SMACKDOWN: JACQUES DERRIDA VS. MILDRED D. TAYLOR: Final thought on Derrida for the moment (although I did get some interesting mail about him). Derrida’s insistence on always privileging the fissures and gaps in community, privileging scattering rather than gathering, actually seems to distance him from the oppressed people he tries to fight for. If you privilege the things that make “community” a problematic concept, if you focus on the ways in which the black community (say) is not really a community at all, you’re doing a lot of good things (focusing on people as individuals rather than on “group rights,” blah blah blah) but you’re also dissipating political energy. You’re also making it harder for the “black community” to act as more-or-less-a-unit. You’re making it harder for people to identify themselves as inheritors of a once-denigrated history, and therefore you’re making it harder for them to reclaim and honor that history.

Like I said, there are all kinds of reasons to downplay the importance of community. In the US now, for example, I think it’s fairly obvious that “the black community” is a seriously contested term. Are African immigrants part of the “black community”? Usually not–they’re competitors for jobs. Marlon Riggs’s movie “Black Is, Black Ain’t” explored a lot of the areas of tension, discontinuities in the circle of “community,” mostly relating to how homosexuality is viewed in native-born black communities. So it’s not as if Derrida is making up the idea that no community will ever be homogenous, all communities will also alienate at least some people who you might expect to be community members, all communities will have people who are half-in, half-out of the community, and it’s important to keep all that stuff in mind and to allow for that individuality rather than trying to force homogeneity. This is all true enough.

But about a week ago I was struck by the title of one of Mildred D. Taylor’s books. Taylor wrote children’s/young adult books about embattled Southern black communities before the civil rights era; her most famous book is probably Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. And one of the sequels to that book has a title whose metaphor goes totally against everything Derrida says he wants to do: Let the Circle Be Unbroken.

In my earlier Derrida post, I pointed out some basic problems in his privileging of scattering over gathering. So I’d just like to amplify those points by saying that his stance goes against some of the basic ways that people in oppressed, marginalized, or alienated groups organize their lives and marshal their strength and resistance; he misses the needs and hopes that Taylor’s title evokes.