The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Van Houten stated that after yelling that he was a police officer, he managed, with blurred vision and failing consciousness, to pull his gun from its ankle holster and fire three shots. One attacker, who held him from behind, fled; Perry, who assaulted him frontally, lay on his back on the sidewalk, stilled by a wound to his stomach. At 12:55 A.M., after being taken to nearby St. Luke’s Hospital, Edmund Perry was pronounced dead. (Perry’s brother Jonah, then a nineteen-year-old engineering student at Cornell University, was said to have been the accomplice that night. Jonah Perry was later formally charged and cleared by a grand jury.)

  Robert Anson is a freelance magazine writer and author. At the time of Perry’s killing his son was also a student at Exeter and, in fact, had sat behind Perry every day during school assembly. This connection accounts, in part, for Anson’s interest in the Perry story, even after widespread public shock over the shooting subsided. An even more powerful motivation, however, was the apparent contradiction Edmund Perry represented. On the one hand, Perry had “all the things anyone was supposed to need to climb out of poverty and make it in America.” On the other hand, if Perry had actually died trying to mug Van Houten, then something had gone “dreadfully haywire,” despite the “best intentions” of Harlem and Exeter. Anson’s book is his search for an understanding of Perry’s life, education, and killing, and thereby of racism in U.S. society.

  Anson begins by looking for a conclusive account of what happened on the night of June 12. His investigation is fatally compromised by the fact that Lee Van Houten was the only eyewitness to the event. What Anson does is piece together circumstantial evidence that he believes supports Van Houten’s story. (The official police inquiry ruled the killing of Edmund Perry “justifiable homicide” and within departmental guidelines.)

  Several factors—Perry’s personal reputation, the number of shootings of black men by New York City police, and especially the lack of concrete proof against Edmund and Jonah Perry and Van Houten’s inability to identify Jonah as one of the two assailants—lead me to conclude we will never be certain about the events of June 12. We should, however, still look seriously at other issues Anson raises (and doesn’t raise) in his search for an explanation of Perry’s life: the position of racial minorities in predominantly white institutions, the consequences of juggling two cultures, the ongoing racism of American culture, and the inability of most existing race theory to illuminate racism’s malignant persistence.

  Since Anson’s investigation leads him to rule out foul play or police attempts at cover-up, he follows the lead of one of the principal police investigators—a garrulous detective who tells him the streets had eaten Perry alive. Thus, Anson goes to Harlem.

  Through a set of interviews that are the greatest strength of the book, Anson tries to piece together a picture of Edmund Perry’s life and the environment that produced and shaped him. We hear the proud voices of women who had driven dope dealers from the streets by their sheer physical presence; the admiring voices of friends who were inspired by Perry’s discipline and dedication to his ambitious goals; the knowing voices of former co-survivors of the vicious circle of drugs, poverty, and violence, one of whom contended that “Edmund died a natural death up here”; the perceptive voice of a pastor who appreciated Perry’s religious values and his ability to maneuver between two cultures; the empathetic voices of other blacks who had struggled with the difficulty and guilt of their departure from desolate and beleaguered circumstances; and the pained voices of former teachers and mentors who identified and nurtured Perry’s powerful intelligence and talent.

  Above all, we hear the strikingly ambitious and sacrificial voice of Perry’s mother. Veronica Perry emerges as a powerful woman who fought tooth and nail the despair and cynicism that too often conform Harlem life to its ugly mold—a woman who sent both her sons to prestigious prep schools, successfully ran for the school board, and worked ceaselessly to raise the quality of life in her neighborhood.

  The picture of Edmund Perry that formed was one of an extremely bright, hard worker who possessed a mature vision of life’s purpose and an infectious compassion for his people—a vision nurtured by strong religious beliefs. But Anson, sensing a canonizing impulse at work in the stories of friends, teachers, and mentors, searches for a fuller picture. He wants Edmund Perry, warts and all, and so he begins interviewing classmates, teachers, and administrators at Exeter.

  Many at Exeter spoke of Perry’s intelligence, his eagerness to perform well, his quick wit, his enormous love for his mother, his pride in (and rivalry with) his brother, Jonah. Exeter’s chaplain said Perry was guarded, rarely revealing much about himself. Some black classmates, especially women, thought that initially Perry could be “pushy” or “cocky,” something they attributed to his neighborhood roots. Some white classmates were disturbed by what they perceived to be an extraordinary “racial sensitivity.” David Daniels, then one of only three blacks on the faculty and the adult closest to Perry at Exeter, conceded that point: Perry “was sensitive about race, probably more so than the other black students. I never saw any racial hostility though. Instead, there was frustration, exasperation.”

  Anson also reports on the year Perry spent in Barcelona, as well as his troubled final year at Exeter. Perry told many people he experienced no racism in Spain, but Anson contends this was deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. He observes that in this case, as in others, “it was becoming apparent that Eddie had a propensity for telling different stories to different people.”

  During his final year at Exeter, Perry’s work fell off, and he became increasingly hostile. Anson details Perry’s participation in a club that demanded a sexual initiation, and discusses his (and others’) low-level drug dealing. Perry also delivered a “tough and angry” speech to a schoolwide assembly on Martin Luther King’s birthday. The speech, written immediately after King’s assassination by a former black Exeter student, used Black Power rhetoric to make a bristling declaration of black independence.

  Overall, the picture of Perry that emerged from Exeter was one of a deeply troubled young man whose racial identity caused him and, by extension, those around him a great deal of pain. Now Anson is sure: “Edmund Perry had indeed been killed while trying to assault an officer of the law. Why he had done so was less apparent to me.”

  Unfortunately, the assumptions that Anson brings to his search for an adequate explanation of Perry’s death guarantee that he will not find one. The backdrop for most of his reflections on Perry is a scissors-and-paste version of the liberal theory of race—a theory that even in its more sophisticated manifestations has never come to terms with the reality of structural racism.

  The liberal understanding of race in the United States is modeled on the white European immigrant experience.1 In making this experience paradigmatic, liberal theorists have lumped race together with other variables—religion, language, and nationality, for example—and taken them all to constitute a larger ethnic identity that is more crucial than race in explaining the condition of black people. The focus on ethnicity means that liberal theories of race are primarily concerned either with ethnic assimilation or with the maintenance of ethnic identity through cultural pluralism.

  Thus lawyer Madison Grant advanced his Anglo-conformity theory of ethnicity in the 1920s, contending that there must be total assimilation and conformity to Anglo-American life in order for white Americans to retain their racial purity. Historian Frederick J. Turner and Jewish immigrant Israel Zangwill composed the melting-pot theory, which asserted that America is best seen as a pot in which all ethnic groups are melting and merging together. Horace Kallen proposed the notion of cultural pluralism, saying that each culture maintains its own character while coexisting with other groups. And Moynihan and Glazer promoted the emerging culture theory, maintaining that cultures interact and the resultant combination produces a political and cultural tertium quid, the phenomenon of the hyphenated American (e.g., African-American).

  The l
iberal theory of race has informed the party practices, jurisprudential reasoning, and legislative agendas of its most ardent and aggressive political proponents, the liberal Democrats. Liberal race theory experienced a fragile inception in FDR’s New Deal, a tentative strengthening under Truman’s Fair Deal, and a substantial solidification in Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Great Society due to the civil rights movement. In sociopolitical dress, liberal race theory has argued for a greater black share in jobs, for integration of housing and education, and for desegregation of interstate transportation as strategies to assure black inclusion and assimilation in the larger circle of American privilege.

  The problem with the theory is that it encounters an insurmountable obstacle: the irreducible reality of race. Because it conceives of race as merely a part of one’s broader ethnic identity, liberal race theory is unable to make sense of the particular forms of oppression generated primarily by racial identity. Much of the time, it cannot explain why blacks have failed to “assimilate” because it has not acknowledged the unique structural character of racism or historical content of racial oppression—slavery, Jim Crow laws, structural unemployment, gentrification of black living space, deeply ingrained institutional racism. At this point, however, instead of revising their fundamental assumptions, liberal race theorists tend to explain blacks’ failure to “assimilate” successfully by looking almost exclusively at problems within black culture and by treating these problems as givens.

  More specifically, liberal theory opts for an explanation of the debilitating effects of racism that reduces them to their psychological effects on the black personality. It does not weave its psychological analysis into a dynamic understanding of the persistent social, historical, and political aspects of racism. While it is undeniable that racism’s effect on the black psyche is deleterious, to perceive that as racism’s primary damage obscures the persistent structural factors that enforce and reinforce perceptions of personal inferiority, rage, and hostility. That kind of reductionism hinders our understanding of personal identity as a construct of several different elements—social, psychological, political, and historical—and makes it likely that we will mislocate the causes of black failure to “assimilate.”

  This psychological reductionism is nowhere more apparent than in the second half of Best Intentions. As Anson interviews Perry’s classmates, teachers, and administrators, he draws a psychological portrait of Perry as an angry, hostile, and belligerent person. True, but Anson never really tells us why. He does not connect his psychological portrait to any social structural analysis—either of Exeter or of Harlem as Perry experienced them. When we do get hints of an explanation of Perry’s actions—from either his white classmates or Anson—they are usually by way of further appeals to psychological factors. His classmates say Ed had a chip on his shoulder because of race, indeed that he was a racist himself. Anson wonders whether the stories of white racism that Veronica Perry told Ed “shaped” him, because he was “impressionable,” possibly causing him to attempt to mug a New York police officer.

  To his credit, Anson considers the possibility that Ed’s psychic turmoil was occasioned by the clash of cultures between Harlem and Exeter. But aside from a brief review of common understandings of race relations, liberal social policy, and Harlem history of the last few decades, he doesn’t even begin to cover the moral, political, socioeconomic, and historical ground that psychology shares in a plausible explanation of Perry’s life and behavior. The condition of the black underclass, the way in which gentrification of black living space continues to shrink black life options, an understanding of the psychic, spiritual, and physical attack on black men—all these factors would help chart a comprehensive approach to Perry’s life and death.

  Such an approach would avoid merely personalistic explanations that totally blame Perry. It would also avoid merely structural explanations that totally absolve Perry of any responsibility for the choices he made. In short, it would provide the richest detail possible about the circumstances of Perry’s life so that he is rendered as a human being faced with difficult choices, choices that must be made within a complicated configuration of personal and structural constraints. Anson simply has not done this.

  Instead, he gets mired in a great myth of liberal theory—the myth of meritocracy—and fails to comprehend how a person of Perry’s talent could have failed. The dominant belief that legitimates the central place of achievement in U.S. culture and explains the distribution of goods and privileges is that all things being relatively equal, one gets what one merits, based upon intelligence, industry, and a host of other American character traits. The single most important social issue that has focused the problems and contradictions of the meritocratic approach is affirmative action.

  Throughout Best Intentions Anson employs Perry as an example of the “legitimate” complaints white Exeter students had against blacks for receiving “preferential treatment.” He says that Perry’s race helped him gain admission to Stanford and Yale. Furthermore, Anson reports, several Exeter faculty members admitted this point, referring to the experience of the white valedictorian in Perry’s senior year “who possessed an academic and extracurricular record far more distinguished than Eddie’s,” and who applied to Stanford, “but was not admitted.” This example is intriguing because throughout the book Anson reports that Perry was, by most accounts, an extremely intelligent, articulate youngster “sought after by name” by places like Princeton and Yale. But its importance lies elsewhere. It reflects the confusion of effect with cause that underlies Anson’s view of Perry. Anson seems to forget that affirmative action was instituted to redress inequality of opportunity; whites who inherit the privileges of economic resources, old boy networks, and the like are not making it on “merit” alone.

  The kind of assumptions that inform Anson’s thinking are precisely what exacerbated Perry’s situation as a black student at a predominantly white institution. On the one hand, many “liberals” want to address past wrongs by admitting qualified minority students to elite educational institutions. On the other hand, these same students are then blamed for extending and perpetuating inequality by being the recipients of “preferential treatment.” Unfortunately the terrain on which this battle is fought is the lives of minority students. How can Anson grasp Perry when he, too, is a victim of the same limited understanding?

  Anson might have overcome the limits of his approach if he had made a more sustained attempt to acquaint himself with Afro-American culture. But as is clear in several places in Best Intentions, he just doesn’t understand the general concerns or basic themes of Afro-American life.

  Anson asks whether the stories Veronica Perry told her son, stories about the evils of white racism and the need not to “judge all whites harshly,” had made Perry “racially proud” or “angry enough, possibly, to have vented that rage on a seemingly innocuous white boy on a darkened city street.” What Anson apparently doesn’t understand is that in telling her son these stories Veronica Perry was performing the tragically necessary task most black parents face: telling her child about the viciousness of racism while ratifying her Christian belief that hate is not the proper response for victimized blacks. Thus, she was preparing Edmund Perry to negotiate the difficult process of identifying and acknowledging racism while channeling the resulting, and justifiable, anger into creative and redemptive strategies for coping.

  Anson remarks that Perry told different stories to different people, pointing to the obvious fact that he was “pretending” in order to augment his image as a ghetto street tough. But there is more. As is obvious throughout the book, Perry more easily (although sometimes only after extensive scrutiny) formed close associations with other blacks and especially sympathetic whites, able to tell and share one story with them and another with the rest of Exeter. Perry most likely learned, as do most black people, that he could not afford to bare his soul often—either because truth telling could not be borne by particular moods of the white consci
ence or because it could not be tolerated by many aspects of the white worldview. For example, when told by a teacher that he needed counseling, Perry said there wasn’t anyone on campus he could talk to, that the only people he could talk to were black, and that “anytime he tried to open up to whites and be honest, he always wound up hurting someone’s feelings.” Or again: a white student who shared many classes with Perry told him that “people are just people,” and that “some people are white and some people are black, and if you are going to get bummed out about it, it’s pretty dumb.”

  Thus, in order to avoid a discourse of perpetual blame (whose payoff is usually only increased frustration) and the pain of having to explain oneself, to argue for the logic or legitimacy of one’s being, Perry adopted a familiar coping strategy: he knew when, and when not, to open and reveal himself. While, as a maturing youth, Perry undoubtedly “pretended” and lied, it is important not to confuse this with strategies adopted to deal with an environment that is hostile and insensitive to one’s identity. Ironically, Anson’s psychological perspective does not comprehend this crucial point.

  More poignantly, throughout the book Anson quotes and refers to Veronica Perry’s strong religious beliefs, which Anson thinks are “extremely intense.” He sees Veronica Perry’s swing from profound belief in the wisdom of God in taking her son to a bitter denouncement of the police system that killed him as a possible indication of her emotional instability. (She had had a nervous breakdown.) In fact, her “mood swing” may be understood as ad hoc theodicy, an attempt to come to grips theologically as best she could with the evil that killed her child. It is an attempt to vindicate—through faith—belief in a good and loving God who may appear absent or silent in the face of human suffering, without at the same time excusing the human beings who inflict that suffering. It is a theme that runs through the Afro-American Christian engagement with the world, and it is a central problem in Christian theology.