The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  The melanin theory, however, has its genesis in a broad body of literature published mostly by independent or black presses and in highly technical studies in scientific and medical journals. Black authors like psychiatrist Richard King, in his book titled African Origin of Biological Psychiatry,2 Carol Barnes in his privately published monograph Melanin, and lecturers such as Baltimore psychiatrist Patricia Newton have stimulated interest in the role of melanin in biological, mental, and racial development. Newton and King have also been a motivating behind-thescenes force in organizing a series of “Melanin Conferences,” held annually since 1987 in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., Dallas, and Los Angeles. Each conference has drawn more than five hundred participants—laypeople and community activists joining with scholars.

  But the most prominent figure to introduce a consideration of the possible behavioral and cultural consequences of melanin to broad public discussion has been black psychiatrist Frances Cress-Welsing. Cress-Welsing first articulated in 1970 the Cress Theory of color confrontation and racism (white racism), which links the development of white supremacist ideology to white fear of genetic annihilation. Her theory maintains that “whiteness is indeed a genetic inadequacy or a relative genetic deficiency state, based upon the genetic inability to produce the skin pigments of melanin (which is responsible for all skin color). The vast majority of the world’s people are not so afflicted, which suggests that color is normal for human beings and color absence is abnormal. . . . Color always ‘annihilates’ (phenotypically and genetically speaking) the non-color, white.”3 Cress-Welsing further states that because of their “color inferiority,” whites respond with a psychological vengeance toward people of color, developing “an uncontrollable sense of hostility and aggression,” an attitude that has “continued to manifest itself throughout the history of mass confrontations between whites and people of color.”4

  Ironically, Cress-Welsing now says she believes that the recent preoccupation with her melanin theory is a diversion from the more immediate problem facing people of color: white supremacy. “I put the discussion of melanin on the board in order to [describe how pigmentation] was a factor in what white supremacy behavior was all about,” she says. “If I had my way, there wouldn’t be all the discussion about melanin. I would say discuss white supremacy. White supremacy has guided the discussion to multiculturalism, diversity, to anything [but white supremacy].”5

  Indeed, white supremacy is a theme that Cress-Welsing single-mindedly pursues in her book The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors, a text that has sold nearly 40,000 copies, principally through black-owned retail outlets. But despite her currently stated interest in refocusing her message on white supremacy, she continues to develop her melanin theory, for example, by expounding on the neurochemical basis of soul and evil. Moreover, since her theory links white injustice with the inability of whites to produce melanin, her focus on white racism leads ineluctably to a concern with melanin.

  Jeffries, too, has been attempting to distance himself from possible racist implications of the melanin theory. When he appeared on Donahue last fall, his first time on a national TV show, he said, “We do not have a theory of melanin that says black people are superior. It’s a joke. But it’s been run and run and run into the ground.” Jeffries contends that melanin is subsidiary to “the larger awakening of African peoples in terms of their real history,” because there is “an African primacy to human experience.”

  But he just as often stressed the need for comprehending the crucial function of melanin in cultural and biological evolution. Jeffries noted that Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology, the landmark book by the late Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, characterizes melanin as “the phenomenon which helps us establish that there’s only one human race, and that human race is African. Melanin is that phenomenon that comes about as a result of the sun factor.”

  Jeffries says Diop links the development of melanin to a more involved theory about the origins of human civilization in Africa’s Nile River valley, where important distinctions in the qualities of persons and cultures would have been developed—hence his use of the reductionist sun people/ice people dichotomy to explain perceived differences in persons from the northern and southern cradles. “The value system of the northern cradle [ice people] . . . that rough survival value system, produces a premium on male physical strength and has produced this warrior value system,” Jeffries opined, “whereas [in] the value system of the south [sun people] where you can look at the spiritual relationship within the human and the cosmic family . . . you see the male and female principle in harmony and balance, you see nature in harmony and balance, you see the relationship of the sky and the moon and the sun to human development.” This amounts to biological, ecological, and racial determinism, and can hardly be substantiated.

  Although Jeffries views himself as an Afrocentrist, Molefi Kete Asante, chairman of Temple University’s Department of African American Studies and often described as the “father of the theoretical and philosophical movement of Afrocentricity” (he is the author of Afrocentricity, published by Africa World Press), contends that Afrocentricity itself “is not a theory of biological determinism [but] essentially the idea that African people must be seen as subjects of history and of human experience, rather than objects.” Asante finds the melanin theory “intriguing” but disavows it as an Afrocentric theory.

  Rigid categories based on essential, unvarying characteristics melt in the face of actual experience and human history. “Blacks are just as intellectual [as whites], and whites in some situations are just as feeling [as blacks],” says Cornell University professor Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.6 “My study of human societies and the way in which whites and blacks behave in their societies makes me believe that you can explain these things more satisfactorily in terms of society and social relations than you can in terms of physiology.”

  Bernal, a white Briton whose recent scholarship explores the Egyptian roots of Greek civilization, admits a personal affinity for Egypt in part because “here is an African culture [that is] analytical and intellectual. You can have African societies of both types, just as you can have European societies of both types.” Bernal says his study of Egypt and Greece has taught him that both were such a “mixed culture.”

  Egypt was one of the great civilizations of the ancient world, but so were China, Mesopotamia in the Middle East, and other cultures in Central America. So in attempting to overcome the bruising absence of constructive discourse about Africa, Jeffries and his cohorts have distorted the variety and legitimacy of other ancient civilizations through the lens of a compensatory racial and cultural hierarchy that assigns Africa artificial and romantic superiority.

  Indeed, it was Jeffries’s courageous attempt to reverse the harmful effects of Eurocentrism through educational reform in the New York State school system that first brought him to national attention. Jeffries served as a consultant to the first of two task forces charged by the New York State Commission on Education with correcting deficiencies in the curriculum in regard to people of color. Not surprisingly, Jeffries and many of the task force members concluded that the experiences, histories, and contributions of nonwhite people were gravely underrepresented in New York’s educational curriculum. Brutal internecine battles developed, especially between Jeffries and his ideological opponents, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and educator Diane Ravitch, but many of Jeffries’s ideas were adopted in the committee’s final report, “A Curriculum of Inclusion.”

  Schlesinger issued his dissenting opinions in The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.7 In it he invoked the timeworn metaphor of national unity forged as ethnic groups melted into the American character, in contrast to what he saw as the vicious ethnic tribalism evinced by people of Jeffries’s ilk. Apparently for Schlesinger, anyone who appeals to racial or ethnic identity as the basis of making radical
social, political, or moral claims is what may be termed an ethnosaur, a recalcitrant ethnic loyalist who has not acknowledged the legitimacy of a superior and more sweeping national identity. Schlesinger contends that many Afrocentrists “not only divert attention from the real needs but exacerbate the problems.”

  The call by Schlesinger and others for more “objective” historical scholarship fails to address the persistent historical patterns of racist exclusion of minority perspectives that are manifest in varying degrees from the elementary school to university education. “[Schlesinger] probably really believes that he and his contemporaries have been writing objective history,” says Bernal. “He seems to me remarkably lacking in self-consciousness and awareness and still sees white middleaged men as the only people capable of rendering acceptable historical judgments.” In this context, Afrocentric attempts to articulate credible intellectual conceptions of the nature and shape of black racial experiences and to express profound disenchantment with the silence of majoritarian histories on the suffering and achievements of minority peoples are praiseworthy indeed. But while Jeffries’s diatribes against Eurocentrism are sometimes accurate, his embrace of various ideas in support of his version of Afrocentrism seems plain wrongheaded. Jeffries is promoting a rigid and romantic notion of racial identity.

  Ironically, Jeffries is arguing for the same sort of unanimity of vision and experience that racism has artificially imposed upon African-American life. Perhaps he would do well to heed the words of fellow Afrocentrist Asante that “the virtue of Afrocentrism is pluralism without hierarchy.” Asante emphasizes that “Afrocentricity is not about valorizing your position and degrading other people. Whites must not be seen as above anyone; but by the same token they’ve got to be seen alongside everyone.”

  Moreover, Jeffries’s romanticization of Egyptian culture as the seat of human civilization incorrectly views history through the idyllic lens of uncritical racial pride and narrow nationalist goals. Such simplistic distortions overlook the conflicts and corruption spawned by Egyptian civilization and repeat the fantastic egocentrism and therapeutic fables of Eurocentric history at its worst. “Eurocentric history as taught in schools and universities has had a very large egoboosting, if not therapeutic, purpose for whites,” acknowledges Bernal. “It’s in a way normal for the idea that blacks should have some confidence building in their pedagogy.” But he cautions against an uncritical celebration of racial and cultural roots. “I think there should be research history as well, and that will sometimes reveal facts that you don’t like.”

  As mature African-American scholars, teachers, students, and citizens, we must embrace the rich and varied racial past that has contributed to our making. We must also acknowledge the profound degree to which we have alternately enjoyed and endured a terrible but sometimes fruitful symbiosis with European American culture how we have helped shape many of its cultural gifts to the world, even against its will; and how those expressions emerged in the crucible and turmoil of our uniquely African American experience.

  Nine

  SHAKESPEARE AND SMOKEY ROBINSON: REVISITING THE CULTURE WARS

  This is one of my favorite essays. I first delivered it as a keynote address at a symposium on language and identity held at the Mark Twain House in 1994, featuring Frank Rich, Christopher Hitchens, Jeff Greenfield, and Gloria Naylor. In this essay (an excerpted version appeared on the back page of the New York Times Book Review) I embrace the vital intellectual and cultural traditions of African American and European American life. At the same time, I nod to the vibrant popular cultures from which I learned a great deal while appreciating the classics of literary culture. I see no essential contradiction in embracing the poetry of Hughes and T ennyson, the novels of Morrison and Hemingway, the essays of Baldwin and Ozick, the drama of Wilson and O’Neill, the criticism of Gates and Gass—or, for that matter, the insights of the Harvard Classics or hip-hop culture. They all help deepen one’s awareness of what it means to be human and intellectually engaged with the questions of truth, beauty, goodness, evil, suffering, life, and death.

  I CAN HARDLY THINK OF A SUBJECT MORE strained by confusion and bitterness than the relation of race to identity. Our anguish about this matter is at least three centuries older than the current turmoil stamped in the culture wars. American views on race and identity have wearily tracked our Faustian bargain with slavery, an accommodation of moral principle to material gain that has colored national history ever since.

  The paradox of our situation is that Americans are continually fatigued and consumed by race. We sense, indeed fear, that its unavoidable presence is the truest key to our national identity. Yet we are as easily prone to deny that race has any but the most trivial affect on human affairs, and that it has little to do with personal achievement or failure. Therefore, the people whose lives have been shaped by the malicious meanings of race—to be sure, there are ennobling ones as well—must now endure the irony of its alleged disappearance in silence.

  If they speak of the continued effect of racial bigotry, for instance, they are accused of exploiting unfairly their status as victims. If they talk of the injury inflicted by coded speech that avows neutrality even as it reinforces bias, they are called supporters of political correctness. If they appeal to black, or Latino, or Native American heritage as a source of security in the face of hostility or neglect, they are said to practice the distorting politics of identity. And if they Shakespeare argue that Emerson be joined by, say Baldwin, in getting a fix on the pedigree of American literary invention—if they insist that the canon jams, occasionally backfires when stuffed with powerful material poorly placed—they are maligned for trading in a dangerous multicultural currency.

  All of this makes clear that language is crucial to understanding, perhaps solving, though at other times even intensifying, the quandaries of identity that vex most blacks. Speaking and writing are not merely the record of our quest to conquer illiteracy or ignorance (they are not the same thing). Neither are they only meant to hedge against the probability of being forgotten in the future by marking our stay with eloquent parts of speech that add up to immortality. Language simply, supremely, reminds us that we exist at all.

  Whether this is positive or negative, an uplifting or degrading experience, depends largely on how language—plus the politics it reflects and the power it extends—is used on our behalf or set against us. This is especially true for blacks. Early in American life the furious entanglements of ideology and commerce caused disputes about black folk to follow a viciously circular logic; slaves deprived of the mechanics of literacy for fear of their use in seeking liberation were judged inhuman and unintelligent because they could neither read nor write. Even those blacks who managed to show rhetorical or literary mastery were viewed as exceptional or hopelessly mediocre. However unfair, language became the most important battlefield upon which black identity was fought. This is no less true today.

  The most important concerns of black life are intertwined in the politics of language—from the canon to gangsta rap, from the debate about welfare reform to the fracas about family values, from the roots of urban violence to the place of black religion. In my view, a happy though unintended effect of the culture wars is that they force Americans to see that from the beginning our language has been indebted to political transaction.

  It is not just now that ideological intimidation has allegedly ruined the prospect of objective judgment, or that its advocates have crashed the party and lowered the American standard of artistic achievement. Our literary traditions and rhetorical cultures eloquently testify to the influence of class upon taste, and reveal how power shapes the reception of art.

  Black culture lives and dies by language. It thrives or slumps as its varied visions, and the means elected to pursue them, are carefully illumined or deliberately distorted. The threats, of course, are not entirely from the outside. The burden of complexity that rests at the heart of cultures across the black diaspora is often avoi
ded in narrow visions of racial identity within black life. Its earnest proponents evoke the same old vocabulary of authenticity and cry of purity in their defense. But such moves echo as a hollow chant when voiced in league with the resounding complexity of identities expressed in the literature and music, the preaching and art of black culture.

  Likewise, prolonged concentration on a fictitious, romantic black cultural purity obscures the virtues of complex black identity. An edifying impurity infuses black experiments with self-understanding and fires the urge to embrace and discard selves shaped in the liberty of radical improvisation. Fiction and jazz, for instance, urge us to savor the outer limits of our imagination as the sacred space of cultural identity. When advocates of particular versions of Afrocentrism and black nationalism claim a common uniqueness for black life, they deny the repertoire of difference that characterizes African cultures.

  Such conflicts teach us to spell black culture and language in the plural, signifying the diversity that continually expands the circumference of black identities. If this is true for black culture, it is even more the case with American culture. The two are intimately joined, forged into a sometimes reluctant symbiosis that mocks the rigid lines of language and identity that set them apart. American culture is inconceivable without African-American life.

  Can we imagine the high art of fusing religious rhetoric with secular complaint without Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X? Their craft lifted freedom and democracy from their internment in ink and unleashed them as vital motives to social action. Can we think of contemporary American fiction, and its fiercely wrought negotiations with the cataclysmic forces of modernity, without the magisterial art of Morrison, Naylor, Wideman, and Walker?