I took another pass at the material, going a little more deeply this time (I hope), including reading through a discussion on Greg’s Facebook page about the same essay:
I also just gave it some general thought over weekend, and came to feel that (among other things) it might be important for me to express more clearly why I’m even interested in the discussion in the first place.
Frankly (in case it wasn’t obvious), I feel very much like an outsider to inner cultural nuances of this particular debate—indeed, black culture in general—even through I’ve grown with it in so many ways, as it’s simply part of American (and global) culture. (I appreciate your point, Ed, about black art always already being art. Why do the universal and the particular have to be in opposition, except by deficient mentality?)
But I think black art is unique in our larger, shared and emergent culture(s) because in so many ways it subverts and puts into question predominant narratives. At the same time, like all counter-narratives, it becomes subject to (sometimes willing) co-optation by the structures sustaining those predominant narratives. There is a real struggle there, always a tension—which is basically the criticism against Ellison, as I understand it, a claim that he sold out to those structures.
What I understand Greg to be saying, however, is that Ellison was actually engaged in holding a complexity of tensions in a way his critics might not recognize or value, neither “selling out” to a dominant culture nor “buying in” to a deficient racial ideological contruct. Greg’s emphasis (made in one of his Facebook comments) on the distinction between race and culture is crucial, I’ve come to see, as race is essentially a deficient mental category, whereas culture is about lived experience; it’s inherently complex, deep and lateral. Yet in much discourse, the two are conflated.
The reason this is important to me, personally, is because I feel a great deal of suspicion regarding “predominant cultural narratives” and I’m finding in black artists some really powerful expressions validating my suspicions…indeed, my outright disagreement with these constructions of the world.
I might not share the Erfahrung of being a black man in America, but neither am I completely untouched by the incredible violence human beings have unleashed on other human beings going back at least 10,000 years, of which modern racism is just one ugly expression. The question is, what do we, as human beings, do with these experiences? How we redeem the traumas of history, as much as of our own lives? How do we create something better? And to my mind, one of the answers to this, one of the most profound gifts we can receive/give, is that we can use our experiences to make art. To create beauty, inspire joy, feed our hunger for real freedom…
I’m learning to be a humble student of the path. 
But one thing I know is that art is about the expansion, intensification, and integration of experience. And in a sense, all cultural experience is vicarious. But the vicarious can become lived experience through the act of empathic engagement—has to become so, in fact, for real integration to occur. And it might even be that an outsider perspective—if there’s real aesthetic and ethical empathy there—could be unique and valuable in its own right, though different from the insider view; and that, moreover, it could be a conduit to its own valuable contexts, insights, gifts. This is what I might aspire to. The problem lies in disqualifying any view a priori, which is perhaps one of the underlying dynamics in the Packer-Moody debate that I’m more sensitized to now.
Ultimately, I think the question we need to ask is: What does the art itself have to say?
This is why I think we need to go to sources (such as Gebser, Ellison, et al), do our homework—and actually integrate the lived experiences of those engagements within ourselves—as a matter of cultural edification and spiritual intensification, and not the least of which, to make our own art.
Thanks, Greg and Ed, for your openness to the conversation! I’m curious what others might think, too…
