The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (21 page)

On the contrary, Mrs. James taught us that to really be black we would have to uphold the empowering intellectual and artistic traditions that we were being taught to understand and explore. Mrs. James was extraordinarily demanding, and insisted that our oral and written work aspire to a consistently high level of expression. And neither did she reproduce some of the old class biases that shaped black curricula around “high culture.” She taught us the importance of Roland Hayes and Bessie Smith. She taught us to appreciate Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson. She encouraged us to revel in Paul Robeson and Louis Armstrong.

This last element of Mrs. James’s pedagogy was particularly important since so many of her students lived in Detroit’s inner city. She provided us a means of appreciating the popular culture that shaped our lives, as well as extending the quest
for literacy by more traditional means. Thus, we never viewed The Temptations or Smokey Robinson as the raw antithesis to cultured life. We were taught to believe that the same musical genius that animated Scott Joplin lighted as well on Stevie Wonder. We saw no essential division between “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and “I Can’t Get Next to You.” Thus the postmodern came crashing in on me before I gained sight of it in Derrida and Foucault.

But Mrs. James’s approach to teaching her students about black folk did not go over well with many of her black colleagues. Still bound to a radically traditionalist conception of elementary school curricula, many of Mrs. James’s colleagues blasted her for wasting our time in learning ideas we could never apply, in grasping realities that would never give us skills to get good jobs. (This was still the late 1960s, and the full impact of the civil rights revolution had not yet trickled down to the classrooms, nor the psyches, of many black teachers.) But Mrs. James’s outstanding example of intellectual industry and imagination has shaped my approach to education to this day.

Another event in my adolescence also shaped my quest for knowledge. I can vividly remember receiving a gift of
The Harvard Classics
by a generous neighbor, Mrs. Bennett, when I was in my early teens. Her husband, a staunch Republican (a fact which, despite my own politics, cautions against my wholesale reproach of the right), had recently died, and while first inclined to donate his collection to a local library, Mrs. Bennett gave them instead to a poor black boy who couldn’t otherwise afford to own them. I was certainly the only boy on my block, and undoubtedly in my entire ghetto neighborhood, who simultaneously devoured Motown’s music and Dana’s
Two Years Before the Mast.

I can barely describe my joy in owning Charles Eliot’s monumental assembly of the “world’s great literature” as I waded, and often, drowned, in the knowledge it offered. I memorized Tennyson’s immortal closing lines from “Ulysses:”

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heave, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I cherished as well the sad beauty of Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy (Written in a Country Churchyard),” reading into one of its stanzas the expression of unrealized promise for black children in my native Detroit:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

I pored over Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography
and exulted in Marcus Aurelius; I drank in Milton’s prose and followed Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
. I read John Stuart Mill’s political philosophy and read enthusiastically Carlyle’s essays (in part, I confess, because his quote, “No lie can live forever” had become branded on my brain from repeated listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s recorded speeches). I read Lincoln, Hobbes, and Plutarch; the metaphysical poets; and Elizabethan drama. (This last indulgence led a reviewer of my first book to chide me for resorting to Victorian phrases—which in his view was patently inauthentic—to describe a painful incident of racism in my life; I was tempted to write him and explain the origin of my faulty adaptation, but, alas, I concluded that “that way lies tears.”)

The Harvard Classics
whetted my appetite for more learning, and I was delighted to discover that it opened an exciting world to me, a world beyond the buzz of bullets and the whiplash of urban violence. One day, however, that learning led me right to the den of danger. Inspired by reading the English translation of Sartre’s autobiography
Les mots (The Words),
I rushed to the corner store to buy a cigar, thinking that its exotic odor would provide a whiff of the Parisian cafe life where the aging master had hammered out his existential creed on the Left Bank.

My fourteen-year-old mind was reeling with anticipation as I approached the counter to confidently ask for a stogie. Just then, I felt a jolt in my back; it was the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun, and its owner ordered me and the other customers to find the floor as he and his partners robbed the store. Luckily, we survived the six guns brandished that day to take our money. Long before Marx and Gramsci would remind me, I understood that consciousness is shaped by the material realm, that learning takes place in a world of trouble.

I was later thrilled to know that the new pastor of my church, Frederick Sampson, a Shakespearean figure if there ever was one, shared my love of learning. An erudite man trained to speak the King’s English to the Queen’s taste, he would, at a moment’s notice, embellish his sermons and conversation with long stretches of Shakespeare or Wordsworth. Even at funerals, as he led the procession out of the church, he would recite Longfellow;

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul . . .
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing
Learn to labor and to wait.

But like Mrs. James, Dr. Sampson read widely in black letters. Time and again, his eloquent pulpit art indexed the joys and frustrations of black and religious identity. He ranged between unlikely sources to make his points. He called on
Bertrand Russell (“the center of me is a wild curious pain . . . [the search for God] is like passionate love for a ghost”) and W.E.B. Du Bois:

Mrs. James, Dr. Sampson, and my early habits of reading are to me models of how the American canon can be made broad and deep enough to accommodate the complex meanings of American identity. To embrace Shakespeare, we need not malign Du Bois. To explore black identity, we need not forsake the learning of the majority culture. And even if Dostoyevsky never appears among the pygmies, great culture may nonetheless be produced in unexpected spots.

The difficulties of gaining clarity about cultural and racial identity are only increased with the introduction of theory into the mix, a move bitterly debated among black intellectuals. The application of theory to black culture has provoked resistance from the right and left alike, mimicking patterns of response to theory in larger literate culture. Now what is meant by theory is literary theory, not a theory of progressive politics, say, or a theory of quantum mechanics, though both have come under attack for sharply different reasons.

The notion of theory itself, however, is not suspect. How could it be? Even its opponents have theories about the problems with theory. Some Marxists and feminists have theories about why deconstructionists need to be more realistically grounded in the world and politically engaged. Defenders of the Great Books have ideas about why theorists romp in pedantry and obfuscation, their jargon a sign of poor writing, or worse yet, muddled thinking. African-Americanists have theories of why black intellectuals should spurn European theories and stick to more traditional ways of criticizing books and culture. In their opposition to theory, at least, usual opponents find full agreement. With some adjustments, I think theory may help to explain black culture. We must have at least two skills to make it a go.

The first skill is
translation
. What’s said meaningfully in one place must often be restated to make sense in another setting. Among initiates, subtleties of theory will be transparent, while those outside the theoretical loop will inevitably miss out. But if theory is to serve or undermine traditions of interpreting books and culture, the moral of the story (even if the point is that there isn’t one) must at crucial points become clear. Admittedly, that is sometimes communicated by writers whose politics of expression lash out at simple, given meaning. In order to be successful, though, such an act should not be hindered by sloppy execution. As with all writing, there are good and bad ways to do theory.

The second skill is
baptism.
I know the phrase evokes volatile responses because of its religious association, but then I’ve got a theory or two about that. For Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault to be useful to me, they can’t be dragged whole-hog into black intellectual debates without getting dipped in the waters of AfricanAmerican culture. Strategies of play, notions of “difference,” and ideas about the relation of knowledge to power can illumine aspects of black culture when applied judiciously.

But theory must be reborn in the particular cultural forms that shape its use; it must reflect the cultural figures fixed in its gaze. Jazz and science fiction, hip-hop culture and collagist painting, and broad intellectual imagination—embodied in folk like Betty Carter and Octavia Butler, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Romare Bearden, C. L. R. James and Zora Neale Hurston—all have something to gain from, and to give to, theory. Bertrand Russell believed that the goal of education is to help us resist the seductions of eloquence. At its best—in translation and baptized—theory can do just that.

The controversies surrounding hip-hop bring us full circle in grappling with how race, language, and identity are joined, and how their contradictory meanings sometimes collide. Because of its extraordinary visibility, indeed, vilification in the larger society—and because of the strong veto it has aroused in many black quarters as well—rap perfectly symbolizes the failure of neat, pure analysis to illumine the complex workings of black culture. The debates about hip-hop culture strike the deepest nerves in black culture—how we name ourselves; how the white world views us; how we shape images and identities that are tied to commerce and exploitation; how black culture preserves itself while continually evolving; and finally, and perhaps, most important, how survival is linked to the way words are used for and against us. Like the black culture that produces it, rap is both a new thing, and the same ol’ same ol’. That is the crux of black culture’s gift and burden.

As debates about the canon continue, and as currents of suspicion about the wisdom of multiculturalism endlessly swirl, the example of black culture’s constant evolution and relentless self-re-creation is heartening. At its best, African American culture provides an empowering model of education that combines the impetus to broad learning and experimentation with new forms of cultural expression. The ongoing controversies generated by identity politics, hip-hop culture, and racial politics, and the insurgence of a host of other minority voices, insures that African-American intellectual and cultural life remains an important resource in addressing not only marginal traditions, but in reconceiving and expanding the very framework of American literature and democracy.

Over the last decade, the recognition that white folk make up a racial
group, much like black and red and brown folk, has spurred some powerful,
progressive scholarship. Writers on whiteness have examined the
very notion of what makes someone white, as well as how that identity is
used to justify an alarming variety of destructive practices. Some of the
best insight has come from folk who have been the victims of whiteness as
it has metastasized across the globe. I hope that as the scholarship on
whiteness grows, it will provide even greater inspiration to the nation to
turn away from the road of white supremacy and to follow the path of
racial justice.

BITTER CONFLICTS OVER THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY are at the heart of contemporary debates about the labor movement, the political left, and the American academy. Such debates are often burdened by a truncated historical perspective that overlooks crucial features of the story of how identity politics, and the alleged special interests upon which such politics is said to rest, have come to dominate our intellectual and cultural landscape. This essay, then, has a modest ambition: to provide a small corrective to such stories by emphasizing how whiteness—which has reflexively, if unconsciously, been defined in universal terms—is composed of particular identities. These particular white identities have, until recently, been spared the sort of aggressive criticism that minority identities routinely receive. I will also argue that some critics of identity politics ignore these facts, and
this ignorance smoothes the path for false accusations against blacks, women, and other minorities as the source of strife and disunity in the labor movement. Finally, I will suggest that, based on the uses of whiteness in the labor movement, the politics of identity was a problem long before the fuller participation of blacks and other minorities. Indeed, identity politics is most vicious when it is invisible, when it is simply part of the given, when it is what we take for granted.

One of the unforeseen, and certainly unintended, consequences of recent discussions of race is that we have come to question the identities, ideologies, and institutional expressions of whiteness.
¹
For most of our national history, the term race has meant black. The collapse of the meanings of blackness into the term race has led to a myriad of intellectual blind spots, not only in the narrow conceptualization of black identity, but in the severe lack of attention paid to how whiteness serves as a source of racial identity. The result of this is a cruel irony: whiteness, the most dominant and visible of American racial identities, has been rendered intellectually invisible, an ideological black hole that negates its selfidentification as one among many other racial identities. In the absence of viewing themselves as having a race, many whites latched onto citizenship as a vital means of self-definition. Whites were individuals and Americans; blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and other minorities were collectively defined as members of racial and ethnic subgroups. Whiteness had a doubly negative effect: it denied its racial roots while denying racial minorities their American identities.

Prior to conceiving of whiteness as a social construct—as a historically mediated cultural value that challenges the biological basis of white identity—most blacks and whites viewed whiteness as a relatively fixed identity. For blacks, the meaning of whiteness was singularly oppressive. The varied expressions of whiteness were viewed as the elaboration of a single plot: to contain, control, and, at times, to destroy black identity. For whites, their racial identities were never as concretely evoked or sharply defined as when the meanings of blackness spilled beyond their assigned limitations to challenge white authority. In part, whiteness was called into existence by blackness; a particular variety of whiteness was marshaled as a defensive strategy against black transgression of sanctified racial borders. At the least, whiteness was tied to blackness, its hegemonic meanings symbolically linked to a culture it sought to dominate. As a result, blackness helped expose the dominant meanings of whiteness and helped reveal the meaning of whiteness as domination.

To be sure, whiteness as domination had many faces, though the body of belief they fronted shared profound similarities. White supremacist ideology united poor whites in the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan and sophisticated scholars in robes in the halls of academe. Still, if domination was the hub of the meaning of whiteness, there were many spokes radiating from its center. First, there was
whiteness as
the positive universal versus blackness as the negative particular
. On this view, the invisibility of whiteness preserved both its epistemic and ethical value as the embodiment of norms against which blackness was measured. White styles of speech, behavior, belief, and the like were defined as universal standards of human achievement; their origins in particular ethnic communities were successfully masked. Through this meaning of whiteness, whites were able to criticize blacks for their failure to be human, not explicitly for their failure to be white, although in principle the two were indistinguishable.

Then there was
whiteness as ethnic cohesion and instrument of nation making
. This meaning of whiteness consolidated the fragmented cultures of white European ethnics and gave social utility to the ethnic solidarity that the myth of whiteness provided. The genius of unarticulated, invisible whiteness is that it was able to impose its particularist perspective as normative. Thus, the resistance of blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans to absorption into the white mainstream was viewed by whites as viciously nationalistic, while white racial nationalism managed to remain virtuously opaque.

Next, there was
whiteness as proxy for an absent blackness it helped to limit and distort
. The accent in this mode of whiteness is on its power to represent the ideals, interests, and especially the images of a blackness it has frozen through stereotype, hearsay, and conspiracy. In important ways, this use of whiteness parallels Renato Rosaldo’s description of imperialist nostalgia, where a colonial power destroys a culture, only to lament its demise with colonialism’s victims.
²
In the present case, whiteness claims the authority to represent what it has ruined. The exemplars of this function of whiteness voice, instead of nostalgia, a presumptive right to speak for a minority it has silenced. Thus, there is a coercive representation by whiteness of the blackness it has contained. Needless to say, coercive representation often presents images that are feeble, distorted, or the idealizations of domesticated, colonized views of black life.

Finally, there was
whiteness as the false victim of black power
. This mode of whiteness is the ultimate strategy of preserving power by protesting its usurpation by the real victim. The process was driven as much by the psychic need of whites for unifying inclusion as it was by a need to find a force to combat the exaggerated threat of black power. Thus, whites were able to make themselves appear less powerful than they were by overstating the threat posed by blacks. D. W. Griffith’s film
Birth of a Nation
exaggerated black male threats to white womanhood to justify the lynching of black men and to increase membership in white hate groups like the White Knights of Columbus. And in our own day, widely voiced complaints by “angry white males” about unfair minority access to social goods like education and employment often misrepresent the actual degree of minority success in these areas.

These strategies of dominant whiteness, as well as the orthodox views of race on which they are premised, held sway until the recent rise of constructivist views of race. One fallout from such constructivist views—challenging the racial stereotyping of minorities by dominant communities, as well as criticizing the romantic representations of minorities within their own communities—has been the wide denunciation of identity politics. It is not, I believe, coincidental that identity politics,
and its alleged ideological cousins, political correctness and multiculturalism, has come under attack precisely at the moment that racial, sexual, and gender minorities have gained more prominence in our culture.

Although I favor forceful criticism of vicious varieties of identity politics—the sort where one’s particular social identity is made a fetish, where one’s group identification becomes an emblem of fascist insularity—the rush to indiscriminately renounce group solidarity without fully investigating the historical contexts, ideological justifications, and intellectual reasons for identity politics is irresponsible and destructive. If the labor movement, the left, the academy, and communities of color are to enjoy a renewed alliance, such investigations are crucial.

Still, taking history into account is no guarantee that the outcome will be just, or that it will profit the sort of balanced perspective for which I have called. Many critics have launched sharp attacks on identity politics as, among other things, the source of sin and suffering within the academy, the left, and the labor movement.
³
Many critics argue that the left—including civil rights groups, feminists, gays and lesbians, and elements of the labor movement—has, through its self-destructive identity politics, undermined the possibility of progressive consensus and community. The Hobbesian war of all against all—pitting minority groups against the majority, blacks against whites, gays against straights, and the handicapped against the able-bodied—results in each group talking (or, more likely, hollering) past the other, leading to a destructive politics of purity. Many critics suggest that the energy squandered on identity politics is nothing less than an American tragedy, because it negates a history of left universalism even as it supports a bitter battle over select identities. On this view, the larger tragedy is that the right, long identified with privileged interests, increases its appeal by claiming to defend the common good.

Like these critics, I am certainly worried about the plague of the politics of identity when it is unleashed without concern for the common good.
⁴
I, too, lament the petty infighting and shameless competition for victim status among various groups. Still, such analyses inadequately explain how we got into the mess of identity politics to begin with. Such critics of identity politics fail to grapple with the historic meanings and functions of whiteness, especially the harsh stigma that whiteness brings to those identities and social ideals which fall outside its realm. Moreover, they do not account for the narrow definition of universality and commonality on which such a project of left solidarity often hinges. To paraphrase Alasdair MacIntyre, “Whose universality and which commonality?”

But if such critics’ efforts at explicating our national malaise fall short, Michael Tomasky’s similar story falls far shorter.
⁵
In trying to figure out where the left has gone wrong, Tomasky is even more unrelenting in assailing the lefts “identity politics, and how those [intellectual] underpinnings fit and don’t fit the notions about a civil society that most Americans can support.” According to Tomasky, “the left has completely lost touch with the regular needs of regular Americans.” He contends that the left “is best described as tribal, and we’re engaged in what essentially has been reduced to a battle of interest-group tribalism.” Further, Tomasky claims that “solidarity based on race or ethnicity or any other such category always produces war, factionalism, fundamentalism.” He concludes that “particularist, interest-group politics—politics where we don’t show potential allies how they benefit from being on our side—is a sure loser.” Tomasky warns that “will never do the left any good, for example, to remonstrate against angry white men.” Tomasky says that this “is not to say angry white men don’t exist. But what’s the use in carrying on about them?”

Tomasky is certainly right to criticize the left for its failure to show possible fellow travelers how they might be helped by tossing in with our project. And he’s within reason to decry the destructive tribalism of the left. But he fails to comprehend that creating a civil society that has the support of most Americans cannot be the goal of any plausible left in America. The role of a marginalized but morally energized American left is to occupy an ethical register that counters injustice, especially when such injustice passes for common sense. The welfare debate is only the most recent example of how the left should gird its loins to defend those who are unjustly stigmatized against the advocates of universal values and common sense. But nowhere is Tomasky’s fatal lack of balanced historical judgment seen more clearly than in his dismissal of the political and social effect of “angry white men.” Tomasky fails to understand that such anger often grows from the historical amnesia encouraged by the ideology of white supremacy and by the politics of neoliberal race avoidance as well.