In watching the movie, A Soldier’s Story (for the 25th time), I’m once again struck by Sergeant Waters. While his treatment of C.J. Memphis was certainly despicable, there’s a part of me that understands where he was coming from. Being that I self-identify as the “chitlins, collard greens, cornbread style,” I obviously don’t agree with that piece of Waters’ philosophy, but the idea that there are certain elements that the Black race can’t afford doesn’t seem entirely off. As I’m wont to say, it ain’t right, but it ain’t exactly wrong.
In a way, though, I guess that makes me wonder whether there is a Black race. ‘A’ meaning one. As in the antithesis of the phrase I picked up from Zora Neale Hurston, “my skinfolks but not my kinfolks.” Not too long ago, the idea was posited that people of my generation and younger are increasingly starting to see the fissures in the Black “community” as permanent, to the extent that some people would actually redefine Black folks as separate races. Personally, I don’t know if I’d go that far with it. I certainly think that there are different cultures within Black America, but to suggest that there are different Black “races” seems to hyperbolize to the point of losing a very important idea. I suppose, however, that since race as we know it is in large part a social construct with some points of biological basis, one definition is just as good as any.
Bearing that in mind, would a 2008 Sarge be content with exiling those he saw as unfit to a different “race” than himself, would he be more interested in physical separation, or would he still be looking to personally destroy them? And as a counter question, if we know that certain elements within our community do, in fact, behave in ways that are detrimental to our community, then at what point are we complicit in our own destruction because we DON’T react like Ol’ Sarge?
Just wonderin.
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