Beyond The Obvious: Many Voices Are Like Muted Violins

By: Joseph Evans, Ph.D.

Something For Sunday

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a stage of rage most of the time … And part of the rage is this: It isn’t only what is happening to you [to us]. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance.” James Baldwin

“A riot is the language of the unheard” Martin Luther King, Jr.

Spoken in 1961, James Baldwin’s words remain seared into the mainstream of the collective American consciousness. Words that hauntingly underscore – the signs of the times.  Let us place them into a more recent context. Baldwin’s words powerfully point toward ongoing and unrelenting violence that black folks doggedly face from intransigent forces. Then and now, these forces are namely; federal, state and local governments and their codified law enforcement policies. Let us add that academic, medicine, law and political institutions continuously disregard the powerless. In short, it should be beyond the obvious. People protest because they feel a sense of desperation. Many voices are like muted violins.  

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The opening epithet is taken from one of Baldwin’s many radio interviews (https://edge2.pod.npr.org, last accessed 6/9/2020). The teeming journalist made an attempt to sound empathetic. However again relying upon the 1960’s context and how Baldwin chose such words; it leads listeners to think of the journalist’s worldview as nothing less than apathetic. Indeed American apathy is in large part, a result of an intramural class scrimmage. Racism then is apathy on steroids. It’s an unrelated reaction to a scrimmage that most people of color are dragged into as a metaphor. Blacks are made into a permanent scapegoat.  If we find the courage to abolish racism and then otherness, in that order, democracy is on the horizon. 

By apathy however, we mean that again in this context; the interviewing journalist was indifferent. In short, the journalist is preoccupied with a kind of social distancing from the plight of the oppressed. Baldwin’s retort is adroit and a poignant example of signifying “the most extraordinary and criminal indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance” is further understood when hear his words in a proper context.  The journalist’s ignorance is pigeonholed here as the broader ignorance and indifference of what Baldwin characterizes as “most white people in the country.” There is no other way to describe this but to acknowledge that Baldwin has reshaped brilliantly the narrative and made it his own.  To accomplish this, he has employed juxtaposition. That is, he has replaced the white subject with the black subject. In this way, the former subject is now the object – the objectified, the villain – the culprit, the one who is now on trial. 

Of course, this was not the initial time that Baldwin has heard or experienced racial indifference. It is not the first time that he felt and experienced its poisonous sting. He was familiar with this kind of irrational reasoning from people who were an entrenched fossilized subject. This helps all understand why Baldwin chose carefully his aforementioned words to answer the journalist. He knew that the question came from a person closely wedded to the majority culture’s storyline. That is, somehow the journalist, who is representation here, knowingly or unknowingly, chose to frame their discourse by placing the Negro into the objectified space. This objectification is what Baldwin resisted.  Instead, he offered no excuses for so-called black rage.  He embraced it.  

In fact, he made it clear.  Like the American Colonists, people of African descent yearn for democracy too and like the Colonists, black folk have an obligation to protest against tyranny. Those who are denied participation in democracy and do not acknowledge personal rage or indignation are in a state of denial. Unfortunately; those in denial are no less than possessed psychologically by dehumanizing numbness and trauma. It is Baldwin’s democratic yearning that underscores his refutation against the journalist’s indifference. Indifference can be a result of privileged social location.

Commenting on her interpretation of James Cone’s’ work in Black Theology of Liberation, we contend that she is correct and that she reinforces our claim:

[James] Cone wanted to critically awaken and educate readers so that they would not only break through denial and acknowledge the evils of white supremacy, the grave injustices of racist domination, but be so moved that they would righteously and militantly engage in anti-racists struggle… he wanted the public to learn how to distinguish that racism which is about prejudice and domination from more subtle forms of white supremacy (bell hooks, killing rage: Ending Racism, 149-150).

American privilege is underscored here. It belongs to a caste – species of the majority culture. Its storytellers then and now cannot seem to relocate themselves. It is difficult for them to understand that black folk are the subjects of their own stories that build into a narrative. Black folks narrative then is stories of resilience and self-determination.  The collective narrative of black people in America however began with trauma (1619). It is a narrative simple to follow.  It is stories of protest and a language of resistance expressed as democratic acts. By democratic acts, we mean physical and cyber movements designed to obtain rights and privileges that are inherent and afforded by American constitutional claims of democratic equality. 

We are not aware of another writer who has provided a more profound, clearer, succinct and provocative description about how this black narrative was shaped and formed. To be sure, what follows captures the reasons that the oppressed protest. Oppressed people protest is a demand for full and equal citizenship – it is a democratic right. This is beyond the obvious: there are many voices that are like muted violins: 

The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement.  It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up.  A formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions has consistently punished black resilience, black resolve “(Carol Anderson, White Rage, 3-4).   

This is an example of the underlining factors that shape black folk’s narrative. This is how it began in America.  Informed by the writer, we notice that White rage is at the taproot of black trauma (1619).  In fact, White rage is the objectification – the villain that causes black trauma. When considered this way, it is organized and collective.  In short, White rage attempts to deny black expectations and ambition. These cognitive behaviors are instinctive and natural to all people groups. 

White rage of 1619 is the original sin. Although blurrily visible, White rage is the culprit that demands human subjugation and this includes poor white folks. This claim is made because this form of rage is embedded inside the majority culture.  This kind of rage produced American slavery and other forms of oppression which are motivated and in this instance, – to deny black’s human equality. A successful rage campaign is a systematic denial of black folks’ quest to have full equality and citizenship. It is dastardly successful when black’s expectations and ambitions are punished. This is the ultimate and designated punishment. That is, systematically deny recognition of black humanity.

What emerges then is a collective response. The response is to resist the omnipresent threat that reinforces that black lives do not matter. This collective response has evolved into a collective black story (the newest iteration of the story is black lives matter).  Black folk’s narrative does not make an attempt to deny the presence of numbness which has been black folk’s most faithful, constant nemesis and companion. However,  a collective fight  must be maintained against it.  Numbness here is horrifying, meaninglessness, lovelessness – its nihilism:

Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophical doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority; it is, far more, the lived experience coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, and (most important) lovelessness.  

Nihilism is not new in black America.  The first African encounter with the New World was an encounter with a distinctive form of the Absurd.  The initial black struggle against degradation and devaluation in the enslaved circumstances of the New World, was, in part, a struggle against nihilism.  In fact, the major enemy of black survival in America has been and is neither oppression or [nor] exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat – that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle (Cornel West, Race Matters, 22-23).  

The language above is Baldwin – like.  Consider the claim. The state of black America is filled with toxic hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness. All of these existential conditions are manmade and mandated and parochial – life within the veil. We see the Absurd. But it’s not new to black America. The response has been protest and resistance to fatalism and nothingness. 

We return to the above writer.  Here he provides an explanation for how many have made gallant attempts to avoid the need to protest: “The genius of our black foremothers and forefathers was to create powerful buffers to ward off the nihilistic threat to equip black folk with cultural armor to beat back the demons of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness” (West, Race Matters, 23.). There is no doubt, black folk’s weak infrastructure has kept many from losing their minds and some from committing suicides and or talking the “numb” out of  taking to the streets and taking matters into their own hands – this is beyond the obvious. This is what is meant by muted violins – this sense that the oppressed music cannot be heard nor created. If not, what do we have to soothe the numbing of the human soul?  In order for art to be appreciated, there must be a cultural audience that supports, believes, knows and loves the self-enough to comprehend its existential, complex, realities and still absolutely love our lives.   

In another interview, Baldwin explains why people loot the property of someone else – in this instance the proprietor’s businesses that raise food prices, capitalizing, even creating food deserts – which too often are located in particular neighborhoods. Protestors are aware of this and therefore turn to drastic methods in order to unmute their violins:

Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom? Grabbing off the TV set? He doesn’t really want the TV set. He’s saying screw you. It’s just judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. He doesn’t want it. He wants to let you know he’s there. The question I’m trying to raise is a very serious question. The mass media-television and all the major news agencies-endlessly use that word “looter.” On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us, and no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you’re accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it’s obscene (James Baldwin, in “Looter to who?  James Baldwin on Racism in America” and we refer readers to https://longreads.com/2015/06/01/looter-to-who-james-baldwin-on-racism-in-america).  

Baldwin is adept here and demonstrates that he has not, nor would he ever forget, that he was reared among the brutalities of his native Harlem that helped inform and shape his worldview.  He points to the American paradox. Which is, America is proud of its radical beginnings – America was birthed from resistance to empire and its imperial power. A significant part of the paradox, Americans have a difficult time remembering that the tea cast into the Boston harbor was someone else’s tea and not their own property.  It’s called looting by their own definition.   

Baldwin’s words continue to hold its currency; this is what is happening now in America. There is No Name in the Street of America and neither in the world. The protests are happening in large part due to the throngs of people who are horrified at our country’s state sanctioned police brutalities. The protest was predictable.  How long would it take for people to consider their own culpabilities?  How long before the boiling water steams in the tea kittle and begin to whistle – it’s hot?

We cite these culpabilities and the hot tea kittle: Since 2014, there have been at least ninety-nine black women and men who have been killed by American police brutality (again these are the ones that we know about). Furthermore, we know that light now shines upon our nation’s hypocrisy; its fascination with the so – called Lost Cause.  Many American cities and municipalities are removing statues that have misplaced honor upon Confederate generals – legally traitors to the Union of this country. We dare to hope that Confederate general’s names indeed will be removed from military installations, located across this country’s fruited plains. We dare to hope that this happens especially in the American South. This is beyond the obvious.   

Perhaps, finally, people have come to terms with the black folk’s narrative. Perhaps and finally, many people among Americans of the majority culture and other world citizens understand that they share our democratic yearnings. Many it seems have conceded, black folk are the subject of their own stories that shape and build our narrative. We end here with Martin Luther King Jr.’s words. We now expand his words a larger context; his words that appear at the beginning of this writing:

I contend that the cry of “black power” is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I believe that [we believe] that a riot (or perhaps a protest movement) is the language of the unheard.  

We can pessimistically be optimistic that we are moving beyond the obvious. The protests have come from a desperate space, a space where powerful people refuse to listen.  Too many people have not a democratic voice and therefore people have protested which is an obligatory democratic act. This is to protect our Providential democratic rights; rights that affirm our collective humanity.  It is because of the muted violins we see a glimmer of hope.   

On The Cover Page: The Black Violins