Free Labor & Black People
“Black people can’t be asked to do labor for white people.” You may have seen this type of idea on instagram posts or something. Some people who say this usually mean don’t ask black people to lecture to audiences for free. That seems to me to be a given; in general you should pay people for their work and time.
But then I started thinking about those people who actually say that black people shouldn’t be asked to educate white people, and it isn’t that they’re wrong but that what they’re saying is beside the point Whole people can and must educate broken people, and if some of those whole people happen to be black, then so be it. It’s worth mentioning that the word educate comes from the latin ‘educe’ meaning to draw or lead out. It means helping to draw out one’s latent potential and is actually a deeply beautiful word.
Educate. To draw forth a person’s essence, like water from a well. This is the spiritual obligation of psychologically whole people. One of the coolest teachings from the Buddha that I’ve read about is that if you reach some form of enlightenment, you should go back and help alleviate the suffering of others. I subscribe to this view and believe that whole people must do this, now, more than ever.
And speaking of whole people, James Baldwin once said that if a white racist sheriff bludgeons a young black woman with a baton, what happens to the woman is ghastly but what happens to the sheriff is in some ways “far worse.” But Baldwin was only half right. It’s only worse if the woman the sheriff is attacking is whole. If she’s whole, then, no matter what he does to her, she is free and he is the slave. A slave to his fears, his emotions, his projections. It doesn’t matter if he has all the power. You can be a slave to power, especially, to power. But Baldwin is wrong if the woman the sheriff attacks isn’t whole. I mean psychologically whole. Self-aware whole. Cognizant of her flaws and her messiness whole. Able to balance all the opposites within herself whole. Integrated — a word which we in this country never fully actually understood, and surprise surprise, it means whole.
Because if she isn’t whole, she is far more likely to internalize the projections of the white racist sheriff and see herself the way he sees her, or see white people the way he sees her. And that would be a tragedy for then we would be dealing with two slaves, not just one.
There is a long history of pragmatic black activism focused on healing people and healing communities. I try not to be overly pessimistic, but sometimes it seems that this legacy of pragmatism has been hijacked and turned into an overly performative pantomime, an Instagram wall of afro picks and raised fists, a Twitter timeline of "wypipo do this" and "Karen did that," and endless blogroll full of five-dollar words cribbed from academic jargon and books that people don't really understand.
Something has happened that has gotten a lot of people believing that it is better to have the people they don't like feeling bad then to get to a point where they feel good.
Really like this post. No one, whether black or white, should ever feel obligated to educate. You can only do what you feel up to doing. However, unless people "whole enough" to feel up to the challenge, whether they are black or white, step forward, that education will never happen.