When I think about contemporary black masculinity, I can’t help reflecting on another intriguing, contradictory, infuriatingly complex figure: Dennis Rodman. In fact, he’s helping redraw the boundaries of black masculinity in the most archetypically black masculine sport there is, basketball. Basketball has arguably replaced baseball as the paradigmatic expression of the highly mythologized American identity, since sport is a crucial means by which America regenerates its collective soul and reconceives its democratic ideals, to borrow Emersonian language. Basketball also has elements of spontaneity; individual genius articulated against the background of group success; and the coalescence of independent creative gestures in a collective expression of athletic aspiration. In a sense, basketball provides a canvas on which American identity can be constantly redrawn. The cultural frameworks of American identity, especially American masculinity, are being symbolically renegotiated in black masculine achievement in basketball.
Dennis Rodman has the sublime audacity to challenge the codes of masculinity at the heart of black masculine culture in the most visible art form, besides hip-hop culture, available to black men. He transgresses against heterosexist versions of machismo that dominate black sport. For instance, he wears fingernail polish and he occasionally cross-dresses in advertisements and public relations stunts, wearing a wedding gown in its white purity against that 6’9” brown body that “the Worm,” as he’s nicknamed, inhabits. Even his nickname signifies; it suggests the burrowing of an earth-bound insect into the hidden spaces of the soil, deep beneath the surface of things. And it’s not as if Rodman were a marginal figure. He’s acknowledged as the most gifted rebounder in the NBA today, and one of the greatest of all time. His specialty is unavoidably representative. He’s constantly grabbing the ball off the backboard, taking shots that are left over from the failed attempt to score, enhancing the ability of the team to win. His genius on the court is, in précis, a symbolic articulation of black masculine identity; it is a major trope of black masculinity, since black men are constantly “on the rebound,” and “rebounding” from some devastating ordeal. Black men are continually taking missed shots off the glass, off the backboard, and feeding them in outlet or bounce passes to some high-flying teammate who is able to score on the opposition. Ordinary and iconic black men are constantly helping American society to rebound from one catastrophe or another and to successfully overcome the opposition in scoring serious points, serious arguments, serious goals.
This is precisely why you are reviled in some circles. This reading of Dennis Rodman, with which I agree wholeheartedly. Consider me now as the organist who plays those chords behind the sermon. Dennis Rodman is terribly fascinating. I laughed uproariously to see him show up with arched eyebrows and fingernail polish in the championship series on the day after wearing a boa to his book signing. And here he is performing the dirtiest, roughest, most “masculine” aspects of the game for his team.
He’s inscribing those aspects in the text of black masculinity—because 80 percent of the players in the NBA now are black, so we have to talk about it as a black man’s game. Dennis Rodman’s relationship to basketball is similar to disco’s relationship to American music, and especially black pop music. The black gay aesthetic informed the construction of the post-R&B era before the rise of hip-hop culture. It was widely reviled, although it is now being reexcavated in popular culture for archetypal images of American identity. Disco focused on the rhythm as opposed to the substance of the words; it highlighted the rhythmic capacity of the voice against the lyrical content of what was being articulated. Disco culture was about a kind of rapturous and transgressive move against the sexual segregation of gay and lesbian bodies in social space. It was about the freedom and ecstasy of dance where clubs became sanctuaries for the secular worship of the deities of disco: rhythm, carnival, play, movement, and sexualized funk, elements that helped its adherents choreograph an aural erotopia. Those streaming, swirling globe lights that fixed on the dance floor assured that artifice was taken as the ultimate reality. I guess you could say in a sense that Sylvester got a hold of Baudrillard. The way that disco prefigures and precipitates a postmodern American sensibility often gets erased. Disco was dissed because its black gay aesthetic vogued against what was in vogue, and therefore its sexual transgression was the subtext, or what they call in philosophy the suppressed premise, of the logic of an ostensibly “straight” black pop musical culture.
Dennis Rodman’s effect is comparable. He’s the suppressed premise of the logic of black masculinity’s prominence in basketball. So he helps to construct the public face of black masculinity along with Connie Hawkins, George Gervin, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Julius “Dr. J” Erving, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Charles Barkley, and Michael Jordan. Through Dennis Rodman’s body of work, the homoerotic moment within sport, and especially within black masculine athleticism, surfaces: Patting one another on the behind to say “good game” or “good play,” hugging and kissing one another, falling into each other’s sweating arms to boost camaraderie, and so on. This is a sexualized choreography of suppressed black desire and the way it is portrayed from the gridiron to the hardwood floor, pun intended! Dennis Rodman’s figure invites us to see that homoeroticism has a lot to do, ironically enough, with the seminal production of black masculine athletic identities. The homoerotic and gay sensibility, contrary to popular perception, doesn’t stop—and certainly in his case may even fuel—great athletic and masculine achievement. My God! The brother is an outlaw in what was formerly an outlaw and, racially speaking at least, outlawed sport.
There was a time, remember, when blacks weren’t allowed to play professional basketball. When they were relatively early in their tenure in the NBA, in the early 1970s, Ebony magazine did an annual article that featured every black player on every team, something unimaginable today. And don’t forget that the New York Knickerbockers during this time were called by racist fans the New York “Niggerbockers” because of the presence of Frazier, Monroe, Willis Reed, Dick “Fall Back Baby” Barnett, and Henry Bibby. Rodman’s homoeroticized black athletic body is “outlaw(ed)” in several simultaneously signifying fashions, so to speak. The outlaw and the rebel, with apologies to Eric Hobsbawm, are countercultural figures whose lives embody the hidden and contradictory ethical aspirations of the masses, or at least some of them, even if the masses are not altogether aware of, or don’t consciously identify with, the ideals the outlaw or rebel embodies. So Dennis Rodman is performing a kind of above ground “dream work” for the collective sexual unconscious of black masculinity. What Dennis Rodman’s example shows is that even as black masculine culture overtly represses sexual difference and attempts to conceal or mystify homoerotic elements and behavior, it often depends on that very homoerotic dimension for athletic entertainment.
This homophobic dimension would seem to explain why most groups distance themselves from Rodman. Black people explain his absurdities by pointing to his time in Oklahoma. White people can point to his black urban ghetto origins. He thus seems to be an unusual signifier who can be whatever you need him to be. In other words, there are no false statements you can make about Dennis Rodman.
He’s a successor next to Michael Jackson, in that sense. Not only is what you say about Dennis Rodman true, but what you say about Dennis Rodman is what you say about yourself. Even as you try to read Dennis Rodman, you’re reading yourself. There’s a relationship between ethnography and epiphany, between self-revelation and the excavation of the other.
To talk for a moment of this modern/postmodern divide about which you spoke earlier, could you talk for a moment of how your intellectual development has been affected by television and cyberspace. When I look back over Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I think to myself how differently he might have perceived things in the face of television.
I think immediately of what legendary singer and spoken word artist Gil ScottHeron famously s
aid, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Well, in many ways, it has been televised, except the revolution about which he spoke has been replaced by the revolution of the medium itself. It’s like Marshall McLuhan meets Barney Fife. I’m a child of television, even though my mother tells me that early on when I was mad at my family because I wanted to read a lot, I’d say, “Y’all don’t read enough, you watch too much TV.” I think it’s God’s joke on me that part of my life as a cultural critic is to be an analyst of television. Television has very deeply influenced my understanding of pop culture and my intellectual development in the sense that I take it as another very powerful text that we have to read, that we have to interpret, that we have to consume. I think that my self-understanding certainly has been to a degree both shaped by and articulated against the images, ideas, and ideologies on television, as they enable an on sight—and that’s deliberately ambiguous for me, both s-i-g-h-t and s-i-t-e—negotiation of black identity. The evolution of television, along with the evolution and influence of film, sport, and music, has coincided with the evolution of the popular conception of black people in this country.
Besides its effect on my intellectual development and the professional pleasure it has provided me in reading its various texts, television has also extended an outlet to me to advocate social change, analyze culture, and argue about ideas. I know that’s not the sense you meant by your question, but it leads me to reflect on another reason I’m drawn to TV, I think it’s a legitimate medium through which to educate the public and to disrupt, subvert, and transgress against hegemonic forces. First of all, I talk so fast, which is both a good and bad thing for television. I can get a great deal in during a five-minute span on a news or talk show, and even more when I’ve got more time. On the other hand, I know I should slow down sometimes, but sometimes I’m really suspicious of slowing down. I sometimes prefer the machine-gun approach, given the often coarse and certainly fast-paced nature of television time and rhetoric. So, on occasion, the staccato, rapid-fire rhetorical style I have is usefully unfettered on television. I want my style to shatter that airtight medium. I want it to put a dent in television because it’s an incredibly pedagogical medium.
As intellectuals, we ought to get used to the fact that television is a medium that affects people’s identities and perceptions of reality, sometimes for the good. There have been studies carried out that show that people trust their local newspeople more than they trust their clergy people. People still look to conventional news broadcasts on TV to get their information, even more than from written journalism or from the alternative press. So I want to bring my alternative, nontraditional, perhaps even subversive viewpoint to bear on and within this most hegemonic of mediums.
In some ways, television has proved to have ideological flexibility, especially when radicals pop up on rare occasions. At least there’s the potential to shatter dominant ideological modes, if even for a brief moment. We should definitely take advantage of television’s episodic fluidity. I don’t see television in a snobbish way. I’ve been on Oprah to talk about black oppression, black masculinity, and female identity. I’ve gone on CNN to talk about race, white supremacy, and electoral politics. I want to seize television as a pedagogical tool to help liberate or transform folk, or at least contest what Stuart Hall calls the preferred meanings of the dominant culture, juxtaposing them to what he terms the negotiated meanings, as I acknowledge the prevailing ideological framework while arguing for alternative structures of thought and oppositional practices. I want to use television to challenge our culture’s common sense, in the way Gramsci meant it, and to help educate and occasionally uplift those who pay attention.
That does fit within the ways that I wanted to hear you talk about the medium. This also points me back to your notion of this betweener generation—people in their late thirties and very early forties. People just a few years older than the betweeners remember television in its early, formative stages, when televisions weren’t ubiquitous. They remember Uncle Milty, and TV was still a novelty. But, for me, when I wake up to memory it’s there and it’s unremarkable. It’s on and it’s unremarkable. One of my earliest TV memories, at three, almost four years old, is seeing Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. That’s a vivid scene I remember seeing—sitting on my mother’s bed—that scene. That’s one of those moments I’ve somehow written into my mind as an early moment. That and also realizing, somewhere around my thirtieth birthday, that from as far back as I could remember until my thirteenth birthday that the news started every day with the body count from Vietnam. That’s pretty deep—to realize that there is a generation of us, eight years old in 1968, old enough to be aware of the assassinations, of the riot in Chicago, of moon landings, of Detroit and Newark, of all the stuff happening around you, seeing it come at you and nobody talks to you about it. So, in 1987 and 1988 I carried around a grudge because People, Time, and Newsweek did “summer of love” and “summer of discontent” retrospectives. So, they talked to (all) the people who were adult participants in ’67 and ’68. Then they talked to people who were twenty years old in ’87 and ’88. And I thought: “you did it again!” In 1968 no one said anything about this to me. Here, again, in 1998 you ask everybody but me.
You’re so right. You’ve brought up here what is not my first memory of television, but it is my most important one. That is when I saw the newscaster interrupt the regular program to announce that MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. had been shot in Memphis, Tennessee. That is the most powerful moment of the television bonding with me, and of me bonding with the TV. I identified, almost beyond volition or consciousness, with the television as a medium, as an apparatus, that brought me an ideologically contested moment in black rhetoric. That is, MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. speaking his last speech. They flashed an image of him as he said what would immediately become some of his most famous words, “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.” That was a very profound and electrifying episode that shaped my life forever. I asked my mother, “Which one is he? Which one is he?” I remember distinctly, and I don’t know why they showed it, Dr. King at some point reeling back on his foot. I immediately felt his power; his words were like containers brimming with the pathos of black life. Later, the newsman broke faith again with the printed program by saying, “MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. has just died at thirty-nine in Memphis, Tennessee.”
And now, here I am thirty-eight, and you’re thirty-seven, so we’re basically the same age and almost the age at which King died. King’s death was stunning to me. I had never heard of Martin Luther King Jr. before that point, and when he died in 1968—I was nine years old—it changed my life. Television literally changed my life because, after his death, I began to watch all the programs about Dr. King. I began to go to the library to read all the books I could about him that were available. I then ordered, through a telephone number I got off of the television, speeches that were available on records. I had my little record player back then, when vinyl was the medium of choice and analog was the order of the day. Then, through television, I ordered the commemorative book on Martin Luther King Jr. So, television was a very powerful medium that fused with my evolving self-consciousness as a young black person. The 1967 riots in Detroit also made me pay attention to television. It brought me scenes of social ignominy and racial deterioration right before my eyes, and made me realize that what I could see from my front porch in the streets—as people scurried up and down the pavement with money stashed in their big fros, televisions on their backs, and carrying all kinds of ill-gotten gains and goods—was refracted through the prism of a medium that made it larger than life.
Thinking back on the brothers and sisters in the streets, I’m reminded of the old joke Dick Gregory told about black people being stopped in the riots. These people were carrying a couch when the police stopped them. Dick Gregory said that when these people were stopped, they said, “Goddamn! A black psychiatrist can’t even mak
e house calls anymore!” And what else is it that they say? In a riot black people destroy everything but libraries and bookstores. Lord have mercy! Anyway, the reality is that the riots and the death of Martin Luther King Jr. point to how social catastrophe and transformation is either covered or concealed on television. These events spring from deeply embedded social processes of resolving or reinforcing conflict that are not usually explored in great depth on television, save in the rare in-depth documentary.
The contested and conflicted meanings of race in the 1960s were frequently papered over and smoothed out, resulting in the McDonaldization of Martin Luther King Jr. in a McLuhan universe where the medium was the message. It’s important to me that the medium through which Dr. King was articulated for me was a televisual apparatus—since I never met him in the flesh. And the message I got from him was about social change. My early identification with TV grew from the fact that it had the radical potential to transform, not merely to anesthetize, to open up and not merely to constrain, to shatter and not merely to constitute, social reality. I saw it as an imaginative apparatus through which, ideologically, we could resist and challenge dominant racial and cultural narratives. Now, I didn’t know all of this back then, but I felt a connection to King that transcended time and place and allowed me to identify with this figure whose life just revolutionized my consciousness. So, there’s no question that television changed my life.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 77