Requiem for Human Dreams
"Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the
facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and
unmoved." This sentence from W. E.
B. DuBois's article "A Negro Nation Within the Nation," Current History 42( 1935 ): 265-270 has
been quoted by Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped
from the Beginning: The Definitive
History of Racist Ideas in America (2016). DuBois's assertion sounds in 2016 like a lament
from a person in ideological pain, and there can be no doubt that Kendi quoted
DuBois to remind us of the implacable and always changing conditions of human
existence. There are indigenous nations
still within the United States of America, but we who have no membership in
those nations remain ignorant of them by
choice. Perhaps, the ignorance is more a
reflex action than a rational choice, an unconscious motion of marking the
authenticity of being an American. Such
ignorance and indifference, or selectivity in our commerce with facts, is not innately
necessary or sufficient, a part of unadulterated biological functioning. It is
a part of social and cultural engineering. No doubt we remain unmoved by knowing this
fact, because the excruciating pain of being an American paralyzes common sense
as well as the qualities of charity, hope, and faith which manifest themselves
in most of the religions of this world.
Stamped from the
Beginning, like any book, may only
awaken a few dozen Americans and disturb the bliss of ignorance. Nevertheless, Kendi's book may awaken a
handful of Americans to recognize what such widely discussed books as Kevin
Powell's The Education of Kevin Powell,
Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow,
and Ta'Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me and such
infrequently discussed books as Dennis de Rougemont's The Devil's Share, Sam Greenlee's Baghdad Blues, Alexis de Tocqueville's
Democracy in America and Gustave Le
Bon's The Crowd work toward by
indirection: the abject cognitive
poverty of sentences in which the word "race" is the subject. There can be no doubt that Americans remain indifferent and unmoved by arguments in
Charles W. Mills's The Racial Contract, arguments that are as crucial as
the fictions about terrorism which circulate internationally.
As an irreversible new ordering of the world descends upon
us , cognitive poverty ascends. In 2016,
Americans and other human beings know
only two facts: (1) Nothing is neither
true nor false, because it is nothing
and (2) Everything is either true or
false, because it is everything. Know
that these magic propositions ordain a requiem for human dreams.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. June 18, 2016
