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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I think Ol Sarge would be happy if and only if the ‘races’ were recognized fairly as clearly as black classes can be now. Nobody is ever going to mistake Clarence Thomas for Biggie Smalls, and thus the classes can abandon responsibility for each other. Sarge wants a separate peace with whitefolks, something he could never afford so long as he was in the same racial bucket with CJ and all his gutbucket blues, and he resented this. He couldn’t stand the fact that ultimately he was held responsible for ‘his nigras’ in the way that the South owned ‘their nigras’. It was nothing he could avoid in the white man’s Army. But when Denzel’s character showed the breach - that there was another justice to which Ol Sarge was also responsible, he couldn’t take it. Sarge drunk himself stupid, practically suicidal. It destroyed him because he always knew the cost - some nigras had to die so that the race could go forward. Sarge was the gatekeeper and he knew all the rules. The new rules would ultimately destroy Sarge.
Today, Sarge would be liberated. The question was whether or not he acted out of love, and I don’t think he did. I think he operated out of fear. He feared that any bumpkin in the wrong place at the wrong time could set back the progress of the race. It was in Sarge’s best interests to keep the bumpkins in line, to be the overseer, to make examples. But that job doesn’t pay in contemporary America. Sarge would, I think, be a great deal more happy lording over white trash, representing to them an impossible standard of bourgie blackness. He’d take perverse pride in that.
I can’t answer whether Sarge actually loved himself. I can’t figure it.
I’m pretty sure Sarge hated himself, but that his self-hate was fueled by his pride. In other words, I think that while he may have taken some pride in being Black, the resentment that he held because of the fact that his accomplishments could be so easily denied and dismissed because he was Black caused him to despise his own Blackness, almost as much as he despised CJ.
I wonder, though, if Sarge had gone through the Civil Rights Movement, whether he would have latched on to the organizations the way some folks have. Like, would Sarge be so embittered by segregation and so liberated by the CRM that he doesn’t even recognize his own freedom to do his own thing? Would he be an NAACP lifer, unable to recognize when the game changed again?
Yes he would be an NAACP lifer, and he would resent the free pass younger people got. I think he would be like Wyatt Tee Walker, ultimately successful, stuck in his ways, preaching the same message to a fixed level of Maslow’s pyramid. An Old Testament fire and brimstone dude, always measuring the times by the same old yardstick. I recognize some of that in my own father who never fails to introduce somebody to me by ethnicity when he tells stories, who refuses cable TV and broadband.