Principles r us

THE FOLLOWING IS IN RESPONSE TO THIS PROGRAM
http://www.radioopensource.org/nell-painters-history-of-white-people-its-coming-to-an-end/

A sparkling conversation. It strikes me that most of the conversations Ms. Painter will have on her book tour will be to describe her book, but it might be said that in the big picture she wrote the book so as to stimulate the kind of conversation that happened here.

Ah yes, in the billion words that Mr. Emerson wrote through his life, some fallibility can be culled, I have no doubt. But RWE was about principles, and his principles are the letters I subscribe to, not the parsing of random speeches.

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE”
-Emerson “The Oversoul”

Mr. Painter describes RWE as the “embodiment of the American Renaissance,” but I feel that puts him in a box. My Emerson is an embodiment of the American identity born through a specific principle. The principle that W.E.B. Du Bois quotes in chapter III of The Souls of Black Folk.

“By Every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

The same identity-through-principle that Ellison’s Invisible Man grasps on to at the end of the book: “and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I no longer had to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and the Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine.”

The same identity that James Baldwin’s African American protagonist comes to embrace at the end of his trip to Europe and his story What it Means to Be an American. “It is the day he realized that there are no untroubled countries in this fearfully troubled world; that if he has been preparing himself—for anything in Europe, he has been preparing himself—for America. In short, the freedom that the American writer finds in Europe brings him, full circle, back to himself, with the responsibility for his development where it always was: in his own hands.”

It’s same identity and principle that even the fallible Booker T. Washington pinned his hopes on in Up From Slavery: “This country demands that every race shall measure itself by the American standard.”

But here is my revelation even in writing this blog, Mr. Washington isn’t just talking about the black race rising up to the “American standard,” he’s also talking about the white race coming down off it’s perch to the “American standard” – and thus to the American principle; American identity; equality. But hold your horses! We’re not come’n down quietly!

“Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an unmovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.”
- James Baldwin

Ms Painter tells us “anybody can be racialized,” and thats a vital message, although it only tells half the story. Where do we go from there? We know what to avoid, but what to embrace? PRINCIPLES! Anybody can also be principlized! How do I know? Ralph Waldo Emerson told me so!