The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  King was certainly not alone as a black student who confronted an egregiously unfair academic situation. Neither can we be sure that he wasn’t simply the sort of person who would have cheated no matter his race or age. But since we only know him as we did—a black man confronting his self-doubt in a majority white culture—we can only reasonably speculate with the facts at hand. From King’s own description of the psychic and emotional torture he confronted, I think it is reasonable to suggest that a possible reason for his cheating had to do with the attempt to please the white professors who judged him and to measure up to the standards of the white society in which he competed academically. I am not suggesting that most black students respond similarly; they obviously do not. I am, however, arguing that it is plausible that King responded to stereotype threat, perhaps even “stereotype fatigue,” and surrendered the fight on the academic end to preserve his mental health on the emotional end. The fight was just that costly that plagiarizing course papers and a dissertation—as awful and lethal a flaw as it is—was deemed less harmful than facing the consequences of failing to meet the challenges of the white world.

  King’s plagiarism at school is perhaps a sad symptom of his response to the racial times in which he matured. His plagiarism is made even sadder by the realization that King’s heroic efforts as a civil rights leader relieved for others some of the pressures that he faced as a graduate student, pressures that no one should have to face but that thousands of blacks have managed with amazing grace. It is not unbelievable that such figures were gifted, but that they could perform under the punishing conditions of rigid racial apartheid. Their success deflects attention from the horror of the conditions they learned to master. It is bitterly ironic that of all people, Martin Luther King, Jr., should be found out as a plagiarist since his huge rhetorical gifts helped to create a world of opportunity for millions. But then his genius for mastering the white world through mastering its languages, and for portraying so compellingly the pained psychic boundaries of black life, may derive from the tortured memory of his sore temptation on an isolated battlefield of conscience where he wrestled with, and failed, himself. As a New York Times editorial eloquently reminded our nation, King may have plagiarized words, but he could never plagiarize the courage he displayed on countless occasions:

  But however just it may be to denounce his scholarship,73 that should not be confused with his leadership. Whether or not, as a student, he wrote what he wrote, Dr. King did what he did. . . . Some say he solicited the assistance of others . . . but even if so, that’s no more to be faulted than John Kennedy turning to Theodore Sorensen, or George Bush to Peggy Noonan. . . . What the world honors when it honors Dr. King is his tenacity on behalf of racial justice—tenacity equally against gradualism and against violence. He and many with him pushed Americans down the long road to racial justice. That achievement glows unchallenged through the present shadow. Martin Luther King’s courage was not copied; and there was no plagiarism in his power.

  PART EIGHT

  RELIGION AND SEXUALITY

  The sexuality of black peoples has been a source of mythology, stereotype, fear, and fascination since our arrival in “the New World.” Black folk have waged fierce campaigns against the exploitation of our sexual identities even as we have sought to enjoy, with varying degrees of success, erotic liberty. Although black religions have been instrumental in fostering social and spiritual freedom, they have been less adept in encouraging black folk to break the shackles of repression and the sexual conformity imposed on us by a white supremacist society. And when it comes to alternative lifestyles and sexual practices, stalwarts of black religion have been just as homophobic in their outlook as the members of dominant, heterosexist culture. Black folk whose heterosexuality has been demonized should be the last folk on earth to dump stigma on our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender brothers and sisters. The challenge to black believers is to embrace a just vision of black sexuality that emphasizes a love and acceptance of all human beings, whatever their sexual orientation.

  Eighteen

  WHEN YOU DIVIDE BODY AND SOUL, PROBLEMS MULTIPLY: THE BLACK CHURCH AND SEXUALITY

  Some black preachers were angry with me for writing this essay and “telling tales out of school.” It only helped a little that I was honest about my own shortcomings as well. But the black church must engage black sexuality on every front: the sometimes hypocritical assaults by the white mainstream that have over the years caused us to deny our sexual beauty; the sometimes repressive sexual practices of black religious communities that deny the sacredness of sexual identity; and the homophobia that feeds the AIDS pandemic, which has torn through black communities with destructive fury. In this chapter, I combat the legacy of white supremacy that brings shame to black embodiment, even as I exhort the black church to develop a theology of eroticism that freely embraces our God-given sexual gifts. Otherwise, the church will be mired in sanctimonious pronouncements that offer little help to struggling believers, and our children will be further alienated from an institution that, were it honest and courageous, might literally save their lives.

  ______________________

  He healed my body, and told me to run on.

  —GOSPEL SONG

  “CAN’T NOBODY DO ME LIKE JESUS”

  ______________________

  Love . . . gives you a good feeling. Something like sanctified.

  —MARVIN GAYE

  “LET’S GET IT ON,” 1973

  ______________________

  Sexual healing is good for me.

  —MARVIN GAYE

  “SEXUAL HEALING,” 1982

  THE VISITING PREACHER, A BRAWNY BROWN MAN with smooth skin and teeth made of pearl, was coming to the close of his sermon, a ritual moment of climax in the black church. It is the inevitable point to which the entire service builds. Its existence is the only justification for the less dramatic rites of community—greeting visitors, collecting tithes, praying for the sick, reading scripture, and atoning for sins. These rites are a hallway to the sanctuary of zeal and vision formed by the black sermon. The furious splendor of the preacher’s rhythmic, almost sung, speech drove the congregation to near madness. His relentless rhetoric stood them on their feet. Their bodies lurched in holy oblivion to space or time. Their hands waved as they shrieked their assent to the gospel lesson he passionately proclaimed. His cadence quickened. Each word swiftly piled on top of the next. The preacher’s sweet moan sought to bring to earth the heavenly light of which his words, even at their most brilliant, were but a dim reflection.

  “We’ve got to keep o-o-o-o-on keepin’ on,” he tunefully admonished. The preceding wisdom of his oration on Christian sexuality, arguing the link between passion and morality, turned this cliché into a sermonic clincher.

  “We can’t give up,” he continued. “Because we’ve got God, oh yes, we’ve got Go-o-o-o-d, um-humh, on our side.”

  “Yes,” members of the congregation shouted. The call and response between the pulpit and the pew escalated as each spurred the other on in ever enlarging rounds of emotion.

  “We’ve got a friend who will never forsake us.”

  “Yes sir, Reverend.”

  “We’ve got a God who can make a way outta no way.”

  “Yes we do.”

  “He’s a heart fixer, and a mind regulator.”

  “Oh, yes He is.”

  “I’m here tonight to tell you whatever moral crisis you’re facin’, God can fix it for you.”

  “Thank you, Jesus.”

  “If you’re facin’ trouble on the job, God can make your boss act better.”

  “Tell the truth, Reverend.”

  “If your kids won’t act right, God can turn them around.”

  “Hallelujah!”

  “If you’re fornicating, and I know some of y’all been fornicatin’, God can turn lust to love and give you a healthier relationship with Him.”

  “Hold your hope! Hold your hope!”

  �
��If you’re committin’ adultery, and I know some of y’all are doing that, too, God can stop your rovin’ eyes and keep you from messin’ up. Won’t He do it, church?”

  “Yes! Yes He will!”

  “If your marriage is fallin’ apart, and there’s no joy—I said there’s no jo-oy-oy-oy at your address, God can do for you what He did for David. David asked God: ‘Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation.’ I’m a witness tonight, children. God can do that, church. God can restore your joy. Won’t He do it, children?!”

  “Yes He will! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!”

  “I’m closin’ now, but before I go, I just stopped by to let you know that you can’t find salvation in things. You can’t find salvation in clothes. You can’t find salvation in your car. You can’t find salvation in your wife or husband. And you certainly can’t find salvation in sex. Did y’all hear me? You can’t find salvation in sex. You can’t find it in sleepin’ around, tryin’ to fill the empty places of your life with pleasure and loose livin’.”

  “Thank you, Jesus!”

  “You can only find salvation in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ! Do y’all hear me? Jesus, that’s who you need! Jesus, that’s who can save you. Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

  “Thank ya! Oh, hallelujah!”

  The congregation erupted in waves of shouting and hand clapping as the minister withdrew from the microphone and dramatically spun to his seat. He was thoroughly spent from a forty-five-minute exercise in edification and enlightenment. As soon as he was done, his fellow ministers on the dais, including me, descended on the preacher’s chair to thank him for his thoughtful, thrilling message. Sex, after all, is a difficult subject to treat in the black church, or, for that matter, in any church. This is indeed ironic. After all, the Christian faith is grounded in the Incarnation, the belief that God took on flesh to redeem human beings. That belief is constantly trumped by Christianity’s quarrels with the body. Its needs. Its desires. Its sheer materiality. But especially its sexual identity.

  I got a glimpse that night, or, I should say, a reminder, of how deeply ambivalent Christians are about sex. I learned, too, how dishonest we’re sometimes made by the unresolved disputes between our bodies and our beliefs.

  After the service was over, after the worshipers had time to greet and thank the preacher, we ministers, five in all, retired to the pastor’s study.

  “Doc, you blessed me tonight,” beamed the pastor, a middle-aged preacher of no mean talent himself. (Among black ministers and their circle of intimates, “Doc” or “Doctor” is an affectionate term given to preachers. It began, perhaps, as a way of upgrading the minister to the level of respect his gifts deserved, especially at a time when black ministers were prevented from completing their formal education.)

  “Thank you, man,” the preacher gently replied with a kind of “aw shucks” smile.

  “Yeah, Doctor, you were awful, just terrible, boy,” a second minister enthused, heaping on the guest the sort of congratulation black preachers often give to one another.

  “Revrun, it was judgment in here tonight,” another minister chimed in with yet another line of black preacherly praise. “You killed everythang in here. And if it wasn’t dead, you put it in intensive care.” At that, we all laughed heartily and agreed that the preacher had hit his mark.

  As a young minister in my early twenties, I was just glad to be in their number, bonding with ministerial mentors, men standing on the front line of spiritual warfare, or, as the black church memorably refers to it, “standing in the gap”: carrying and crying the judgment of the Almighty, opening opportunity for salvation, proclaiming the soul’s rescue and the requirements of redemption, and edifying believers with the inscrutable, wholly uncompromising, tell-it-like-it-is, to-bepreached-in-season-and-out-of-season gospel of the living God. I was simply enjoying this magical moment of fraternal friendliness. And it was just that. No women were there. No one thought it odd that they weren’t. We never remarked once on their absence, and, indeed, we counted on their absence to say things, manly things, that we couldn’t, didn’t dare say, in mixed company. Still, I wasn’t prepared for what followed.

  “Revrun, I need to ask you something,” the visiting preacher begged the pastor. His eyebrows were raised, a knowing look was on his face, and his voice affected, if not quite a mock seriousness, then a naughty whisper that clued us that his curiosity was more carnal than cerebral.

  “Who is that woman with those big breasts who was sitting on the third aisle to my left?” he eagerly inquired. “Damn, she kept shouting and jiggling so much I almost lost my concentration.”

  “She is a fine woman, now,” the pastor let on.

  “Well, Doc, do you think you could fix me up with her?” the visiting preacher asked with shameless lust.

  “I’ll see what I can do, Revrun,” the pastor promised.

  The married preacher’s naked desire shocked me. To my surprise, it also made me secretly envious. The fact that he could seek an affair less than an hour after he had thundered against it offended my naive, literal sense of the Christian faith. I thought immediately of how angry I’d been in the past when I heard preachers justify their moral failings, especially their sexual faults. Such ministers chided their followers with a bit of theological doggerel dressed up as a maxim: “God can hit a straight lick with a crooked stick.”

  But in ways I didn’t yet completely understand, I envied the preacher’s sense of sexual confidence. He was able to zoom in on his desire and, to borrow a favorite neo-Pentecostal catchphrase, “to name it and claim it.” The preacher—and he was surely aware of it, since he didn’t let principle stand in the way of his pleasure—had apparently made his peace, however temporary, with the war between Christian ideals and delights of the flesh. I hadn’t.

  Still, I’m glad I didn’t mount a high horse that night to trample the preacher. I’ve developed enough failures in the sometimes bloody management of erotic desire. So have many other black Christians. Especially those seeking, like most people of faith, to close the gap between what they believe and how they behave. That night, I was nearly tortured by questions I couldn’t answer. Was the preacher’s theology off? Did he have a flawed understanding of how a Christian should view the body and its sexual urges? Was his extreme sexual libertarianism just plain out of order? Was he simply a hypocrite? Or was he acting out, however crudely, a confused sense of black Christian sexuality that is, by turns, repressed and excessive? Or all of the above?

  The answers to these questions are not as simple as we might believe, despite the rigid certainty of self-anointed arbiters of Christian Truth. And neither are the answers relevant simply for cases, like the one I’ve described, where everyone can agree that something was wrong. It’s much more difficult to figure out how we can have a healthy sense of black Christian sexual identity in a world where being black has been a sin, where black sexuality has been viewed as a pathology, and where the inability to own—and to own up to—our black bodies has led us to devalue our own flesh. We must recover the erotic uses of our bodies from the distortions of white racism and the traps of black exploitation. We must liberate ourselves to embrace the Christian bliss of our black bodies.

  At the beginning of the African presence in the New World, black bodies were viewed in largely clinical and capitalist terms. The value of black slave bodies was determined by their use in furthering the reach of Western colonial rule; expanding the market economies of European and American societies; institutionalizing leisure for white cultural elites; deepening the roots of democracy for white property-owning gentry; and providing labor for the material culture that dominates the American landscape. Interestingly, when Christianity poked its nose in, chattel slavery, already a vile and dehumanizing affair, got even uglier.

  Christianity insisted there was a need to save the savages from their own cultural deficits. White Christians sought to rescue slaves from perdition by making sure
what little soul they had was made suitable for the Kingdom of God. Christianity gave theological legitimacy, and racial justification, to widely held beliefs about black inferiority. It also sanctified the brutal methods deemed necessary to tame the beastly urges of black Africans. White society exploited black labor. White Christianity made it appear that God was behind the whole scheme. Some argued that God used slavery as a tool to bring backward Africans to America. They believed God used white slavers to save black souls by subjugating their bodies. Christian theology shook hands with slavery and sailed off into the sunset of white supremacy.

  A key to keeping blacks under white control was the psychological poison pumped into the intellectual diets of slaves. Whites viewed black bodies as ugly, disgusting, and bestial, and blacks were made aware of this. Black bodies were spoken of in the same breath as, say, horses and cows. As if being viewed as an animal wasn’t bad enough, blacks were also considered property. Because of Western beliefs about the connection between moral and aesthetic beauty, the belief in the ugliness of black bodies carried over to attitudes about black souls.

  Black sexuality sat at the heart of such judgments. If black bodies were demeaned, black sexuality was demonized. Unless, of course, it was linked to breeding black babies for slavery, or, in the case of black women, satisfying the lust of white men. Thus, a central paradox of black sexuality began. Even as whites detested black bodies for their raw animalism, they projected onto those same black bodies their repressed sexual yearnings. Black bodies provided recreational and therapeutic relief for whites. Although that paradox has certainly lessened, it has not entirely disappeared.