American jazz: America's gift to the world. But before that, it is God's gift to America

Gaghdad Bob writes here about American jazz

Now, why would a formerly enslaved people create such a beautiful sound? Perhaps for this very reason. Since physical -- i.e., horizontal -- freedom was restricted, blacks poured forth this longing on the vertical plane, via musical expression.

Furthermore, music was very much a way to express identity and personhood that were otherwise denied by cultural oppression. Take anyone, for example Louis Armstrong, or Duke Ellington, or Thelonious Monk. To a racist-existentialist, they are simply boy, or n-----, an anonymous designation determined by race, by existence. But the existential yoke is really on the racist, for each of these men not only expressed their unique identity via music, but created whole musical worlds that will endure and be explored forever, whereas the racist is buried in an anonymous grave that no decent person wants to visit.

So in his own way, the racist makes himself as unfree as his projected existential dunce partner. In other words, the racist needs the "inferior" race in order to imagine he is superior. The same dynamic exists in contemporary liberalism, since the white liberal's identity is thoroughly entangled in his sanctimonious and condescending attitude toward the blacks he presumes to pity.

Why more blacks aren't offended by liberal condescension is something of a mystery, but no more mysterious than the liberals who do the condescending. It takes two to engage in this freedom-denying dialectic of existence and accident, just as it takes three to engage in the trialectical spiral of freedom, person, and essence.