“…there’s an old song I used to listen to in high school down in Chester, Virginia, a world away from Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. And the Dave Mason song went, “There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy. There’s only you and me and we just disagree.” — Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America, p. 361
A few days ago, family members shared with me photos from a book signing with black poet and activist Nikki Giovanni. My family members were awestruck to be in Giovanni’s presence. Their faces lit up with admiration as Giovanni posed for the camera. Born on June 7, 1943, Giovanni’s “early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the ‘Poet of the Black Revolution.’” I was happy for my family members to be in the presence of “a national treasure.” I also recognized Giovanni had no giddy effect on me.
And this dissonance leads me to this essay about the Nikki Giovanni effect.
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On the surface, some might perceive the central clash in race ideas as the battle between color blindness, Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, and color consciousness. Color Conscious Anti-Racism Maybe this surface conflict in race ideas is misleading.
I suggest the central fulcrum of race and blackness is something deeper. And we see a sign of this deeper thing within one American family. Why are my black American family members giddy and aglow in the presence of an 80-year-old activist poet and writer while I am not stirred in my soul? It is an interesting question. A preliminary answer lays bare why we can’t see eye to eye about race and blackness within Black American families.
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The real issue before us is culture. Too often, scholars, intellectuals and writers will throw out the label “black culture'“ as if it is self-evident. Well, culture is not self-evident among Black Americans. It is not the case. Let’s explore this insight for a moment.
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As always, we can draw upon insights from the American Soviet Jew experience. Both Black Americans and Soviet Jews have lived through a double-consciousness as part of a larger country. Black Americans and Soviet Jews nonetheless both have individual histories. A group identity gives rise to trauma in each respective group. There is both a collective experience and an individual experience in the Black American and the American Soviet Jewish stories. Both groups have experienced an immigrant consciousness through space and time. Black Americans like my Dad were born legal second-class citizens and have moved through the course of nearly 90 years to an unimaginable country compared to the 1930s in Virginia. Immigrant consciousness through the portal of time travel from 1934 to 2024. Similarly, American Soviet Jews were born in one place and time and, through physical migration, have aged into a new country with freedoms unrecognizable to the Soviet Union of their childhoods.
For these reasons, it is instructive to approach the nuance and complexity of culture within Black American families as one might do so within American Soviet Jewish families. I use as my text for this comparative analysis a brilliant essay in Tablet Magazine.
Due to the violent pogroms in Czarist Russia, more then 2 million Jews left Russia for other parts of the world. Most found a safe haven in the U.S. Those Jews who remained under Soviet rule were treated shabbily and perceived as the Other. In the Community Essay, ‘We Have Our Own History, Our Own Trauma, and Our Own Experience’, Table Magazine, April 24, 2024 by Abigail Pogrebin, Pogrebin writes about a roundtable discussion of participants, all American Jews native to the Soviet Union. One participant is Yuriy Age 38. “Born in Odesa, Ukraine, immigrated in 1996 at age 10, now living in the Bay Area.” Yuriy observed how his grandmother lived across space and time: My grandmother, who born in the mid-’30s, kind of has one foot in each world, where she remembers practicing Jewish traditions and religion and also life under the party rule.”
Similarly, there are echoes of the pogroms and the American Soviet Jewish experience in my Black American experience. My family members are descended from an ancestor who lived in post-Reconstruction South Carolina. A dispute with a white contractor led to arson. The family home was set on fire. Luckily, everyone survived but it was felt a lynching was in the air. The family fled for New York City and a new start, comparable to the more than 2 million Jews who fled Czarist Russia and violent pogroms for the safety of America. My close blood family, like the grandmother of Yuriy, chose to remain in the land of their ancestors in Virginia.
Thus, the differences between Jews who knew Ellis Island and those who arrived in America via Delta Airlines during Soviet times reflects a different Jewish cultural experience like my family members who fled South Carolina for New York City would have with me and my family members who remained down South in Virginia. The Great Migration involving six million people will have different experiences and traumas from those millions of people who chose to remain and live down South. For example, one difference is black children had a greater sense of self-esteem on the famous doll test administered by Dr. Kenneth Clark than black children up North attending mixed race schools in the 1940s and 1950s.
A lower self-esteem up North might account for the greater appeal of activist poets like Giovanni. Speculation on my part. More research should be done into whether, and why, revolutionaries and activists never had the same appeal in southern towns compared to places like New York City. For example, I was reading Black Enterprise Magazine in the 1970s, not Giovanni’s book Love Poems (1997) written in memory of Tupac Shakur. She has stated that she would "rather be with the thugs than the people who are complaining about them."
Do you see the cultural divide within my Black American family? I am not a fan of street scholar Tupac Shakur. If one is a fan of Giovanni, I am guessing one has a positive view of Tupac. Call me crazy.
There is more to the parallels between American Soviet Jews and Black Americans. For example, how does someone learn they are Jewish? Oftentimes, a Soviet Jew would learn about their Jewishness from a head teacher or teacher in school. I cannot speak for my Northern family members, although I suspect they learned at home that they were black. I learned I was black from prejudiced white classmates in the third grade. My experience of learning that I was black from someone other then my parents tracks the experience of Irina in the Tablet essay: In the Soviet Union, in schools, you were supposed to state your nationality, and when I was asked who I am, I said, “I’m Russian.” And our teacher and the head teacher looked at me and said, “Well, no, you’re not Russian, you’re Jewish.” And that’s how I knew. I was about 7. We didn’t really discuss Jewishness at home.
In this regard, I see echoes of my learning that I was black. I was 8 when I encountered prejudiced white classmates, so my experience tracks Irina’s. Is my experience typical or atypical for Black Americans? If my experience diverges from my Northern family members’ experience, might this divergence account for the Nikki Giovanni effect on some but not others? It is an interesting question for which I do not have an answer.
In case you are curious, here is Irina’s background: “41. Born in Kyrgyzstan. (“My grandparents are from Ukraine and Belarus and WWII kind of threw people around.”) Immigrated in 1991 (“one month before the breakup of the Soviet Union) at age 9, now living in Livingston, New Jersey.”
I wish I had more time to explore the points of commonality between the American Soviet Jewish participants in the Tablet essay, Black Americans in my family, and the Nikki Giovanni effect. My general point is that there is a rich nuance and complexity in the American Soviet Jewish experience which rivals the rich nuance and complexity in Black American families. The desire to create racial solidarity has rendered scholars, writers and intellectuals blind to the echoes of the American Soviet Jewish psychology in Black American life.
Consider this essay a preliminary defense of the spiritual harmony between two groups that might appear dissimilar on the surface. This essay is also a recognition that the Nikki Giovanni effect is a metaphor for cultural divide within Black American families.
Conclusion: More research and writing should delve into the space/time continuum within Black American families. We are all aging, growing old, removed from the experiences of the young. The Great Depression imprinted itself upon my Dad. The George Floyd moral panic will have a similar imprint on my children. My children will remember Hamas terror and protests like I remember public school desegregation and Watergate as formative moments.
Unlike my family members who are the spawn of the Great Migration north, I am the legacy of proud black people who stayed put in the South and leaned into enterprise. There were no activists in my family or my neck of the woods. Revolution and activism were not a thing. For some people, a close encounter with an 80-year-old black liberation poet and writer is a memory to be cherished.
Not so much for me. I am more like children of Jews who remained in the Soviet Union. And like many Soviet Jews of a certain generation, my black family members didn’t center Blackness so much. It was enterprise that mattered most of all. Tradition mattered, not revolution.
I was struck by "Sometimes they forget they’re Jewish and they consider themselves more white, where we realized on Oct. 7, it’s not exactly so." I find it telling that many seem to have amnesia over who is included in the clique "white," and how the membership has changed over time, and not always included all without skin pigment. In addition to my West African ancestors, at one time my Italian and Irish ancestors were not "white" according to the clique leaders. It's a nasty, middle-school game of who is allowed in the club. Now it's been flipped and "white" or "white-adjacent" means not allowed in the club. While I don't fall in line with or get starry-eyed around revolutionaries, they do serve the purpose of poking the nest, and the nest does need occasional poking. Sometimes they go too far, like labor unions sometimes go too far, but all voices are needed, imo. But it's healthy for society if people can listen without turning over their brains to the revolutionaries.