* * *
My friends, when you have to confront identities or experiences that don’t fit your view of the world, you fall back on preconceived notions that are no more real than the whiteness I’ve described. I learned this lesson even before my fateful meeting with the president of Carson-Newman.
One day his raven-haired assistant, with whom I’d formed a bond, delivered some troubling news.
“The administration thinks you’re going to do something violent at graduation,” the perky middle-aged white woman told me in a hastily called meeting in her office. After I assured her that I intended nothing of the sort, I stumbled out of her door, speechless.
I knew the president had sent her because he thought she had figured out the mystery of my blackness. I was sure she bragged about it, too, playing both ends against the middle. I didn’t mind as long as the result was peace. But this was beyond the pale.
It was clear that I was as much a creation of their imaginations as whiteness itself. They may have been watching too many reruns of Blaxploitation films. This was only a decade after the era of Shaft and The Mack after all. Maybe they envisioned me out to get revenge against the white man like Pam Grier’s characters in Coffy or Foxy Brown. Maybe they fantasized that I’d been reading Julius Lester’s book Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! But “whitey” didn’t have to worry about this child of Negroes. Hell, even some of their mamas thought I was cute and likable and invited me to dinner. True enough, I was more in the civil rights tradition than an advocate of black power, but I knew that it was all the same to most white folk. And I damn sure didn’t sport any bell-bottoms or modish sideburns. I must confess, however, that I did constantly listen to Isaac Hayes’ epic soundtrack to Shaft, so I may have confused the poor folk. No matter what, I came to understand Ralph Ellison’s meaning when his unnamed character says, in the fourth line of Invisible Man, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
Carson-Newman upped the ante on Ellison. They not only tried to make me invisible, but they symbolically snatched my body and emptied out the contents of my black identity. In my absence they projected a woolly-haired phantom out to do them in. I couldn’t possibly compete with this smaller-than-life stereotype. I was an ordained Baptist minister who had worked in a factory. I had a wife and child to take care of, and an education to get. I had no time for tomfoolery or terror. I had never as much as hinted that rage might flood my body. I had never participated in a formal protest, never written a letter to the editor of the college newspaper. I had never expressed disgust at one racial problem or the next. I had never even raised my fist or voice.
I wasn’t naïve. I knew that honest dialogue might rattle a white world that was not used to hearing a black man like me speak directly about race. No, my crime was far more mundane. I had whispered a prayer into a microphone in chapel during a Black History Month service asking God to help defeat racism in our midst. My few words set the white community on edge. My prayer was the clue that I wasn’t mesmerized by the fictions of whiteness, that I wasn’t satisfied with the sanctuary it wanted to provide. It was enough to tip off the president that I was ready for the Revolution and that I was prepared to bring it on violently. No other explanation made any sense.
* * *
One thing you must understand, beloved, is that whiteness isn’t a solo act. It’s got a supporting cast. Lots of other things got created to uphold and justify whiteness. None was more seductive or necessary than the idea of American history. It may be hard for many of you to concede this. You think of history as a realm of complete objectivity. You think there are such things as indisputable facts, and those facts are woven together by neutral observers in a compelling story that is told as history. You think historians belong to a guild of chroniclers whose work is separate from what the culture considers important. You think they abide by the line from the sixties television series Dragnet, whose star character, the police sergeant Joe Friday, says famously, and dryly, “All we want are the facts, ma’am.”
But the truth is that what so often passes for American history is really a record of white priorities or conquests set down as white achievement. That version of American history is a sprawling, bewildering chronicle, relentlessly revised. It ignores or downplays a variety of peoples, cultures, religions, and regions, all to show that history is as objective and as curious and as expansive as the white imagination allows. Of course, the notion that someone invents history is also to insist that everybody can, or does—though, it must be noted, not to equal effect.
I’m not arguing that most of you are delusional, or that facts of accomplishment and records of deeds don’t exist. The delusion is whiteness itself.
In the end, history is never just what the people who experience it say it is. That’s particularly true if those people are not in power, or if their voices, or their view of things, run counter to what the larger culture thinks is true—in short, what the larger culture thinks is valuable, justifiable, even righteous. The winners, alas, still write history. To say this out loud, in this day and age, when whiteness has congratulated itself for its tolerance of other cultures and peoples, is to invite real resistance from white America.
My dear friends, please try to understand that whiteness is limitless possibility. It is universal and invisible. That’s why many of you are offended by any reference to race. You believe you are acting and thinking neutrally, objectively, without preference for one group or the next, including your own. You see yourselves as colorless until black folk dump the garbage of race on your heads. At your best moments you may concede that you started the race game, but you swear to the God you love that it is we black folk who keep it going. You have no idea how absurd that notion is, and yet we have grown accustomed to your defiance of common sense.
I got a taste of this when I taught at the University of North Carolina in the mid-nineties. I touched a raw nerve of race, and certainly whiteness, when I delivered a commencement address at the school in 1996. I knew that my speech might cause some controversy. There was no way that I could step to that podium and not offend the south’s codes of polite bigotry just by speaking openly about the racial situation at hand. And even though whiteness had metastasized all over the country, its diseased core remained in the south, where black folk were fighting for their rightful place in society. But nonetheless I eagerly stepped into the Dean E. Smith stadium, where six thousand folk had gathered to wish their loved ones a joyous transition to another part of the real world.
(It irks me as a professor to hear folk describe the university as somehow unreal. It may be gilded, or privileged, certainly shielded, but it is no less real than, say, the corporate world, or sports, or the assembly line. We have real conversations, real conflicts, real thoughts, and real bodies to think those thoughts with.)
I grappled in my speech with whether America was still the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr., said it was in a commencement speech he delivered at Lincoln University 35 years earlier. King’s audience was predominantly black, mine mostly white. In his 1961 speech “The American Dream,” King said that “America is essentially a dream, a dream as yet unfulfilled.” Two years later at the Lincoln Memorial King famously shared his dream with the nation. Four years after that, King declared that his dream had turned into a nightmare of church bombings, ghetto poverty, riots, and war.
I battled the notion that young folk were dragging the American dream down with their destructive pop culture and their social narcissism. I defended youth culture and wrestled with some of its most popular figures, from Kurt Cobain and Alanis Morissette to Snoop Dogg and Jenny McCarthy. I quoted the lyrics of The Notorious B.I.G. to make my point, including his use of the word “fuck,” though, on reflection, I should have left it out. I didn’t seek to offend the white grandparents and other kin who had gathered.
I defended affirmative action
at graduation. Lawmakers had abolished it in California with the passage in 1996 of Proposition 209. That effort was led, painfully enough, by the University of California’s regent, Ward Connerly, a conservative black man I’d soon debate. I deemed it my duty to use whatever platform I had to speak back to him. I also encouraged young white folk to appreciate the sacrifices made by some of their poor and less educated kin. Michael Jordan, the most famous alum of UNC, had recently given one million dollars to the university. Jordan said he didn’t give it to the Black Cultural Center, though his mother then sat on the board, because the money would have been limited to one group. Instead he gave it to the School of Social Work, where, he said, the sum would benefit everyone. But the school of social work wasn’t the law school, nor the school of dentistry, nor any other school in the university, and thus, the money couldn’t possibly be for everyone. What saddened me about Jordan’s comments was that even this black athletic legend believed that whiteness signified the universal. Blackness in his view signified the limited and particular. I challenged the black students to do better than Jordan and remember to help other blacks attain the American dream too.
There was no social media back then, but the local newspapers lit me up. One called my speech “a political screed dressed up in trendy academic gobbledygook.” I suppose it’s racial progress of a sort when the black guy is accused of speaking over the heads of white folk. An editorial cartoon featured me sitting on a commode using toilet paper to prepare my next speech. There were calls for the university to fire me, and a flurry of angry columns and letters to the editor. “He is not worth our tax money,” one letter said.
But the real anger rang out from a sense of aggrieved whiteness. One writer asked if the Constitution “protect[s] black citizens but not white citizens?” Another writer puzzled over the liberal discomfort with my speech since progressives had “labored for years to disabuse us of any notions of Western cultural superiority.” He defended the superiority of whiteness through a straw man argument in the form of an extended conditional statement: “But if America is not more than Africa, if Christmas is not more than Kwanzaa, if William Shakespeare is not more than Maya Angelou, then Dyson is not less than Demosthenes.” Then the kicker: “Chapel Hill, welcome to the Third World.” Whiteness had been challenged at its intellectual and institutional heart.
Thankfully a few folk did defend me in public. One letter argued that the paper’s attempt “to discredit [Dyson] by depicting [him] researching cultural expression in a lavatory” means the editorial staff “would benefit from attendance at one of Dyson’s courses,” since the attempt to place “such expression in the context of the political economy and cultural norms that dominate U.S. society, is profoundly important.” A fellow faculty member said that “this is an event when we shouldn’t be afraid of words. Control emotions and try to listen to the message.”
I must say that I was taken aback by the vitriol. The calls for me to be fired were one thing; but the scorn, even the death threats that came simply because I expressed a different view, a black view, were way over the top.
My friends, it’s not as if I had only focused on reactionary white folk. As one letter said of my speech: “Rarely in one sitting can an individual insult Michael Jordan, white liberals, the black middle class, the United States and his own employers.” My God, at least give me credit for being an equal opportunity offender! But white folk who get upset at being challenged hardly ever see the balance, never hear that they’re not the only ones being singled out, even if one has just cause to indict whiteness to start with. I wasn’t angry as much as I was saddened by the unvarnished hate and denial of reality that still pulsed in whiteness. But I should not have been surprised. After all, the country had just weathered a major racial catastrophe that revealed how blind whiteness could be.
* * *
You must remember, beloved, that this was a year after O.J. Simpson had been acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. Race relations between black and white folk were tense. The Simpson acquittal was a “racequake” that revealed the fault lines that stretched beneath our national life. O.J.’s trial came on the heels of a tragic acquittal of four white policemen in 1992 for the savage beating in 1991 of Los Angeles motorist Rodney King. Black folk felt that they couldn’t get a fair hearing in America’s courts even when there was visual evidence of lethal whiteness. This may be read as an instance of dueling judgments: the not guilty Simpson verdict answered the not guilty verdict for the white officers. But the stakes were even higher. The King verdict, as it is known—funny how it is called that when it was the white cops being tried, suggesting that blackness is always on trial, always the object of dispute—was answered by a violent urban rebellion. More than 11,000 people were arrested, more than 2,000 were injured, and 55 people died.
The King and Simpson verdicts left America emotionally raw and at a brutal racial impasse. White folk got a rare chance to experience the sense of absurdity that black folk routinely feel when a clear case of injustice doesn’t get resolved in court. Many of you were outraged and shocked that Simpson could get away with murder. A lot of you were miffed, even heartbroken, that black folk cheered Simpson’s acquittal like it was Christmas in October. But you must see that the bitter taste left in your mouths was but a small taste of what black folk have swallowed from our first moments in this nation.
Maybe enough time has passed for us to admit that the Simpson verdict made liars of white and black folk alike.
But the lie began long before the Simpson trial. It has roots in whiteness itself, in whiteness that is a construct, an invention, that keeps white folk ignorant of black life. It makes so many of you, if we’re honest, largely indifferent to black life. Admit it: you go on your merry white way as if the police aren’t routinely hammering black folk without cause, aren’t daily brutalizing us in front of your faces, aren’t murdering black folk without so much as blinking an eye. You didn’t care then. And tell the truth—many of you don’t really care now.
Beloved, it’s true that some of you are ashamed and embarrassed, but that is hardly enough. It looks bad to the rest of the world for all this havoc to be going on in America. It’s not that the world loves us so much; it’s that they feel you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for treating us this way. Now, I’m old enough to not be too fussy about how change comes about. What starts as shame may end as transformation. But even that can’t be depended on. Whiteness grows more shameless, more cruel, more uncaring by the day. How many of you have really tried to put yourself in our position? It’s hard to be white and empathetic to others. That sounds harsh, but that’s a lesson that whiteness has taught its victims. Many of you were stuck, in 1995, and, sadly, even now, in a whiteness that didn’t have to know, that wasn’t punished for not knowing. It is hard for you to give up this willful ignorance. It is a drug. It is privilege and addiction. Your whiteness is a shield that keeps you from knowing what black folk must always know. Not until the Simpson verdict did many of you claim that you were finally awakened to what black folk had to know every day. But if so, you went back to sleep pretty damn quickly.
The Simpson verdict made black folk lie too. I’m not just telling you this now, my friends. I said it then to O.J.’s impossibly beautiful lawyer Johnnie Cochran. I know a lot of you hated him because he beat you at your own game. He sold his vision of history as the one that made the most sense to the group of people, his group of people, on that jury, whose decision, for once, mattered most. That’s usually how whiteness operates in a nutshell. But this time, for a glancing moment, whiteness got coopted by a devilishly handsome chocolate barrister whose smooth words and hypnotic cadence left the jury and nation spellbound. I gave Cochran my full two cents when I ran into him after a weird and distressing phone call.
“Hello,” I said as I took the phone from my wife.
“Should I call you reverend, or pr
ofessor, or Dr. Dyson?” the familiar voice asked me. I nearly swallowed my spit. It was O.J.
I had just appeared that morning with infamous O.J. hater Geraldo Rivera on a national television show observing the fifth anniversary of the murders of Nicole and Ron. I had minced no words. I said that before the verdict there had been nothing black on Simpson but the bottom of his shoes. I also said that when O.J. took that long, slow ride down the L.A. freeway in A.C. Cowlings’ iconic Bronco it wasn’t the first time he used a white vehicle to escape a black reality. My words bit me in the butt that evening.
“You can call me Mike,” I said in a voice that was an octave or two higher than my normal baritone register. Okay, the truth is I sounded like Mickey Mouse. O.J. had me scared and nearly speechless. My wife was in tears laughing at me.
“Speak like the courageous critic you’re supposed to be,” she teased me.
I gave her the “cut it out” gesture with my free hand slicing the air around my throat. She only laughed harder. It tickled her that I was squirming.
“I just want to clarify some things for you, Mr. Dyson,” Simpson continued.
Simpson proceeded to relitigate the case. On and on he went for nearly 45 minutes. He even offered to come to my class at Columbia University and present his side of things. That made me especially nervous. He had one more thing to tell me.
“Geraldo said I only date blondes,” O.J. said to me. “That’s not true.”
There was a beat. After the pause came his follow-up. It was vintage Simpson.
“I date redheads, brunettes, all types of women.”
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