Uplifting the Race - Literature review Example

Uplifting the Race The book “Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century” by Kevin K. Gaines centers on bothrace and gender and their connections with the ideologies of racial uplift and black nationalist ideas, exemplifying that the implication of uplift was strongly contested even among those persons who shared its goals. In his book he says that since the end of the nineteenth century, and all the way through the era of isolation, the term uplift implied an array of diverse meanings for African Americans. One popular perception of uplift, that goes back to the time of the antislavery folk faith of the slaves, describes it as a personal or a joint spiritual and probable social transcendence of the oppression and misery of the world. Recounting a collaborative struggle for freedom and social improvement, the phrase uplift also signifies that African Americans have, with an almost religious feeling, held education as the fundamental key to liberation (Gaines, 1). Eventually, elite perceptions of the ideology moved away from more democratic images of uplift as a social improvement, leaving a legacy that confined the conceptions of rights, nationality, and social justice. Gaines’ book explores the historical circumstances that led to the post-civil rights media manifestation of posthumous black messianic headship. The look for for the genesis of racial liberalism, civil rights, the falsehood of color blindness, and the imprudent black messianism that delineated black struggle and deformed its history led to focus on the turn of the nineteenth century. An essential assumption of racial uplift philosophy was that the African Americans material and ethical progress would ebb white racism. Nevertheless Gaines argues that, in its emphasis on class distinctions and patriarchal authority, racial uplift ideology was tied to derogatory notions of ethnic pathology and thus was restricted as a power against white prejudice. The author explains that the present world faces the paradoxes of continual racial discrimination amidst charges of color blindness. The spreading out of the black middle class in the middle of deepening poverty and social dissolution in black communities has been equally disconcerting since many black citizens carry on to bear the burden of joblessness, recession, and poor schooling. Nostalgic mass-media reports of civil rights try to redirect these crises by squaring on images of a magnetic, messianic leader who is invariably a male, and is generally martyred. Documentary media tributes of the civil rights period recycle the vision of a magnetic leader as if to shun confrontation with the persistent maladies of racism, joblessness, and social wretchedness. For a number of blacks, such narrative of civil rights indicates a condition of depression, epitomized in the mass media grieve over the loss of role models. Such mythologizing suppresses the democratic, anti-imperialist program that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were developing when they were slain, and which W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson had taken up until they were listed as non-persons at the peak of the suppression of civil rights and liberties in the times of the Cold War. In the middle of the violent racism prevailing at the turn of the twentieth century, African American intellectual elites who were struggling to enunciate a positive black identity formed a middle-class philosophy of racial uplift. These black elites claimed that they were the true representative of the races potential, espoused a culture of self-help and service to the black populace and separated themselves from the rest of the black population as instruments of civilization. Here lies the author’s rationale for coining the term uplifting the race’. He describes race as a historical phenomenon which has dominated the intellectual and cultural aspects of people’s lives and has eventually reflected the power relations. Since the year 1980 and onwards, conservative black headship has helped the federal attack on civil rights reforms, upholding for some the delusion of color-blind justice. By this short-ranged racial estimation where black ideals of self-help act in response to and strengthen the societys opposition to federal imposition of civil rights, grouping, antipoverty programs, and the spreading out of the black middle class have created a culture of poverty, concluding a golden age of hypothetically healthy black communities during the period of de jure (legal) segregation (Gaines). He argues that there is an unambiguous association of post-civil rights neo-liberal demands of a color-blind world and the recruitment of black conservatives by the federal regime, supported by the confused reactions of rising black anger and estrangement with civil rights and of wistfulness for segregation and self-help. This study focuses on black elites reactions and challenges to white dominance ever since the turn of the century. A sustained contemplation on their contradictory place both as an expectant social class and a racially inferior caste who were denied all political privileges and protections, struggling to label themselves within a society based on white supremacy, offers a reflective insight of the past nexus of race, class, nationwide and sectional politics, and black headship in the American society. The self-help philosophy of racial uplift defines the response of elite African Americans, to de jure segregation. Usually, the black elites demanded class distinctions, as a better class among the general blacks, as a proof of race progress. They thought that the upgrading of African Americans material and moral state through self-help would reduce white racism and hence they sought to restore the races image by exemplifying respectability, performed through an ethos of assistance to the masses. Through racial uplift principles, elite blacks looked for the assistance of white political and commercial elites in the quest of race progress. Their social visualization of blacks inside the American society was mainly determined by those influential whites who reasserted command over black and white workforce by disfranchising blacks and poor whites after the democratic experimentation of Reconstruction. In other words, ethnic uplift ideology cannot be considered as an autonomous black perspective. Black middle-class philosophy cannot be secluded from dominant forms of knowledge and power relations controlled by race and racism. While black elites oppositional claims of self-help may have represented their aspiration for independence and self-determination, this self-worth obscured the degree to which self-help also worked as an adaptation to blacks non-citizenship status. The study focuses basically on two interrelated objectives- one that deals with the meaning of uplift from the African American perspective and the controversies related to it. This is further studied to understand the discussions of rights and the association among black leadership, awareness, and political behavior. There was a historical strain between two general subtexts of uplift. On the one hand, a wider vision of uplift suggestive of collective social ambition, progression, and struggle had been the bequest of the emancipation era. On the other hand, educated blacks made uplift the foundation for a racialized elite character claiming Negro enhancement through class stratification as race advancement, which introduced the yardstick of bourgeois education for rights and citizenship. This strain between educated racial and prevalent social descriptions of uplift within black headship and culture led to the second objective, which is, exploring the concept of race in the U.S. from the time of the turn of the century. The drawbacks of black elites’ self-protective appropriation of prevailing racial theories for the purpose of building up a theoretically positive black identity were an outcome of their desperate situation. In the end, the book continues to say more about supremacy, black vulnerability, and the core position of race in the countrys political and cultural establishments than it does about the intentions or involvement of black elites. Reference 1. Gaines, Kevin K. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, The University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Read More