Bearing Witness to Black Sanctity

Race pride and why abolishing race is the only solution to America's "race" problem

**Dear Reader, last November my best friend of nearly thirty years died suddenly. Because of his passing, I have been inattentive to my Substack newsletter. Hopefully, with the healing that comes from the passage of time, I will be able to devote more time to Religion, Politics, and the Great Pumpkin. Thank you. Ashley Christopher Leach aka Young Törless**

“And it came to the Senator that he was watching no ordinary automobile. This was no Cadillac, no Lincoln, Oldsmobile or Buick- nor any other known make of machine; it was an arbitrary assemblage of chassis, wheels, engine, hood, horns, none of which had ever been part of a single car! It was a junkyard sculpture mechanized! An improvisation, a bastard creation of black bastards— and yet, it was no ordinary hot rod. It was an improvisation of vast arrogance and subversive and malicious defiance which they had designed to outrage and destroy everything in its path, a rolling time bomb launched in the streets….” Ralph Ellison, juneteenth

Three years have passed since George Floyd’s death ushered in America’s racial reckoning (what I have referred to as the Age of Racial Paranoia), and though the violence that marred the Summer of 2020 has temporarily subsided, the obsessive focus on race has metastasized, polluting nearly every aspect of American society. Surprisingly, on some level, this hypersensitivity over race has revitalized citizen participation in a few of America’s forgotten institutions. The pushback against Critical Race Theory and its modern makeover Anti-Racism has roused public school parents to attend School Board Meetings and invest an interest in what their children are being taught. Community members have formed grassroots organizations and participated in advisory boards, petitioning municipal and state governments for changes in school curricula. Additionally, the publication of several books such as John McWhorter’s Woke Racism, Mark Goldblatt’s I Feel, Therefore I Am, and Heather MacDonald’s When Race Trumps Merit have assisted in broadening the public’s awareness of a topic, which up until the Racial Reckoning, had been careening recklessly down a one way street. Despite the pushback, however, race relations in America have sunk to their lowest point in years.

This summer will mark the 60th Anniversary of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. famously expressed the nation’s creed within the signature line of his I Have A Dream Speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This line, more than any other King uttered that day, touched the very manna within the soul of the America experiment, that this nation was founded on the fundamental rights and worth of the individual, and as a nation of individuals, the common bond is a citizenship based on equality. In other words, America was the first nation in the history of the world, which tied citizenship and its creed to ideals rather than ethnicity, class, or religion. While striving to build a nation, which accurately reflected this singular American idea, has been exceedingly difficult and fraught with hardships, no other mechanism has proven to be more destructive to this prodigious endeavor than that of race. And against decades of scholarly and scientific work, detailing the irrationality behind America’s race classifications while stressing the complexity of assessing possible differences within genetic ancestry, in 2023 America remains a nation defined by race.

Therefore, let me start this reflection on the past three years by restating the primary conclusion of my five part commentary about race in America, which I wrote in response to the Racial Reckoning: Race is an antiquated, abject, and scientifically bankrupt concept. Released last year, David Bernstein’s Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America is the latest book, which brilliantly tackles the absurdity of race and its many ridiculous classifications. Most Americans know the the absurdity of race to be intrinsically true on some level, even though they may not be exactly sure of how they know it to be true. Unfortunately, the numerous sensitivity landmines we have planted around the topic, which if detonated gets one labeled a racist, has only silenced most Americans and prevented them from asking serious questions. What is not so obvious to most Americans is that race, not racism, is the culprit behind America’s race problem. Although the aim of this essay is to highlight how race acts as a corruptible force, this does not mean the recently published criticisms of Critical Race Theory and Anti-Racism are wrong. In fact, much of these criticisms offer warranted critical analysis of current race orthodoxy in relationship to the greater Social Justice Movement, which includes gender ideology and trans-activism. However, none of them address race as the primary problem. Thus, this essay seeks to address race as causation, and as such, asserts that any society constructed around race, no matter how well-intentioned, will always be plagued with the problem of racism. Finally, the most crucial aspect of this reflection will undoubtedly be the most contentious and difficult to accept. Because we have neglected to confront race directly and enact the necessary and difficult measures to fully extract it from the whole of American life, another virulent racist ideology, what I call Black Sanctity and not dissimilar to White Supremacy, has taken root and entrenched itself into many facets of American society. Much of what I will state, regarding this new racist ideology, will certainly displease and even anger the average reader. But I firmly believe we are participating in a fool’s errand at best and sacrificing future generations to a long period of civil strife at worst. Until we are willing to get rid of race, once and for all, America will be forever shackled to what I have called the möbius strip of racism, a continuous cycle of violence and victimization that constantly threatens the integrity and rights of the individual and degrades the nation’s citizenship based on equality.

In my previous essay on Trayvon Martin and the Sanctity of Blackness, I presented a brief overview of how Blackness as a race identity developed, first as method of delineating between free and enslaved people in the American colonies and then as a mark of racial inferiority in both the defense of slavery and after the Civil War in the Jim Crow South. As more Americans of West African descent gained their freedom and autonomy and with the arrival of immigrants from the Caribbean, the meaning of Blackness broadened and grew increasingly complex. By the beginning of the 20th Century, the popularity of Eugenics and Scientific Racism further obfuscated the meaning of Blackness. Tensions between Northern and Southern blacks, aptly illustrated through the publicized disagreement between W. E. B. DuBoise and Booker T. Washington, indicated Blackness had not only cracked the shell of inferiority, which had incased its inception, but was branching out into the sprawling limbs of endless possibilities. In the 1920s Marcus Garvey asserted a variation of Blackness, which skirted the edge of racial superiority. Through his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Garvey believed “the Negro race is as good as any other,” but he also advocated “against miscegenation and race suicide.” It was this aspect of Blackness, centered around race preservation, which served as foundation for today’s Black Sanctity. While both Whiteness and Blackness developed out of the institution of slavery, White Supremacy evolved into a racist ideology based on a belief in race hierarchies. Black Sanctity, on the other hand, has its roots in race safeguarding. Obviously, both racist ideologies advance rhetoric that mimics or echoes the other. Most White Supremacist organizations today are a response to a perceived “genocide” of white people, and Black Sanctity repeatedly demands black people are elevated to positions of power. However, since race hierarchy formed its foundation, White Supremacy manifested in overt and violent systems of control such as Jim Crow laws, public lynchings, and yes, even elements of the criminal justice system and law enforcement. Black Sanctity with its roots in race preservation has tended to be veiled and clandestine, underpinning social justice calls like the Black Power Movement and Black Lives Matter as well as academic pedagogies like Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. But fundamentally, White Supremacy and Black Sanctity are ideologies, which esteem race over individualism, and as such are anathema to America’s free market economy.

Due to the popularity (and controversy) surrounding the New York Time’s 1619 Project, many Americans believe free market capitalism is a tool of White Supremacy. Much of this stems from the historical debate regarding capitalism’s supposed roots within the institution of slavery. However, as Luis Pablo de la Horra points out in his article aptly entitled The Southern Slave Economy was Anti-Capitalistic, one of the misconceptions that fuels this belief is the profitability of the slave system. By 1860 the system was quite profitable, but “profits have existed since the emergence of commerce in the dawn of civilization, and capitalism was born as late as in the eighteenth century with the Industrial Revolution. In addition, profits may arise under many circumstances: forced labor, monopolies, the discovery of highly-demanded natural resources, etc.” Certainly, the Southern economy had capitalistic features, but ultimately, Southern slaveholders’ prosperity resulted from the preservation of their arcane system; liberal democracy and free markets threatened that system. After the Civil War the threat from free markets and competition grew exceedingly worse. Since white landowners could not depend on free labor, they needed ways to coerce free blacks into working for them. “Class interest and white solidarity were not adequate to overcome the economic incentive for individual planters to offer higher wages to blacks. Despite all the admonitions, white employers competed vigorously with one another for black labor, and blacks frequently left lower-paying jobs to take higher-paying ones.” Hence, the rise of White Supremacy and Jim Crow Laws in the South were primarily the creation and implementation of government mandates to control black labor and not the natural inclination of capitalistic whites, who somehow could afford to discriminate.

Although many scholars have analyzed slavery and post-Civil War sharecropping to decipher if these systems could accurately be categorized as forms of capitalism, W. E. B. DuBois was the first to apply a Marxist critique of the southern economy, wedding the white racial identity with the concept of the bourgeois in his book Black Reconstruction. But it was the Black Power Movement, which explicitly redefined the Civil Rights Movement into a Marxist Revolution to overthrow capitalism. Headed by individuals like Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis, the Black Power Movement expanded White Supremacy beyond the confines of individual bigotry and asserted the American system, namely American capitalism, to be the greatest existential threat to black people. Additionally, Black Power recast the Marxist bourgeois to include all of white America, not just Southern whites. It maligned the black middle class, calling those blacks, who could have modeled the necessary life skills for social improvement, “captive leaders.” Despite the rise of the Black Panther Party and the greater New Left Movement in the US, the hope for a Marxist Revolution never materialized, and Black Sanctity’s survival like White Supremacy’s after the abolition of slavery hinged on a concrete entity legitimizing it. Not surprisingly, Black Sanctity like White Supremacy found its home in American law; however, unlike White Supremacy, which was written directly into statutes, Black Sanctity was embedded in legal theory, what we now know to be Critical Race Theory. By the early nineties, Critical Race Theory with its Marxist framework had begun establishing itself not only in many of the law departments of American universities but also across their Humanities departments as well. Today, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices as well as Anti-Racism programs are the result of an established Black Sanctity. In other words, like Southern landowners, who employed government mandated White Supremacy to control black labor and combat the adverse effects of free market competition, Marxist legal scholars instituted Black Sanctity within the academy to undermine meritocratic selection processes and invalidate an entire system that favors determination, self-sacrifice, and personal responsibility. On Thursday, June 29th, 2023, the Supreme Court overturned Affirmative Action in education, a legal blow to this codified Black Sanctity. While this decision has been contentious and in some circles castigated as exacerbating inequality, ultimately, it is not unlike the 1954 Supreme Court Case Brown vs. Board of Education, which overturned separate but equal statutes in public education and struck the first death knell signaling an end to codified White Supremacy. At their core both court decisions disempowered the validity of race.

While both White Supremacy and Black Sanctity share the common bonds of anti-capitalism as well as implementation through legal means, Black Sanctity contains an element found in White Supremacy but not nearly as salient: race pride. As I outlined in the section of my commentary on race entitled Dylann Roof and the Convenience of White Supremacy, white-skinned Americans both historically and today have never collectivized under a uniform belief in a shared Whiteness. For decades groups like the Italians, Polish, and Jews were ostracized and treated as the other, and suggestions that these groups have matriculated into a general Whiteness is specious, since most are likely to identify with their ethnic background and are only forced to identify as white through government mandated census and employment forms, which actively collect data on race. As Peter Kolchin writes in his critique of White Studies, the problem with Whiteness is that it assumes these groups experienced discrimination based on a perceived “non-whiteness.” In essence, Whiteness as a concept engages in the false belief that with each passing generation, established white Americans used a degree of Whiteness as the measuring stick by which they judged immigrant groups coming from Europe. Famed Columbian historian Karen Fields has repeatedly argued that the race category of white was created and implemented strictly to deny black Americans their rights under the Constitution, and any attempt to apply it to how white-skinned Americans either discriminated or privileged each other dangerously overextends the validity of race where none existed. This inflated Whiteness overshadows how Americans historically and even today have grouped themselves within a multitude of categories such as class, religion, and most obvious of all, political affiliation. Hence, race pride is typically not associated with White Supremacy, except within explicit White Supremacist/Separatist organizations and even then it is entangled with extreme forms of patriotism or religious fundamentalism. As a side, I remember a story my stepmother, who is from Pennsylvania, told me about why she had to leave Charleston, South Carolina, an area she moved to in the early eighties. One of her former bosses, who was also a local, blatantly told her that because she was a “yankee,” she would never be promoted where she worked. Ergo, the benefits of Whiteness amount to very little in a nation purported to privilege white people.

The uncomfortable reality is that the modern concept of Whiteness actually comes from Black Sanctity, not White Supremacy. Again, as Peter Kolchin argues in his article White Studies, “every racial identification implies a negative judgment of outsiders-feeling that it is good to be white (or black or Asian) inevitably implies there is something less good about being non-white (non-black or non-Asian)….” With the ascension of the Black Power Movement came an exertion of Black Pride, no doubt desperately needed for a group of people who for generations had labored under the disheartening belief that their black skin and hair texture indicated an innate inferiority. Instead of challenging the false assumption that one’s race equated to one’s self worth, Black Power adopted slogans like “black is beautiful” as well as dress and customs like dashikis, tribal art, and Swahili, cultural cliches which had very little to do with an authentic connection to the West African tribes victimized by the TransAtlantic slave trade. This had become Black Power’s greatest achievement, and while mainstream acceptance of black culture in the seventies was undeniably instrumental in mitigating the self-loathing oppression had wrought, the new vanguard of leaders were more concerned about being “black enough” than architecting substantive policies for working class and poor Americans. Furthermore, Black Power had developed Black Pride into an identity of Anti-American pride. Diane C. Mader writes in her article Black Power and Ego Defensiveness: A Study in a Rhetoric of Despair, “Unfortunately, there is no spelling out of what constituted ‘an improved black position.’ On the one hand, blacks were told that they were not socially acceptable; on the other hand, they were told that their social acceptability would be a betrayal of the black race.” Hence, Black Sanctity rendered Blackness as both pride in being non-white and non-American, and in turn, with its adherence to Marxism, Black Sanctity explicitly tied Whiteness with American liberalism and capitalism. According to Jacques Barzun in his 1965 book Race: A Study of Superstition, Marxism is one of the purest forms of racist thought. The bourgeois is “not a human being with individual traits but an abstraction, a creature devoid of virtue or free will and without the right to live.” As Peter Kolchin concludes in his overview of Whiteness Studies, Whiteness is meant to explain why there is no socialism in American today.

From the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five black Memphis Police Officers to the exact solutions within the field of Mathematics, White Supremacy is the sine qua non of Black Sanctity, a racist ideology that views Whiteness as an existential threat to black-skinned people. Thus, white-skinned people are dehumanized, since they can never dispossess themselves of Whiteness. In turn, Black Sanctity extols Blackness as a racial identity possessing a unique and special cachet, which must be equally celebrated and protected. Evidence of Black Sanctity’s established acceptance in America can be found in three docuseries, which debuted in 2022 across three separate streaming platforms: Hulu’s 1619 Project; Showtime’s Everything’s Gonna Be All White; PBS’s Making Black America.

Essentially a documentary adaptation of the New York Times 2019 commentary by the same name, Hulu’s 1619 Project repositions America’s founding from 1776 to the date when the first English ship containing African indentured bondsmen arrived in Jamestown, Virginia. Admittedly, Nikole Hannah-Jones struck upon a powerful idea, reposition the meaning of freedom around a distinctly American people, whose hard won fights contributed to the promise of freedom and democracy for all of its citizens. Instead, the cynicism of the 1619 Project condemns America as inherently racist; draws tenuous parallels between slavery and the plight of many black Americans today as to justify reparations; and asserts black people as the rightful, sole heirs of the American experiment. In the eyes of the 1619 Project, America is a nation stained in sin, and thus, forever irredeemable.

However, the sin is not slavery, but Whiteness, the subject of Showtime’s Everything’s Gonna Be All White. Although it claims to present the history of America through the eyes of people of color, Everything’s Gonna Be All White jumps around sporadically, not so much a method of historiography but propaganda, weaponizing historical events as to further a demonization of white people. The series reduces white people to an ignorant caricature, one who spews uneducated and generalized invectives with a thick New York accent throughout all three episodes. At one point during the first episode, the filmmakers highlight some of the more nuanced and complicated aspects surrounding White Supremacy, namely the ideology’s intentional marginalization of ethnic whites like the Irish, Italians, and Jews. Unfortunately, this sudden realization that Whiteness is not universal to people with white skin is quickly superseded by more snide stereotyping and jocular derision directed toward all white Americans. The most telling moment occurs when an interviewee admits to feeling negative emotions, particularly shame, after witnessing a black mother berate her child on the subway. He then describes the time he asked a white friend if he had a similar form of emotional solidarity with other white people to which the white friend remarked, “No.” The guest then realizes, “Oh yeah. Cause ‘white’ is made the fuck up.” In a remarkable and confounding comment that follows, esteemed Professor of American History at Princeton University Nell Irvin Painter states, “It’s part of the identity of Whiteness not to have a racial identity, to be an autonomous individual, to only be responsible for yourself. If there were anything I wish black people could succeed in teaching Americans in general, it’s the sense of solidarity, of belonging to something larger than yourself.” Painter and those who adhere to this definition of Whiteness obviously have never familiarized themselves with the most common shared belief amongst the multiple factions of White Supremacists and Separatists groups in the United States, a rejection of individual autonomy.

Regardless of what Painter may have intended by that statement, in the arena of race solidarity, one group has carried that torch into the Twenty-First Century. Henry Louis Gates’s PBS docuseries Making Black America follows the trajectory of black people from the first decades of slavery in the British colonies to the cultural influence of Hip-Hop amongst today’s youth. Because Gates is the most decorated historian of the so-called black experience in America, he illustrates quite poignantly and with inspiration how black-skinned Americans not only survived but even prospered during the years of slavery and Jim Crow. What is deeply troubling about this series is that Gates upholds the fallacious idea that race, even if used to refer to history and culture, is essential and absolute. Instead of celebrating the humanity of those Americans, who repeatedly defied and thus debunked the system which had deemed them racially inferior, Gates presents Blackness as if it were a singular inner force found only in people with black skin. Why else would he ask his guests, “What does black joy mean to you,” if he did not believe Blackness to be intrinsic? Subsequently, Gates does not address contemporary black suffering or pain. Doing so would open the Pandora’s Box of inner city turmoil plagued with drugs and gun violence. Instead, Gates embraces the modern hysteria over White Supremacy as the preponderant existential threat to black people, affirming the activism of Black Lives Matter along with the necessity for black only social networking spaces like Black Twitter. As such Blackness becomes exclusionary, effectively silencing the thoughts and experiences of many contemporary scholars with black skin and organizations that question and denounce race solidarity. Summarizing the documentary’s allegiance to Blackness, Rob Fields, director of Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, concludes, “When we talk about black life, particularly in America, it’s like, sometimes you want to celebrate how dope it is to be black, and that’s important, particularly in a country that the best you can say misunderstands black people, and the most damning thing you can say doesn’t care about black people.” ¹

As the three aforementioned docuseries seem to suggest, an explicit and prevalent form of racial animus, which is vehemently Anti-White, exists in America today. Black Sanctity has made Anti-White sentiment socially acceptable, and surprisingly, there has been little concerted effort to push back against it, considering the social sciences have for decades concluded, “there has never been any credible justification for assuming that physical markers, such as skin color, can be considered as ascriptive characteristics that universally predict sociocultural characteristics” (from Charles Hirschman The Origins and Demise of the Concept of Race, 2004). Thus, White Supremacy as America’s whipping boy has only bolstered the mainstreaming of Anti-White sentiment. But most importantly, the frequency in which contemporary American society now cites and blames White Supremacy has actively severed the ideology from its historical nascency within the system of slavery. Ergo, why so many Americans are oblivious to the racist ideology Black Sanctity.

The likelihood that an equally virulent and extreme racist ideology would fester amongst a small group of black Americans should be a given, considering the shameful legacy of White Supremacy Ideology in this country, and extremist groups like The New Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Hebrew Israelite Movement exemplify the most radical forms of hatred toward white people. But while population percentages undoubtedly factor into the number of White Supremacist/Separatists organizations in the nation, their disproportionate presence in a nation supposedly advancing their ideology, even if on a subterranean level, seems particularly excessive. Furthermore, complicating America’s understanding of hate groups is the policy change, which occurred at the Southern Poverty Law Center in October 2020:

“In pursuit of a more accurate and more just hate map, the Intelligence Project (IP) has committed to collapsing the Black Separatist listing. We will still monitor these groups, but we will be transferring them to hate ideologies, including antisemitism, that better describe the harm their rhetoric inflicts.

This decision comes after many internal and external conversations. A change in the way the map is structured will better capture the power dynamics endemic to white supremacy. Black separatist groups land on the SPLC’s hate map because they propagate antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ and male supremacist views, not because they oppose a white supremacist power structure.”

Since the primary organization charged with identifying hate groups in America has adopted Black Sanctity as policy, then this explains why the Movement for Black Lives and the Common Counsel Foundation, non profit entities, can advocate for overhauling the education and justice systems, defunding the police, and destroying capitalism with impunity, simply on the evidence of unequal outcomes between white and black Americans and without any evidence of Anti-Black racism. Consequently, these organizations are permitted to advance these goals without offering any concrete and viable alternatives to the systems they want to eliminate, a conspicuous problem that should give most Americans pause for thought. Most egregious, however, is how these groups advocate for black lives without any attention paid to the number one cause of black deaths, especially among black males.

On Wednesday, February 1st, 2023, the family of Tyre Nichols held his memorial service in Memphis, Tennessee. Besides the Rev. Al Sharpton, who presided over the service and delivered Nichols’s eulogy, a litany of prominent leaders were in attendance, including Vice President Kamala Harris, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Professor Michael Eric Dyson, whom Sharpton referred to as the black Socrates, and Civil Rights Attorney Benjamin Crump, whom Sharpton called Black America’s Attorney General. As all three major networks, including cable news outlets like CNN and MSNBC, broadcasted live coverage of the service, these individuals gathered under a shared black identity and the belief that Tyre Nichols was killed because he, too, was black. Alluding to the death of Civil Rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated in Memphis, Sharpton chastised the black officers who beat Nichols to death, saying, “there is nothing more insulting and offensive to those of us who fight to open doors that you walk through those doors and act like the folks we had to fight for to get you through them doors.” Regrettably, Sharpton’s statement reveals the paradox at the center of racial pride: if he can have shame for the officers’ actions, what prevented the officers from feeling shame over the actions of Tyre Nichols, regardless of how innocent and compliant his actions may have been? Thus, there remains the unspeakable reality the advocates of Black Sanctity like Sharpton are unwilling to confront: Not only did Dr. King give his life for equality so these men could become police officers, but he gave his life so society may judge these men as individuals with agency, solely responsible for their heinous actions and not a reflection of all people with their skin tone. Somehow, deep within the belly of this shame lies the naked, cold truth. These men were hired as officers because of the fallout from Black Lives Matter; the city of Memphis had to lower its employment standards, and so these men were from an urban community, wracked with violence, poverty, and drug use. They were from homes with absent fathers. And they were from this sanctified Blackness, an identity so consumed with pride, these men and those like them are not allowed to be seen as American. They must be seen as Black. Anything else gets dismissed as “blaming the victim” or “the New Jim Crow” or the byproduct of an unyielding White Supremacy.

Without acknowledging this fundamental truth, that each citizen, setting aside his own prejudices, must offer a degree of trust and goodwill faith in the impartiality of the American system, despite its imperfections, then Black Sanctity and perfunctory accusations of White Supremacy will only draw the ire of individuals, who like all of us suffer through the slings and arrows of daily life but have grown increasingly impatient with what they see as a double standard.

---

When Zora Neale Hurston wrote her 1941 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, she included an appendix with four additional essays. In one essay “Seeing the World As It Is” Hurston addresses the corruptible nature of race and how any employment of race, even if well-intentioned, inevitably conflicts with a person’s sense of self. Writing during a time when black Americans were the victims of violent Anti-Black racism, Hurston willed herself above a society stagnant with the “Race Problem” and surmises with the utmost conviction race to be a “sapping vice.”

“There could be something wrong with me because I see Negroes neither better nor worse than any other race. Race pride is a luxury I cannot afford. There are too many implications behind the term. Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit of mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? If I glory, then the obligation is laid upon me to blush also…. Races have never done anything. What seems race achievement is the work of individuals. The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. The Jews did not work out Relativity. That was Einstein. The Negroes did not find out the inner secrets of peanuts and sweet potatoes, nor the secret of the development of the egg. That was Carter and Just. If you are under the impression that every white man is an Edison, just look around a bit. If you have the idea that every Negro is a Carver, you had better take off plenty of time to do your searching. No, instead of Race Pride being a virtue, it is a sapping vice. It has caused more suffering in the world than religious opinion, and that is saying a lot.”

This is where both White Supremacy and Black Sanctity find common cause. By elevating race above the individual and citizenship, White Supremacy and Black Sanctity are by their nature at odds with the principles upon which this nation was founded. For the individual, who believes in the false promise of White Supremacy, his identity is constructed on the belief that he owns America. For the individual, who believes in the false promise of Black Sanctity, his identity is constructed on the belief that America owes him. A society will always undermine its commitment to nondiscrimination if it reviles one form of race identity while in the same breath it sanctions another. For nearly sixty years the group of Americans, who suffered the worst form of racial oppression committed in flagrant hypocrisy to America’s founding principles, has been allowed to wantonly glorify and wield Blackness with unrelenting excess, and until they are willing to part with race, America will always be defined by its “race” problem.

In my next post I will offer an Appendix to this article, outlining the many ways in which White Supremacy and Black Sanctity share similar traits. As always, thank you for reading.

1. Interesting to note that I had coined the term “Black Sanctity” prior to seeing “Making Black America.” In one episode a participate actually said she preferred the term “Black Sanctity” to describe her innate feeling of Blackness.