Why We Remain Blacks - Part 2.02

You created us and that's a misfortune. Here's why that makes us better than you.

“And still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party.” - Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Building the modernized group self-image

We left off in part 2.01 with the realization that although being Black or being a Jew in the modern world is the fault of an external world that forces one to be a member of either group, and although being a member of such a group is also a misfortune, being a member of the group is also an honorable thing.

Now our group narcissist is left with the question of what being a member of this arbitrary fabricated group really means, that is, with the question of what the content of this group identity is.

In No Offense, Cuddihy quotes the great novelist Philip Roth on the narcissistic emptiness that can result from being a member of a group that is defined by an omnipotent but also very abstract and sparsely-defined group self-image, which is to say, what shifts in self-definition can result after an omnipotent group self-image has done battle with the three factors that challenge primitive group narcissism:

What a Jewish child inherited [in twentieth century America], Roth writes, was “no body of law, no body of learning and no language, and finally, no Lord – which seems to me a significant thing to be missing.” But what one did receive “was a psychology, not a culture and not a history in its totality. What one received whole, however, what one feels whole, is a kind of psychology; and the psychology can be translated into three words --- ‘Jews are better.’ This is what I knew from the beginning: somehow Jews were better. I’m saying this as a point of psychology; I’m not pronouncing it as a fact.”