Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) (21 page)

Lately, when I find myself among groups of black academics or intellectuals where I raise the issue of class, suggesting that we need to spend more time talking about class differences among
black people, I find a refusal to deal with this issue. Most are unwilling to acknowledge that class positionality shapes our perspectives and standpoints. This refusal seems to be rooted in a history of class privilege wherein privileged black folks, writers, artists, intellectuals, and academics have been able to set the agenda for any public discourse on black culture. That agenda has rarely included a willingness to problematize the issue of class. Among these groups of black folks there is a tacit assumption that we all long to be upper-class and, if at all possible, rich. Throughout my years in college and graduate school, black professors were among those committed to policing and punishing in the interest of maintaining privileged-class values. My twenty years of working as a professor in the academy have not altered this perception. I still find that most black academics, whether they identify themselves as conservative, liberal, or radical, religiously uphold privileged-class values in the manner and style in which they teach, in their habits of being, in mundane matters like dress, language, decor, and so on. Increasingly, I find these same attitudes in the world of black cultural production outside academic settings. These values tend to be coupled with the particular crass opportunism that has come to be socially acceptable, a sign that one is not so naive or stupid to actually believe that there could be any need to repudiate capitalism or the ethic of materialism.

To a grave extent, the commodification of blackness has created the space for an intensification of opportunistic materialism and longing-for privileged class status among black folks in all classes. Yet when the chips are down it is usually the black folks who already have some degree of class privilege who are most able to exploit for individual gain the market in blackness as commodity. Ironically, however, the sign of blackness in much of this cultural marketplace is synonymous with that of the under-class, so that individuals from backgrounds of privilege must either pretend to be “down” or create artwork from the
standpoint either of what could be called “darky nostalgia” or the overseer’s vision of blackness. When I recently commented to several black women scholars doing work in feminist literary criticism that I thought it was useful to talk about ways the shifting class positionality of writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison inform their writing, style, content, and construction of characters they responded hostilely, as though my suggestion that we talk about the way in which privileged-class status shapes black perspectives was in some way meant to suggest these writers were not “black,” were not “authorities.” That was my intent. Since I do not believe in monolithic constructions of blackness and am not a nationalist, I want to call attention to the real and concrete ways class is central to contemporary constructions of black identity. It not only determines the way blackness is commodified and the way our sense of it shapes political standpoint. These differences in no way negate a politics of solidarity that seeks to end racist exploitation and oppression while simultaneously creating a context for black liberation and self determination; however, they do make it clear that this united front must be forged in struggle, and does not emerge solely because of shared racial identity.

To confront class in black life in the United States means that we must deconstruct the notion of an essential binding blackness and be able to examine critically ways in which the desire to be accepted into privileged-class groups within mainstream society undermines and destroys commitment to a politics of cultural transformation that consistently critiques domination. Such a critique would necessarily include the challenge to end class elitism and call for a replacing of the ethic of individualism with a vision of communalism. In his Reconstructing Memory, Fred Lee Hord calls attention to the way his students at a predominantly black institution make it clear that they are interested in achieving material success, “that if black communal struggle is in conflict with the pursuit of that dream, there will be no
struggle.” Like Hord, I believe that black experience has been and continues to be one of internal colonialism, and that “the cultural repression of American colonial education serves to distort.” I would add that the contemporary commodification of blackness has become a dynamic part of that system of cultural repression. Opportunistic longings for fame, wealth, and power now lead many black critical thinkers, writers, academics and intellectuals to participate in the production and marketing of black culture in ways that are complicit with the existing oppressive structure. That complicity begins with the equation of black capitalism with black self-determination.

The global failings of socialism have made it easier for individuals within the United States to reject visions of communalism or of participatory economics that would redistribute this society’s resources in more just and democratic ways, just as it makes it easy for folks who want to be seen as progressive to embrace a socialist vision even as their habits of being affirm class elitism, and passive acceptance of domination and oppression. In keeping with the way class biases frame discussions of blackness, privileged African American critics are more than willing to discuss the nihilism, the pervasive hopelessness of the underclass, while they ignore the intense nihilism of many black folks who have always known material privilege yet who have no sense of agency, no conviction that can make meaningful changes in the existing social structure. Their nihilism does not lead to self-destruction in the classic sense; it may simply lead to a symbolic murder of the self that longs to end domination so they can be born again as hard-core opportunists eager to make it within the existing system. Academics are among this group. I confront that hard-core cynicism whenever I raise issues of class. My critical comments about the way class divisions among black people are creating a climate of fascism and repression tend to be regarded by cynics as merely an expression of envy and longing. Evidently many black folks, especially the
bourgeoisie, find it difficult to believe that we are not all eagerly embracing an American dream of wealth and power, that some of us might prefer to live simply in safe, comfortable, multiethnic neighborhoods rather than in mansions or huge houses, that some of us have no desire to be well-paid tokens at ruling-class white institutions, or that there might even exist for us aspects of black life and experience that we hold sacred and are not eager to commodify and sell to captive colonized imaginations. I say this because several times when I have tried at academic conferences to talk in a more complex way about class, I have been treated as though I am speaking about this only because I have not really “made it.” And on several occasions, individual black women have regarded me with patronizing contempt, as though I, who am a well-paid member of the professional-managerial academic class, have no right to express concern about black folks of all classes uncritically embracing an ethic of materialism. In both instances, the individuals in question came from privileged class backgrounds. They assume that I have made it and that my individual success strips me of any authority to speak about the dilemmas of those who are poor and destitute, especially if what I am saying contradicts the prevailing bourgeois black discourse.

One dimension of making it for many black critics, academics, and intellectuals is the assertion of control over the discourse and circulation of ideas about black culture. When their viewpoints are informed by class biases, there is little recourse for contestation since they have greater access to the white-dominated mass media. A consequence of this is that there is no progressive space for black thinkers to engage in debate and dissent. Concurrently, black thinkers who may have no commitment to diverse black communities, who may regard black folks who are not of their class with contempt and disrespect, are held up in the mass media as spokespersons even if they have never shown themselves to be at all concerned with a
critical pedagogy that seeks to address black audiences as well as other folks.

The commodification of blackness strips away that component of cultural genealogy that links living memory and history in ways that subvert and undermine the status quo. When the discourse of blackness is in no way connected to an effort to promote collective black self-determination it becomes simply another resource appropriated by the colonizer. It then becomes possible for white supremacist culture to be perpetuated and maintained even as it appears to become inclusive. To distract us from the fact that no attempt to radicalize consciousness through cultural production would be tolerated, the colonizer finds it useful to create a structure of representation meant to suggest that racist domination is no longer a norm, that all blacks can get ahead if they are just smart enough and work hard. Those individual black folks who are either privileged by birth or by assimilation become the primary symbols used to suggest that the American dream is intact, that it can be fulfilled. This holds true in all academic circles and all arenas of cultural production. No matter the extent to which Spike Lee calls attention to injustice. The fact that he, while still young, can become rich in America leads many folks to ignore the attempts he makes at social critique (when the issue is racism) and to see him only as an evidence that the existing system is working. And since his agenda is to succeed within that system as much as possible, he must work it by reproducing conservative and even stereotypical images of blackness so as not to alienate that crossover audience. Lee’s work cannot be revolutionary and generate wealth at the same time. Yet it is in his class interest to make it seem as though he, and his work, embody the “throw-down ghetto” blackness that is the desired product. Not only must his middle-class origin be downplayed; so must his newfound wealth. Similarly, when Allen and Albert Hughes, young biracial males from a privileged class background, make the film Menace II
Society fictively highlighting not the communities they live in but the world of the black underclass, audiences oppose critique by insisting that the brutal, dehumanizing images of black family life that are portrayed are real. They refuse to see that while there may be aspects of the fictional reality portrayed in the film that are familiar, the film is not documentary. It is not offering a view of daily life; it is a fiction. The refusal to see that the class positionality of the filmmakers informs those aspects of black underclass life they choose to display is rooted in denial not only of class differences but of a conservative politics of representation in mainstream cinema that makes it easier to offer a vision of black underclass brutality than of any other aspect of that community’s daily life.

Privileged black folks who are pimping black culture for their own opportunistic gain tend to focus on racism as though it is the great equalizing factor. For example, when a materially successful black person tells the story of how no cab will stop for the person because of color, the speaker claims unity with the masses of black folks who are daily assaulted by white supremacy. Yet this assertion of shared victimhood obscures the fact that this racial assault is mediated by the reality of class privilege. However hurt or even damaged the individual may be by a failure to acquire a taxi immediately, that individual is likely to be more allied with the class interests of individuals who share similar status (including whites) than with the needs of those black folks whom racist economic aggression render destitute, who do not even have the luxury to consider taking a taxi. The issue is, of course, audience. Since all black folks encounter some form of racial discrimination or aggression every day, we do not need stories like this to remind us that racism is widespread. Nonblack folks, especially whites, most want to insist that class power and material privilege free individual black folks from the stereotypes associated with the black poor and, as a consequence, from the pain of racial assault. They and colonized
black folks who live in denial are the audience that must be convinced that race matters. Black bourgeois opportunists, who are a rising social class both in the academy and in other spheres of cultural production, are unwittingly creating a division where, “within class, race matters.” This was made evident in the Newsweek cover story, “The Hidden Rage of Successful Blacks.” Most of the black folks interviewed seemed most angry that they are not treated as equals by whites who share their class. There was less rage directed at the systemic white supremacy that assaults the lives of all black folks, but in particular those who are poor, destitute, or uneducated. It might help convince mainstream society that racism and racist assault daily inform interpersonal dynamics in this society if black individuals from privileged classes would publicly acknowledge the ways we are hurt. But such acknowledgements might only render invisible class privilege, as well as the extent to which it can be effectively used to mediate our daily lives so that we can avoid racist assault in ways that materially disadvantaged individuals cannot. Those black individuals, myself included, who work and/or live in predominantly white settings, where liberalism structures social decorum, do not confront fierce, unmediated, white racist assault. This lived experience has had the potentially dangerous impact of creating in some of us a mind set that denies the impact of white supremacy, its assaultive nature. It is not surprising that black folks in these settings are more positive about racial integration, cultural mixing, and border crossing than folks who live in the midst of intense racial apartheid.

By denying or ignoring the myriad ways class positionality informs perspective and standpoint, individual black folks who enjoy class privilege are not challenged to interrogate the ways class biases shape their representations of black life. Why, for example, does so much contemporary African American literature highlight the circumstances and condition of underclass black life in the South and in big cities when it is usually written
by folks whose experiences are just the opposite? The point of raising this question is not to censor but rather to urge critical thought about a cultural marketplace wherein blackness is commodified in such a way that fictive accounts of underclass black life in whatever setting may be more lauded, more marketable, than other visions because mainstream conservative white audiences desire these images. As rapper Dr. Dre calls it, “People in the suburbs, they can’t go to the ghetto so they like to hear about what’s goin’ on. Everybody wants to be down.” The desire to be “down” has promoted a conservative appropriation of specific aspects of underclass black life, whose reality is dehumanized via a process of commodification wherein no correlation is made between mainstream hedonistic consumerism and the reproduction of a social system that perpetuates and maintains an underclass.