The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Economies of invention encourage critics to stress how the project of whiteness was constructed on a labor base of exploited indigenous Americans and enslaved blacks. The irony is that enslaved blacks supplied material support and social leisure to white elites as they constructed mythologies of black racial inferiority. Economies of invention also accent a factor I discussed earlier: the symbiotic relationship between white and black identities, practices, and cultures in the construction of the material and cultural means to express whiteness.

  In this matter, Orlando Patterson’s important book Freedom is crucial in pinpointing the intellectual function of an economy of invention in interrogating the historically and socially constituted meanings of whiteness. Patterson argues that Western conceptions of freedom—as well as the epistemic crucible of Western culture and identity—are contingent on, indeed articulated against, the backdrop of slavery. In other words, there’s no such thing as Western freedom without a corresponding articulation of slave identities; there’s no ideal of freedom within American culture in particular, and Western cultures in general, without the presence of the corollary slave subject that was being constructed and contained within the narrative of freedom to begin with. Economies of invention help us comprehend the extraordinarily intricate construction of white identities in the interstices of hybrid cultural contacts.

  Economies of representation examine how whiteness has been manifest, how it has been symbolized, how it has been made visible. Economies of representation highlight how whiteness has been embodied in films, visual art, and branches of culture where public myths of white beauty and intelligence have gained representative authority to rearticulate the superiority and especially the desirability of whiteness. Economies of representation pay attention to the erotic visibility of white identities and images—how whiteness has been fetishized as the ideal expression of human identity.

  Economies of representation also underscore the cultural deference paid to white identities, images, styles, and behaviors even as they cast light on the scorn heaped on nonwhite identities in a key strategy of defensive whiteness: demonizing the racialized other as a means of sanctifying the white self; devaluing nonwhite racial identities through stereotypical representations as a means of idealizing white identities; and bestializing the expression of eroticism in nonwhite cultures while eroticizing racial others for white pleasure and consumption.

  Finally, economies of articulation name the specific sites of intellectual justification for white superiority and supremacy. From selected writings of Thomas Jefferson, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson to the writings of Dinesh D’souza (a white superiorist in brown skin), Charles Murray, Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, and Richard Herrnstein, beliefs in the pathologies and corruptions of black culture, and by extension in the inherent rightness of whiteness, have deluged our intellectual landscape.

  Economies of articulation specify how, from the Enlightenment to The Bell Curve, ideas of black inferiority have been expressed with vicious consistency. Indeed, The Bell Curve argues black intellectual inferiority through a tangle of pseudo-scientifically manipulated data, leading to what Raymond Franklin has termed “statistical myopia.” Economies of articulation isolate the philosophical architecture and rhetorical scaffolding that joins white superiorist and supremacist thinking to social and cultural practices. Economies of articulation show how myths of value neutrality, ideals of Archimedean-like objectivity, conceptions of theory-free social science, notions of bias-free scholarship, and beliefs in heroically blind moral explanations are deployed to defend (and to coerce others outside of its ideological trajectory to defer to) white civilization. These three economies help us determine, define, and demystify the meanings of whiteness and make sure that the study of white identities, images, and ideologies rests on a critical intellectual foundation.

  What about whiteness being discussed outside the confines of academia, or what about the influence of these scholarly discussions on others not in the academy? How can that happen or how is that happening?

  I think it certainly is happening. One flagrant example is in the cultural discourse about “white male anger,” which, according to its apologists, is the legitimate bitterness of white men who have been unfairly denied employment because of affirmative action. Debates about white male anger take place in employment arenas, especially fire and police stations, where white men, we are told, have had enough. White male anger has focused on black bodies as its objet de terror, its target of rage. In the minds of such men (and their wives and daughters), blacks occupy wrongful places of privilege in the job sector because of their color. Black progress symbolized in affirmative action policies constitutes reverse racism for many whites. This is an extremely volatile occasion outside of the academy where the meanings of whiteness are being fiercely debated.

  There were also discussions—sometimes explicit, more often veiled and coded—about whiteness in the recent ordeal of the bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, and in its aftermath, the trial of Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh became a flashpoint in the resurfacing of a virulent, violent whiteness that had to be contained for at least three reasons. First, the racial violence that McVeigh symbolized transgressed its historic ethnic limits by, in significant measure, being directed toward other whites. Second, by intentionally targeting the American government, McVeigh’s white racial violence shattered an implicit social contract where the nation absorbed (i.e., excused, overlooked, downplayed, underestimated, etc.) extralegal racial violence more readily if it was aimed at black or other minority bodies. This was an ideological relic from earlier generations when extralegal white racial violence actually served the interests of the state, or at least multitudes of its officials, by discouraging black insurrection, protest, or rebellion against the legal strictures of white supremacy. Finally, McVeigh’s violence had to be contained, even eradicated, because his poor white rebellion against state authority threatened to symbolically contaminate “purer,” more elite expressions of white ethnicity.

  One really gets a sense, from many of the white cultural discussions of McVeigh, of the ethnic betrayal many whites feel in the Oklahoma City bombing. Judging by what I’ve read, McVeigh viewed himself as part of a tiny outpost of pure patriotic rebels whose patriotism was expressed in the logic of radical antipatriotism: one must blow up the state as it is to get to the state as it should be. I think that McVeigh believed he was reviving a heroic vision of whiteness that he thought was being suppressed within the institutional matrices of American democracy and “legitimate” government. Apparently in McVeigh’s thinking, the only legitimate government was to be found in the guerrilla gangsterism of his supremacist, antistatist comrades. They are the real Americans, not the namby-pamby politicians and state officials who cater to racial minorities, who endanger the freedom of religious minorities like the followers of the late cult leader David Koresh.

  What’s fascinating about McVeigh is that his actions articulate in the extreme the logic of repressive, hegemonic whiteness that hibernates within the structures of legitimate government: vicious attacks on welfare and its recipients; brutal attacks on black progress and its advocates; heartless attacks on the crime-ridden black ghetto; and exploitative attacks on the alleged pathologies of black culture. All of these claims and more have been launched by governmental officials. The cumulative effect of such attacks is the implementation of policies that punish the black poor and stigmatize the black middle class as well as the legitimation of crude cultural biases toward black citizens.

  Figures like Timothy McVeigh become hugely discomfiting manifestations of the hidden animus toward blackness and civility that such discourses of attack encourage. McVeigh is the rabid reification of the not too abstract narratives of hatred that flood segments of white talk radio. Bob Grant, Rush Limbaugh, and many other lesser lights discover a living embodiment of their vitriolic, vituperative verbiage in McVeigh. McVeigh is the monster cre
ated by the Frankensteins of white hatred. And there’s a great deal of shame in him because he’s out of control and destroying his creators. In this regard, it’s crucial to remember a salient fact: Frankenstein is not the name of the monster but the name of the monster’s creator. The real terror, then, is the mechanisms of reproduction that sustain and rearticulate ideologies of white supremacy, and that sanction the violent attack on black and other minority identities.

  Finally, debates on whiteness beyond the academy occur in the construction of cultural conversations about “poor white trash.” Interestingly enough, Bill Clinton figures as a key subject and subtext of such conversations. For many, Clinton is our nation’s First Bubba, our country’s Trailer Trash Executive, our nation’s Poor White President. It tells on our bigoted cultural beliefs and social prejudices that Clinton—a Georgetown University alumnus, a Rhodes Scholar, an Oxford University and Yale University Law School graduate, and a president of the United States—could be construed in many quarters as a poor white trash, “cracker” citizen. The study of whiteness prods us to examine the means by which a highly intelligent man and gifted politician is transmuted into “Bubba” for the purposes of intraethnic demonization.

  Clinton, or at least his legal representatives, relied on the same prejudice that befell the president in their legal battles over sexual harassment with a very different victim in the poor white trash wars: Paula Jones. The intriguing subtext in Clinton’s fight against Jones’s suit was not simply about the hierarchy of gender, where a male’s prerogative in defining a sexual relationship is under attack through the discourse of sexual harassment. An even more powerful subtext is that Jones was a “po’white trash’ho.” By being so designated, Jones’s claim to sexual ownership of her body was much less prized in the popular mind-set than Clinton’s ownership of his sexual self. As a result, Jones’s believability was unfairly compromised by her degraded social and gender status. Beyond considerations of her relationship to political forces that oppose Clinton, Jones’s status reinforced the perception that gender and class cause one to be assigned a lower niche on the totem pole of poor white identity. And there are many, many more places where whiteness is being discussed far beyond the boundaries of the academy in ways that scholarly studies of whiteness are barely beginning to catch up to.

  What do you think about President Clinton’s addresses on this issue of race? Did they serve in your mind as useful or productive means of expanding the public discourse on whiteness and race?

  I think it’s important that the president of the United States help set the tone for how discourse about race will proceed. If we have any chance of rescuing the productive means by which race is articulated, we certainly have to have the “First Pedagogue” in place. And Clinton in that sense became a figure of estimable symbolic and even moral worth in setting a healthy tone for the debate about race. The means that he ingeniously seized on (which has been discussed in not altogether dissimilar ways in philosophical circles by Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, and others) is that of conversation. The will to converse about race is motivated by an overriding concern: How can we adjudicate competing claims about race without tearing the essential fabric of American democracy that is embodied in the slogan, E Pluribus Unum, “Out of many, one”? If we’re already fractured at the level of identity, and this fractured identity is reproduced through mythologies of racial superiority and inferiority (or through narratives of whites being victimized by blacks in identity politics, affirmative action, multiculturalism, or political correctness), how can we justly resolve disputes about relative victimization within the larger framework of American democracy? It’s a very messy business, and one that certainly calls for the president to become a leader in these matters. But his shouldn’t be the only or even the dominant voice. Still, Clinton created space for the conversation to take place.

  It was important that Clinton open up the space of conversation about race; talking is infinitely better than shooting or stabbing or killing one another. It’s better than black men killing each other in the streets of Detroit or Chicago. It’s better than black people being beaten and killed by white policemen in New York or Los Angeles. It’s better than Latinas being victimized by the ideology and institutional expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment. Conversation certainly is superior to destroying one another and our nation.

  Still, we mustn’t be naive. One of the supreme difficulties of discussing race in America is our belief in the possibility of morally equivalent views being reasonably articulated and justly examined. The implicit assumption of Clinton’s ideology of race conversation is debates among equals, or at least among people who have been equally victimized in American culture. But this is a torturous belief that obscures history and memory. We’ve got to unclog the arteries of collective American political memory.

  In regard to race, we are living in the United States of Amnesia. We’ve got to revoke our citizenship in what Joseph Lowery terms “the 51st state, the state of denial.” That’s an extraordinarily disconcerting process, partly because what is demanded is the rejection of a key premise of liberal racial discourse: whites, blacks, and others share a common moral conception of racial justice, an ideal that regulates social practice and promotes the resolution of racial disputes. The politics and history of race have not supported this belief. To shift metaphors, what we’ve got to do is graft the skin of racial memory to the body of American democracy. That demands skillful rhetorical surgery and the operation of an intellectual commitment to truth over habit. In the conversation of race, we really must be willing to discover new ideas and explore ancient emotions. We can’t simply shout our prejudices louder than someone else’s defense of their bigotry.

  If we’re going to have real progress in thinking and talking about race, we must not reduce racial issues to black and white. Race in American culture is so much more profound and complex than black and white, even though we know that conflict has been a major artery through which has flowed the poisonous blood of white supremacy and black subordination. There are other arteries of race and ethnicity that trace through the body politic. The tricky part is acknowledging the significant Latino, Asian, and Native American battles with whiteness that have taken place in our nation while admitting that the major race war has involved blacks and whites.

  The political centrality and historical legitimacy of dealing with the mutual and dominant relations of whiteness to blackness in the development of what Michael Omi and Howard Winant call “racial formation” is simply undeniable. But such a view must be balanced by paying attention to other racial and ethnic conflicts, as well as the intraracial, interethnic differences that reconstitute racial and ethnic identity and practice. It’s extremely important to get such a complex, heated, and potentially useful dialogue started.

  A nagging question, however, remains: Who gets a chance to come to the race table to converse? Will poor people’s voices be heard? What about young people’s voices? In the conversation on race, there is the danger that we merely reproduce a liberal ideology of racial containment and mute the radical elements of race that might really transform our conversation and practice. Such a prospect appears inevitable if we refuse to shatter our ideological and intellectual grids in order to hear the other. What we don’t need is the crass and deceitful politics of toleration that masks the sources of real power that conceals the roots of real inequality, that ignores the voices of the most hurt, and that is indifferent to the faces of the most fractured. What we need is real conversation, the sort where hidden ambitions are brought to light, where masked motives are clarified to the point of social discomfort.

  Such an aim of honest, hard conversation is what the so-called opponents of political correctness should have in mind when they launch their sometimes pedantic, always pejorative broadsides against the assertion of racial, ethnic, gender, class, and sexual difference. Instead, their ostensible desire to push beyond received racial truths ends up being an operation of
rhetorical sleight of hand: they end up reasserting in new terms much older, biased beliefs. That’s why I’m so skeptical about many of the critics of so-called political correctness—they simply dress up bigotry in socially acceptable form by calling it “anti-PC,” when indeed it’s the same old political correctness: the poppycock of socially sanctioned racial disgust.

  What we have to do, then, is to aim at a raucous debate where the impoliteness of certain people must be permitted because their pain is deep and unheeded. We must surely shatter the rituals of correctness and civility in order to hear from those whose voices have been shut out, where the ability to even articulate pain and rage has been delegitimized through social stigma. That’s the only way we have a chance of striking a just racial contract with our citizens. Taking all of what I’ve discussed into consideration, I think the conversation on race is a step in the right direction.

  That gets us away from what Toni Morrison refers to as the “graceful” liberal practice—in the past, at least—of talking about people as if they were raceless, which we at one time thought was the best way. But what you’re suggesting is that that doesn’t work.