When were you born?
October 23, 1958. Being born in what we would call the ghetto of Detroit had a decisive influence on my life and an impact on how I understand the relationship between scholarship and the street, between the world of the mind and the world of concrete outside of the academy. I think being born in the ghetto and being reared there, and dealing with the inner-city black community, connected me to other African American people who were doing extraordinarily important things. Detroit was a vibrant, vital black world teeming with possibility beyond the ballyhooed violence that stalked poor and working-class blacks. It was a wonderfully rich experience seeing black folk who lived meaningful lives, who ran their own businesses, and who eventually ran the city. When I was still in my teens, Coleman Young was elected the first black mayor of Detroit. I encountered in the political landscape powerful figures like Kenneth Cockrel, a Marxist black lawyer who was very important in my own rhetorical development, especially the stylistic etiquette of joining black radical discourse to a powerful social criticism of the forces of oppression. My pastor, Dr. Frederick Sampson, came to my church when I was twelve years old. He was the decisive intellectual influence in my life, with his fusion in his rhetorical repertoire of metaphysical poetry, racial uplift, and classical learning. Another pastor, Dr. Charles Adams, also thrilled us with his brilliant preaching and his exploration of the radical social implications of the Bible and theology. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. James, was extraordinarily important in my understanding of black people. She taught us about black history when folks didn’t want to hear that, even other black teachers at Wingert Elementary School, which I attended from kindergarten through sixth grade. My Sunday school teachers in church appreciated black history and black culture and exposed us to the broad outlines of our people’s sojourn in America, which gave us a sense of somebodyness as black children. It wasn’t done so much by my teachers deploying a formal didacticism or a pedagogy geared toward instilling pride, but as they took for granted that black folk could achieve and love each other. That had a huge influence on me. They gave us a sense of helping ourselves while not harming others. We could love ourselves without hating anyone else, including white brothers and sisters. It wasn’t about them, it was about us. They taught us to take for granted the existence of a black universe rooted in a black psychic infrastructure that had no need to pay deference to white culture, embracing all folk while defending black humanity and interests in the face of inimical forces.
That was the kind of world in which I was reared. This framework of existential and spiritual nurture provided a rich background for me—Sampson with this attention to the spiritual needs of African American people, Cockrel with his black Marxist discourse, Adams with this attention to the social ramifications of the gospel, and Mrs. James with her attention to the need for black history and memory as a resource to stabilize the black present and to secure the black future. They were among the folk who gave me a sense of self, who helped to create Michael Eric Dyson, who helped me understand the different bricks that must be laid at the foundation of my head and heart in order to have a healthy identity. So, I didn’t spring fully formed out of some racial Zeus’s head; I was shaped and molded in an environment where black achievement was taken for granted, where black excellence was expected, where black aspiration was crucial, and where black intellectual engagement was the norm of the day—on every level. And I’m not primarily referring to formal education in school. I’m referring largely to everyday life with brothers and sisters who were playing the numbers and playing the dozens. They were trying to use their linguistic and rhetorical capacity to defend their interests and worldviews.
That’s just what I was going to ask, if you had that duality even then, where on the one hand, you were already processing what you were being given, and exposed to from your elders, but I was thinking—what were you doing with the fellas on the street, your peers? That’s what you’re talking about.
Oh yeah. There was at least a duality going on. I felt I belonged to many worlds. I kicked it with the fellas on the street and spent a lot of time engaging the Motown curriculum: Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and so on. And at the same time, I learned to engage Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and other great figures. Those interests didn’t develop automatically, but were encouraged by teachers like Mrs. James, who wanted to make sure we knew about Jan Metzeliger and the shoe-lacing machine; Deadwood Dick and Wild Bill Pickett and the hidden tradition of black cowboys; Garrett T. Morgan and the invention of the traffic signal; Daniel Hale Williams and open heart surgery; Charles Drew and blood plasma; and Elijah McCoy and the lubricating cup. Her interest in black life was contagious. At Webber Junior High School, I was fortunate to encounter teachers who were instrumental in my further development. My seventh-grade English teacher, Mr. Burdette, enhanced my speaking skills by encouraging me to become involved in oratorical contests sponsored by the Detroit Optimist Club. And Mrs. Click taught me to type quickly and accurately, and besides that, gave me tremendous affection as a growing young man who had a huge crush on her. To tell the truth, I had crushes on many of my female teachers, starting with Mrs. Jefferson in kindergarten, to Mrs. Stewart and Mrs. Williams at Webber, and Mrs. Ray and Mrs. Carter at Northwestern, almost all of them English teachers. In my mind, love, language, and learning were profoundly linked in what may be termed an erotics of epistemology.
When I got to Northwestern High School, I had a crush on yet another teacher, Madame Black, who taught me French and so much more. She gave me a sense of my burgeoning intellectual power and encouraged me to tutor other students in French. She also gave me a sense that I should use language as a doorway into further investigation of American and African American culture. So did her husband, Dr. Cordell Black, whom I perceived then as my friendly competition! Dr. Black was a professor at Oakland University who often came to pick up Madame Black after school, and I’d still be there, and he’d see me trying to read Jean-Paul Sartre’s masterly philosophical tome, L’etre et le neant, in its original French, a book that, in English, translates to Being and Nothingness. He’d laugh a laugh of wonder and encouragement and say, “Look at him, look at his aspiration and ambition.” But most important, he also encouraged me to read Du Bois and Fanon and other classics in black letters. These figures gave important direction to my scholarly inclinations.
But I can’t romanticize things. At the same time, there was quite a bit of pain and conflict going on as well. There was the pain of being called by some of my peers “brainiac,” “Poindexter,” and “Professor.” Of course, it was their way of slyly, sometimes harshly, complimenting what they thought of as my smarts. But recognition and resentment were, in that beautiful phrase of Ralph Bunche’s, “inexorably concomitant.” To be sure, there was also a hierarchy of virtues established, one that comedian Chris Rock refers to when he jokes in a routine that black folk who get out of prison get much more “dap,” or respect, from other blacks than those who’ve just graduated with a master’s degree from college. I faced a version of that phenomenon, something that is termed in pedagogical theory as “rival epistemologies,” or competing schemes of understanding how the world operates and the place of knowledge and formal training in its orbit. Some blacks think you can’t be simultaneously cool and smart, at least in the sense of formal education. But I also experienced strong support in my peer group. Some of my peers said, “This brother’s destined for a different world than we are.” Others said, “He’s in the ghetto, he’s with us, but he’s got something different. We don’t always understand it, we tease him about it, but we admire him too.” Some of my male peers—I’m thinking especially of a young man named Michael Squirewell—sought to protect me from some of the worst elements in our neighborhood. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen as often today as it did then.
I grew up in Detroit during the restructuring of the automobile industry. My father worked at Kelsey-Hayes Wheelbrake, and D
rum Company, which I call his alma mater, a place where I “matriculated” as well between the ages of nineteen and twenty. I didn’t go to college until I was twenty-one years old. I had been a teen father, lived on welfare, and hustled several years before furthering my formal education. I had gotten off track from the enabling tradition and heritage handed on to me by my teachers. I had gone to Cranbrook, one of the most highly esteemed private schools in the country, located in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit. I was dating a young lady from my church, whose father, Damon Keith, was a deacon there, as well as a federal judge and one of the city’s most prominent citizens. Judge Keith arranged for me to take the IQ and entry exams, and when I scored well, I was admitted, even though I couldn’t afford the $11,000 annual tuition, which was damned near my father’s yearly salary. Judge Keith arranged for me to receive a partial scholarship from New Detroit, a local civic and leadership organization, and to work for the other part of my tuition by traveling the forty or so miles from what was then the second richest suburb in the country to one of the bleakest neighborhoods in America, on the East Side of Detroit, to fill bags with food items, and to do maintenance work, for a group that aided the poor, Operation Hope, run by Bernard Parker. Two of Judge Keith’s daughters, including the young lady I dated, attended Kingswood, the female complement to the all-boys Cranbrook. The schools have since merged.
I went to Cranbrook—where I agreed to repeat the eleventh grade in order to get sufficient academic grounding and to get at least two years at this prestigious institution under my belt, with an eye to getting into a quality college or university—and in some ways, I had a tremendous experience, and in other ways, it was a very painful one. I was seventeen years old, and I had never gone to school with white kids before. Now here I was going to school with kids who were extremely rich, many of them the sons and daughters of some of the wealthiest parents in the country. I remember, for instance, doing a report with Bill Taubman, the son of Alfred Taubman, one of the richest men in the nation. I was also the classmate of an heir apparent to Rockwell International, and the half-brother, Robert Zimmerman, of director Steven Spielberg. And at Kingswood, where we sometimes took classes, things were no different, and I remember Ford Motor Company head Lee Iaccoca’s daughter, Kathy, was a student at the time. When I got out to Cranbrook, which rested on over three hundred acres of verdant, prosperous geography, nestled in a city of extraordinary material blessing, I felt like the Jimmy Stewart character in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. My head began to spin.
As if that wasn’t enough, there were strains of overt racism poisoning the common good. This was during the time that Roots was being televised. I came home to my dorm room one evening to find a newspaper cartoon of one of the Roots characters tacked to my door, with the words scribbled on it: “Nigger, go home.” Some students also anonymously circulated a cassette tape about the black students that we got hold of. On the tape, a voice says in exaggerated southern cadence, “We’re going cigar fishing today. No we’re not, we’re going ‘nigar’ fishing. What’s the bait? Hominy grits!” On another occasion, a white student expressed the wish to place a bottle of sickle-cell anemia in the school’s quadrangle to “kill off all the undesirables.” So it was very tough for me. I got lost, did some crazy stuff—like helping to devise a system to dial out of the dorm on a phone without a face, allowing me and some friends to call our girlfriends and run up huge bills, which I had to get a second job to pay for while their parents ponied up—didn’t do well in school, got expelled, and went back to Detroit a failure after being a golden boy. That was tough to handle. Then I finished night school, which I don’t think they have any more, and got my diploma from Northwestern High School.
Almost immediately after I graduated, I met a woman, got her pregnant, married her, and then divorced her. It was a very trying period in my life. I was eighteen years old, she was twenty-six. She eventually had to give up her job as a waitress when she started to show—she had one of those jobs where the waitresses wore hot pants and tiny tops—and I was eventually fired from a job at Chrysler that my wife’s uncle helped me to secure (an unjust firing, I might add, as I’ll never forget my boss’s words, “it had to be somebody’s ass, and I’d rather it be yours than mine”). We were forced to live on welfare, since I lost my job a little more than a month before my son was to be born. We got food stamps and government medical assistance to pay the costs of delivering our baby. My wife was enrolled in WIC, or Women, Infants, and Children, and I stood many a day in those long lines and collected packets of powdered milk and artificial eggs—just as I did at the welfare office, where the civil servants were often rude and loud, making the experience that much more degrading.
Why did you marry her, Michael?
I married her because she was pregnant. I suppose those southern values were in effect—my parents were from Alabama and Georgia—and I was, after all, a church boy who believed that if you got a woman pregnant, you should marry her. I didn’t want my son to be born out of wedlock. Of course, that was a narrow, naive view, but I suppose I had to learn the hard way. But I really did love Terrie, the woman I got pregnant. I just discovered too late that she didn’t love me. She told me two months into our marriage that she didn’t love me and should have never married me. I was devastated. By that time, however, she was well into her pregnancy. So we made as good a go of it as possible for young people who were poor, stressed, often unemployed, on welfare, and unequally yoked in affection. We had our son, a wonderful, beautiful boy who is now nineteen years old. I spent quite a bit of time attending to him. I did much of the night duty. I loved my son and wanted to bond with him.
That’s a startling contrast to many black fathers today.
I don’t know. I think many more black men than are given credit want to love and nurture their children. It is true that I lived in a moral universe with an ethical framework that dictated that one should acknowledge one’s responsibility, and in my case, the obligation to marry in the belief that marriage itself would protect and preserve the family. At this time in my life, I think such a belief can be downright wrong. Still, I suppose there’s something to be said for wanting to assume responsibility for what one does. But that couldn’t prevent our almost inevitable breakup, so after working in a factory, hustling, cutting grass, shoveling snow and painting houses, working as an emergency substitute janitor for the public school system, working as a maintenance man in a suburban hotel, doing construction jobs, getting laid off, getting fired, going on welfare, and seeing my marriage dissolve, I decided right before my twenty-first birthday that I’d had enough, and I wanted to go to college. I had in my late teens felt a call to ministry, and that call, in tandem with my desire to better provide for my son’s future, sent me to school. Plus, my desire to fulfill my early promise, which had been greatly tarnished by the events of my life after being kicked out of Cranbrook, goaded me to take my destiny into my own hands.
To many onlookers, I suppose I looked like a loser, a typical, pathological, selfdefeating young black male. That may help explain why I empathize with such youth in the hip-hop generation; I was one of those brothers that many social scientists and cultural critics easily dismiss and effortlessly, perhaps literally, write off. In any regard, there were two people in my church who had gone to Knoxville College, a historically black college in Knoxville, Tennessee. I called the college and asked the dean if they had space for a young black man from Detroit. When he replied in the affirmative, the next day I “grabbed me an arm full of Greyhound,” as Sam Cooke once sang, and took the fifteen-hour bus trip from Detroit to Knoxville. I went to college there and initially worked in a factory, then pastored three different churches as I completed my undergraduate studies at CarsonNewman, a small, white southern Baptist school. I transferred from Knoxville College because I wanted to study philosophy, and they didn’t offer but a few courses in the subject. Carson-Newman was a true baptism in Southern Baptist theology and worldviews, many of which were
problematic and sometimes racist, even as members of the academic community encouraged students to nurture their spiritual faculties. But my time in east Tennessee was crucial to my intellectual development, and taught me to navigate some perilous racial and cultural waters.
During the time frame you became a Baptist minister, it seems like there again you were operating on a number of levels. You were obviously fascinated by theology and philosophy, but I detect something else stirred you to commit yourself to that course of study.
No question. I was influenced to enter the ministry by having a pastor who was broadly learned and extremely erudite, who reflected critically on social and spiritual issues and who had read widely and deeply in philosophy and theology. Later on, as a burgeoning scholar, I was also influenced by scholars such as religious historian James Melvin Washington, a renowned bibliophile whom I met in the early ’80s in Knoxville, and the great Cornel West, Washington’s colleague at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, whom I met in early 1984 at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, during a lecture series West was giving at the college. I had driven there from Tennessee, when I was an undergraduate student at Carson-Newman, a junior I believe, and he was a professor of philosophy of religion on his way to teach at Yale Divinity School. Within African American religious studies and theology, I was also influenced by the work and example of scholars like James Cone, Charles Long, J. Deotis Roberts, William R. Jones, Cecil Cone, Jacqueline Grant, and Riggins Earl. These are figures whose commitment to black theology and, to a lesser degree, to black philosophy, had whetted my appetite to study philosophy and religion.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 4