The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Of course, the sheer pleasure of knowledge, of engaging great ideas and wrestling with great thinkers, is not in dispute—Socrates’s dialogues, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Beethoven’s concertos, Newton’s calculus, Douglass’s autobiographies, all have great intrinsic worth. I am not arguing for a crude instrumentalism to every bit of knowledge; nor am I saying that every fact has to fit in place and serve a concrete function. That sort of thinking suits a mechanical view of the world long since demolished by science and common sense. There is something ennobling about reading lovely sentences that hang together because of poetry and penetrating thought. There is, too, genuine joy in noting the elegance of a mathematical equation. All of these good things need no justification outside of the fact of their existence; their goodness is the reason for their existence, and vice versa. But the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake can only be a good thing when it is a possibility for everyone. Knowledge, after all, is not neutral, neither the getting of it nor the keeping of it, or even the uses of it.

  Besides the pleasures it brings, knowledge can also be dangerous, subversive, and liberating. That’s why slaves were legally prevented from reading; that’s also why tyrants and their governments are afraid of literate dissenters. Under tyranny, and in many ostensibly free societies, reading and writing always mean so much more than reading and writing. Even though, despite widespread misquotation, Foucault never said it, and in fact meant quite the opposite, knowledge is power, at least a kind of power that is instantly recognized, even when it’s in the hands of the dispossessed. Dictators and demagogues alike realize that knowledge for its own sake never manages to end there. When I get knowledge, I get desire: I get hungry for the same liberty I find in the books I read, the science I study, the music I hear. I want my society as eloquent as the poetry I memorize. I want my living conditions to match the beauty of the algebraic formula I work. I want my people as blissful and harmonious as the symphony I listen to. I may also want to stamp out the horrors I read about, put an end to the suffering I hear in the music of the desperate, or use what I know to help the subjugated. I might get inspired or enraged, mad or distraught, stumped or determined to act.

  Try as we might to quarantine knowledge, it invariably sneezes on us far beyond its imposed limits. Knowledge exists for a lot more than its own sake. The proponents of social injustice, whether in America or Eastern Europe, understand this all too well, but so do their victims. It’s where Langston Hughes reaches across space and time to embrace Vaclav Havel. It’s also why Frederick Douglass said that “knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” Or, as George Clinton memorably phrased it, “free your mind, and your ass will follow.” As an end in itself, knowledge has much to recommend to the eager pursuer of truth, but even the questions one wants answered—what is truth? does God exist? how should I treat my fellow man? am I my neighbor’s keeper?—say as much about us as about the curiosity that drives us. We’ve got questions for reasons, and those reasons are often bigger than mere curiosity or knowledge for its own sake. What’s often at stake is our identity, our sanity, our souls, our survival.

  The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake can only make sense in a society where knowledge, at least the ownership of it, makes no moral difference, and where learning and thinking lack political value. I’m not saying that we live in an Orwellian nightmare where free thought is corrupted and suppressed. Neither am I saying that we live in a nation where thinking is only politically useful if it supports the interests of the state. But the liberty to think out loud as one wishes to, without qualification or permission, is pretty rare, even in our society, and where such freedom exists, it’s the result of vigilant effort to unmask the official story, the enshrined truth. The freedom to pursue truth wherever it leads, at least in social and political terms, depends on where you stand in the culture and how much clout you have. A real freethinker can be shunned or silenced for straying too far from the nation’s political consensus. If, for example, one runs afoul of the attorney general’s pulverizing views of how terror should be defined and fought, he might be harassed, stigmatized, or arrested. Knowledge is never just knowledge, it can never simply be pursued without regard to context, and its results are just as likely to upset as to unify us. All of which is to say that the black intellectual, without even trying, is a threat to a society that subordinates his people. There is little choice as to whether the black intellectual is involved in the struggle of black folk; to be alive and black makes one a candidate for social animus, and thus, a player in the theater of race.

  I learned this lesson in Mrs. James’s classroom and in the factories where I worked before eventually going to college when I was twenty-one. My longest tenure came in the wheel brake and drum factory where my father labored for more than thirty years before being laid off and forced into maintenance work and odd jobs, from painting houses to cutting grass and laying sod, all of which his five sons joined him in. My father worked long, long hours. He got as much overtime as he could to feed seven mouths and to tamp down the criminal allure of the ghetto streets for his boys. Detroit was then known as the “murder capital of the world,” and the grisly homicide rate rode largely on the decimation of black flesh in drug deals and acts motivated by severe privation. Both of these forces loomed in the lives of our neighbors, and eventually, struck our own house when, after our father’s death, my younger brother got sent to prison for second-degree murder, accused of killing a fellow drug dealer. My father and mother waged soul-depleting war against the violence that surrounded us, holding out the prospect of hard work as the antidote to the devil’s temptations.

  Taking note of, but not completely understanding, and hence, not unqualifiedly supporting my intellectual bent, my father nevertheless brought home encouragement in the form of factory laborers he discovered were also attending college or liked books like me. They were usually young, black (sometimes African) male workers who saw the factory as a means to a larger end: enjoying upward mobility, bettering the lot of their family, financing college, and, in some cases, bringing the worker’s revolution closer to fulfillment. These men were usually active in the same United Auto Workers (UAW) union where my father was a member. This was in the late sixties and early seventies, when the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) and Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) were agitating for social change in the Detroit automobile factories that were the bloodline for the big three car companies: General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford. I picked up some of their fervor during impromptu political lessons taught by my father’s co-workers on the lunch breaks they often spent at our house during the afternoon shift. At other times, I caught dramatic glimpses of the social agenda of black laborers when my father and his besieged co-workers walked the picket line outside their company to demand higher wages and better benefits.

  Later, when I went to work in the factory as a teen father fending off welfare, and with the hope of saving money for college, I got provocative instruction from workers who drilled the point in my head: learning is for liberation, and knowledge must be turned to social benefit if we are to justify the faith placed in us by our forbears. In between unloading brake drums, and welding and balancing them, I got a strong dose of Marxism, but a homegrown version attuned to the gritty particularities of black working life. That didn’t mean there wasn’t high theory; there was theory aplenty, though it was tailored to our needs and driven by our aspirations as a degraded and oppressed people—but a people who resolved to rise up from their suffering through self-determining struggle. I was awed by these grassroots intellectuals who stood their ground and defended their lives with their brains and words. There wasn’t even a hint of anti-intellectualism among them. They didn’t pooh-pooh self-criticism like some do in the highest rungs of government, saloons, malls, some sidewalk streets—and in major parts of the media.

  The factory wasn’t the only place I got a sense of intellectual vocation. I absorbed it in the sanctuary as well. My pastor, Frederick G. Sa
mpson, was an American original, a tall, commanding, impossibly literate dark-brown prince of the pulpit who lived up to that title when it still resonated in the world of homiletics. It was Sampson, more than any figure in my life, who convinced me of the service that intellectuals must render. Sampson believed that those who breathed the life of the mind must serve the people in whose womb they came to exist. His thinking made sense to me because of how faithfully he adhered to his own principle. He wasn’t a preacher who festooned his pulpit oratory with violent grunts or theatrical posing, though he was a verbal master with dramatic flair. Sampson unabashedly laced his rhetoric with the theology and poetry and philosophy he ardently consumed. In the pulpit, he moved effortlessly from Bertrand Russell to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Shakespeare to Paul Laurence Dunbar, and from the King’s English spoken to the Queen’s taste to the wily black vernaculars that bathed the tongues of his Southern kinsmen. Outside the pulpit, Sampson’s insatiable curiosity lead him to devour books and to traffic in ideas, wherever he could get good ones, whether from the mouth of a learned colleague or the neighborhood drunk. Critical encounter was nearly erotic to him, but the joy and passion he brought to intellectual life didn’t obscure its necessary everydayness, its practical application, its edifying repetitiveness, and most of all, its usefulness to common folk.

  Sampson believed that his preaching and thinking should open the minds and hearts of the people who listened to him. They should, he believed, find surer footing in their faith because of the words he carefully chose. At the same time, he challenged the dogmatisms of all true believers, whether they were pew dwellers or zealous ideologues. Sampson stirred things up by staring them down: he refused to blink away the encroaching doubts that made belief improbable to outsiders (and to more insiders than were willing to admit it), inviting his flock to wrestle with feelings of divine abandonment and the unanswerable tragedies that smear our existence. But none of this kept him from making the church a conduit of social justice for ordinary folk who might never darken the doors of his sanctuary. And above all, he believed that the black privileged should use their considerable economic and intellectual resources to help those who lag far behind.

  It is because of Sampson that I believe that intellectuals must serve the communities we live and work in. We’ve got to look beyond a comfortable career, a safe niche behind academe’s protective walls, and a serene existence removed from cultural and political battles that shape the nation’s fate. But we must be willing to shirk the contemptuous pose of distant observer—undoubtedly, we still need observation, and it mustn’t be fatally intertwined in the events or ideas we’re called on to examine, but intellectuals must at some point get our hands dirty as we help our world become more just. We must even be willing to give up one of academe’s most self-serving bombasts: that “serious” thinkers stand apart from the seductions of pop culture to dig into archives and render compelling histories of events long before our time. That’s all good, but it’s surely not all-knowing about what intellectuals are good for. In a show of remarkable adolescence, and obsolescence too, there are many academics who believe that speaking in the tongue of the common person betrays the profession. Well, perhaps that’s so, but it’s a betrayal we should be proud of, and one that should spur us to resist the tedius professionalism that has noisily ripped through the academy’s upper ranks. (That’s largely not the case for the thousands upon thousands of part-time teachers whose plight is barely distinguishable from any group of maligned workers, and the battalion of non-unionized graduate students who are depended on to teach vast numbers of American undergraduates.)

  It was Jesse Jackson who once remarked to me, “If you say something I can’t understand, that’s a failure of your education, not mine,” and he was right. No sloppy thinker or lazy rhetorician himself, Jackson knows the intellectual effort it takes to understand an idea so well that one can explain it to the learned and the layman alike. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time and place for every academic language under the sun—and for the jargons, obscurantisms, esoterica, dialects, glosses, and inside meanings that attend their path. But there is also the need to write and speak clearly about important matters for the masses of folk who will never make it to class.

  There is in the academy today something akin to hip-hop’s vexing quest for the rapper who can “keep it real,” that is, the rapper who best matches his lyrics with a life of crime or ghetto glory, depending on which version of reality wins the day. Many academics are caught up in trying to prove who’s more authentic, who’s more academically hard core, who’s the realest smart person around. That usually ends up being the scholar who is most “rigorous,” and in academic circles that’s often the thinker who is least accessible or who eschews “public” scholarship. But these debates break down on their own logic: academics and scholars who are rigorous don’t have to do work that panders to the mainstream in order to be effective (after all, devoted students can carry their former professors, or their work, with them to the State Department or to Newsweek). Work that can be widely understood or that is relevant to current affairs shouldn’t be automatically suspect or seen as second rate. As Jackson understood, our failure to make our work accessible may be as much the fault of intellectuals as it is the problem of a dumbed-down society.

  These are the beliefs that guide my vision of the intellectual—the American intellectual, the black intellectual, the engaged intellectual, the public intellectual (and in a way, aren’t all of us intellecuals in the academy public intellectuals, since universities are among the biggest public spheres in the country?). Relieving suffering, reinforcing struggle, and rendering service are not bad ways to live the life of the mind.

  PART ONE

  DYSONOGRAPHY

  Although I have yet to write a memoir, I have at times written about my life as it relates to my work. I do this, in part, because I believe that intellectuals and academics who have been poor or working class must testify to our experiences and struggles, and perhaps inspire others to emulate, even exceed, our efforts. I also find that the personal voice, when its tones rise above grating narcissism, can emphasize truths that sound needlessly abstract in the academic’s mouth. When enough of these stories get out, perhaps folk who, on first blush, might seem unlikely to succeed in higher education will get a fair chance.

  One

  NOT FROM SOME ZEUS’S HEAD: MY INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT

  Of all the books I have written, Open Mike, a series of interviews conducted with me over the past decade, best captures the oral traditions that have nurtured me since birth. This interview sketches my intellectual evolution, personal odyssey, and vocational development. It charts my path from ghetto youth, teen welfare father, factory laborer, and street hustler to ordained Baptist pastor, Princeton graduate student, and Ivy League professor. I hoped in the interview to underscore not only the racial character of higher education, but to draw attention to the class dimensions that are often obscured, even in some black academic circles. This interview, conducted by the talented journalist and writer Lana Williams, also gave me the chance to explain my rather unusual route to academic success: writing my dissertation before I submitted my proposal, writing my first book before I completed my Ph.D. thesis, and garnering a doctorate and being promoted to full professor in the same year. I have provoked no small controversy for showing my class roots in the academy, and for bringing an unapologetically black masculine style into the classroom. Deep inside—as this interview shows—I take pride in trying to stay rooted in the streets and church sanctuaries that produced me, even as I stretch my mind and soul through encounters with the wider world.

  Michael, let’s talk a little about your self-perception. I’ve seen articles describing you as an intellectual giant, a person who has created a rather unique niche, as having one foot in the scholarly world and the other “on the block,” and somehow synthesizing the two. When I’ve seen you, you’ve been very vocal in your opinions on issues or themes o
utside of yourself. But the little I’ve heard about you as a man, a person . . . how did you pull this off? That “raising up from the bootstraps” thing is cool, but where we’re from, a lot of us have had to do that. Yet you are special and unique and obviously on a distinct path that, on the one hand, you’re carving, but on the other, seems like it was laid out there for you. How did you have the good sense to follow it, to take that dive? How’d you do that?

  There’s no question that nobody is self-made in America. All this mythology of the rugged individual has to be deconstructed. We’ve got to get at the heart of the essential lie that America was founded on this ethic of personal and private individual achievement. That has to be scrapped because a form of American Protestant communalism is the basis of discourse about American democracy. Recent studies in American political history evince a strong philosophical disagreement with the underlying principles of this American mythology—that we came here as solo artists and that we developed as individuals articulating ourselves against the wilderness of the collective. That’s really not the case. People are produced by cultures and communities, by larger networks of association, love, kin, affection, and so on. And the same is true for me. I was produced, first of all, in the womb of a family that loved me, with my mother and father in the house. My father adopted me when I was two years old. I called him daddy because I didn’t know any other man in my life. He was my daddy and my father. I’m one of five boys who grew up together in our immediate family. There were four older brothers and sisters, all of whom now are deceased.