral character; a resurgence that elevates good stewardship to the status of a social norm; a resurgence that entails sustaining human life in terms of what is good for nature and human society; a resurgence committed to cultivating practical reason, enabling women and men to creatively contribute to the arts and sciences, to economics, politics, business, and culture.
A movement dedicated to fostering dignity in those engaging in self-sabotaging behaviors would have positive spillover effects everywhere: from homes to schools, from streets to the criminal justice system. For example, if freedom, responsibility, and dignity became the new platform for the "advancement of colored people," black marriage rates would be redirected back to their 1950s levels, when the percentages of white and African-American women who were currently married were roughly the same (67 and 64 percent, respectively). An emphasis on practical reason would foster a return to the notion that education-not sports and entertainment-is your "ticket" out of "da hood." Imagine an America where what it means to be a black man is to be a morally formed, educated "brutha," ready to contribute to making the world better.
Decades ago, when the black church was at the center of the black community, these values were deposited from generation to generation. Today, in an era when "justice" means obsession with redistributing wealth rather than restoring dignity, character formation has been abandoned. Disadvantaged blacks are generationally doomed until we recognize that social mobility for those with "dark skin" and "negro dialect" flows from the expansion in tandem of dignity and freedom, not from pursing the siren songs of riches and power.
