The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  1. Rose, Black Noise; Neal, What the Music Said; Boyd, Am I Black Enough for You? George, Hip-Hop America.

  2. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollection of an Indian Official, and Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude, 1849–1850; Barren, The Rastafarians; Dyczkowski, The Doctrine of Vibration.

  3. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels and Bandits; Seal, The Outlam Legend; Duncan, Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons.

  4. Boccaccio, Decameron.

  5. Davis and Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography; Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography.

  6. Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences; Massey and Demon, American Apartheid; Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged and When Work Disappears; Kelley, Yo’ Mama ’s Disfunktional.

  7. Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement; Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Dittmer, Local People; Fairclough, Race and Democracy; Hine, Hine Sight; Giddings, When and Where I Enter; Garrow, Bearing the Cross; Carson, In Struggle; White, Too Heavy a Load; Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind ; Branch, Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire.

  8. Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music; Wolff, You Send Me.

  CHAPTER 24. BETWEEN APOCALYPSE AND REDEMPTION: JOHN SINGLETON’S BOYZ N THE HOOD

  1. These statistics, as well as an examination of the social, economic, political, medical, and educational conditions of young black men and public policy recommendations for the social amelioration of their desperate circumstances, are found in a collection of essays edited by Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species.

  2. William Julius Wilson has detailed the shift in the American political economy from manufacturing to service employment and its impact upon the inner city and the ghetto poor, particularly upon black males who suffer high rates of joblessness (which he sees as the source of many problems in the black family) in The Truly Disadvantaged. For an analysis of the specific problems of black males in relation to labor force participation, see Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams Jr., eds., A Common Destiny, pp. 301, 308–312.

  3. I have explored the cultural expressions, material conditions, creative limits, and social problems associated with rap, in “Rap, Race and Reality,” “The Culture of Hip- Hop,” “2 Live Crew’s Rap: Sex, Race and Class,” “As Complex As They Wanna Be: 2 Live Crew,” “Tapping into Rap,” “Performance, Protest and Prophecy in the Culture of Hip-Hop,” and in Jim Gardner, “Taking Rap Seriously: Theomusicologist Michael Eric Dyson on the New Urban Griots and Peripatetic Preachers (An Interview)” (see chap. 3, this volume).

  4. I have in mind here the criticism of liberal society, and the forms of moral agency it both affords and prevents, that has been gathered under the rubric of communitarianism, ranging from MacIntyre’s After Virtue to Bellah et al.’s Habits of the Heart .

  5. I am indebted to Christine Stansell for this characterization of how Singleton departs from Capra’s depictions of community in his films.

  6. See Mike Davis and Sue Riddick’s brilliant analysis of the drug culture in “Los Angeles: Civil Liberties between the Hammer and the Rock.”

  7. For an insightful discussion of the relationship between the underground or illegitimate economy, and people exercising agency in resisting the worse injustices and effects of the legitimate economy, see Don Nonini, “Everyday Forms of Popular Resistance.”

  8. For a recent exploration of the dynamics of social interaction between police as agents and symbols of mainstream communal efforts to regulate the behavior and social place of black men, and black men in a local community, see Elijah Anderson, Streetwise, pp. 163–206.

  9. According to this logic, as expressed in a familiar saying in many black communities, black women “love their sons and raise their daughters.” For a valiant, although flawed, attempt to get beyond a theoretical framework that implicitly blames black women for the condition of black men, see Clement Cottingham, “Gender Shift in Black Communities.” Cottingham attempts to distance himself from arguments about a black matriarchy that stifles black male social initiative and moral responsibility. Instead he examines the gender shifts in black communities fueled by black female educational mobility and the marginalization of lower-class black males. But his attempt is weakened, ironically, by a prominently placed quotation by James Baldwin, which serves as a backdrop to his subsequent discussions of mother–son relationships, black male–female relationships, and black female assertiveness. Cottingham writes: “Drawing on Southern black folk culture, James Baldwin, in his last published work, alluded to black lower-class social patterns which, when set against the urban upheaval among the black poor from the 1960s onward, seem to encourage this gender shift. He characterizes these lower-class social patterns as ‘a disease peculiar to the Black community called sorriness.’ ‘It is,’ Baldwin observes, ‘a disease that attacks black males. It is transmitted by Mama, whose instinct is to protect the Black male from the devastation that threatens him from the moment he declares himself a man.’

  Apart from its protectiveness toward male children, Baldwin notes another dimension of ‘sorriness.’ ‘Mama,’ he writes, ‘lays this burden on Sister from whom she expects (or indicates she expects) far more than she expects from Brother; but one of the results of this all too comprehensible dynamic is that Brother may never grow up—in which case the community has become an accomplice to the Republic.’ Perceptively, Baldwin concludes that the differences in the socialization of boys and girls eventually erode the father’s commitment to family life.”

  When such allusive but isolated ethnographic comments are not placed in an analytical framework that tracks the social, political, economic, religious, and historical forces that shape black (female) rearing practices and circumscribe black male–female relations, they are more often than not employed to blame black women for the social failure of black children, especially boys. The point here is not to suggest that black women have no responsibility for the plight of black families. But most social theory has failed to grapple with the complex set of forces that define and delimit black female existence, too easily relying upon anecdotal tales of black female behavior preventing black males from flourishing, and not examining the shifts in the political economy, the demise of low-skilled, high-waged work, the deterioration of the general moral infrastructure of many poor black communities, the ravaging of black communities by legal forces of gentrification, and illegal forces associated with crime and drugs, etc. These forces, and not black women, are the real villains.

  10. For a perceptive analysis of the economic conditions that shape the lives of black women, see Julianne Malveaux, “The Political Economy of Black Women.”

  11. The peculiar pain that plagues the relationships between black men and black women across age, income, and communal strata was on bold and menacing display in the confrontation between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill during Senate hearings to explore claims by Hill that Thomas sexually harassed her while she worked for him at two governmental agencies. Their confrontation was facilitated and constructed by the televisual medium, a ready metaphor for the technological intervention into contemporary relations between significant segments of the citizenry. Television also serves as the major mediator between various bodies of public officials and the increasingly narrow publics at whose behest they perform, thus blurring the distinctions between public good and private interest. The Hill-Thomas hearings also helped expose the wide degree to which the relations between black men and black women are shaped by a powerful white male gaze. In this case, the relevant criteria for assessing the truth of claims about sexual harassment and gender oppression were determined by white senatorial surveillance.

  12. Thus, it was unexceptional during the civil rights movement for strong, articulate black women to be marginalized, or excluded altogether, from the intellectual work of the struggle. Furthermore, concerns about feminist liberation were generally overlooked, and many talented, courageous women were often denied a strong or distinct institutional voice about women’s liberation in th
e racial liberation movement. For a typical instance of such sexism within civil rights organizations, see Carson’s discussion of black female dissent within SNCC, in Clayborne Carson, In Struggle, pp. 47–48.

  13. For insightful claims and descriptions of the marginal status of black feminist and womanist concerns in black communities and for helpful explorations of the complex problems faced by black feminists and womanists, see bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman; Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues; Audre Lorde’s Sister/Outsider; and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Garden .

  14. Of course, many traditional conceptions of virtue display a theoretical blindness to structural factors that circumscribe and influence the acquisition of traditional moral skills, habits, and dispositions and the development of alternative and non-mainstream moral skills. What I mean here is that the development of virtues, and the attendant skills that must be deployed in order to practice them effectively, is contingent upon several factors: where and when one is born, the conditions under which one must live, the social and communal forces that limit and define one’s life, and so on. These factors color the character of moral skills that will be acquired, shape the way in which these skills will be appropriated, and even determine the list of skills required to live the good life in different communities. Furthermore, these virtues reflect the radically different norms, obligations, commitments, and socioethical visions of particular communities. For a compelling critique of MacIntyre’s contextualist universalist claim for the prevalence of the virtues of justice, truthfulness, and courage in all cultures and the implications of such a critique for moral theory, see Alessandro Ferrara, “Universalisms: Procedural, Contextual, and Prudential.” For an eloquent argument that calls for the authors of the communitarian social vision articulated in Habits of the Heart to pay attention to the life, thought, and contributions of people of color, see Vincent Harding, “Toward a Darkly Radiant Vision of America’s Truth: A Letter of Concern, An Invitation to Re-Creation.”

  CHAPTER 33 . MICHAEL JACKSON’S POSTMODERN SPIRITUALITY

  1. See Larry Black, “The Man in the Mirror,” Maclean ’s, May 2, 1988, p. 67; Michael Goldberg and David Handelman, “Is Michael Jackson for Real?” Rolling Stone, September 24, 1987, p. 55; Jay Cooks and Denise Worrell, “Bringing Back the Magic,” Time, July 16, 1984, p. 63; and Jim Miller and Janet Huck, “The Peter Pan of Pop,” Newsweek, January 10, 1983, pp. 52–54.

  2. See Peter Petre, “The Traumas of Molding Crazes into Cash,” Fortune, July 23, 1984, p. 48; Alex Ben Block, “Just One More Thriller,” Forbes 400, October 1, 1984, pp. 232–234; “Michael Jackson Says ‘Beat It’ to Bootleggers,” Businessweek, June 4, 1984, p. 36; and Goldberg and Handelman, “Is Michael Jackson for Real?” p. 140.

  3. See, for example, “The Prisoner of Commerce,” New Republic, April 16, 1984, p. 4.

  4. For an explication of the European (especially French) contexts of postmodernism, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); for an exploration of contemporary American postmodernism, see Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983); see also Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); see also his essay, “Mapping the Postmodern,” in New German Critique 33 (Fall 1984), for a historical situating of German, French, and American arguments on postmodernism. Also see the excellent collection of essays edited by Andrew Ross, Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

  5. Quoted in Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

  6. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 145 (1984): 53–91.

  7. Anders Stephanson, “Regarding Postmodernism: A Conversation with Fredric Jameson,” in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 1–12.

  8. Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1988), pp. 168–170.

  9. Hal Foster, Postmodern Culture (Concord, Mass.: Pluto, 1985), pp. xii–xiii.

  10. Michael Jackson, Moonwalk (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 13. All future references will be cited in the text.

  11. Cornel West makes this salient point about the use of a language of rights by African-American religionists involved in the civil rights movement, in West, Prophetic Fragments, pp. 22–24.

  12. For a useful summary of the meaning of ritual in religious experience, see Leszek Kolakowski, Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 165–170.

  13. For Bakhtin on carnival, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968).

  14. See Cornel West’s insightful discussion of a Christian understanding of democracy in his Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), especially the introduction and chapter 4.

  15. Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 10.

  16. Michael Jackson, “Thriller,” Thriller, Epic/CBS Records, 1983.

  17. Michael Jackson, “Bad,” Bad, Epic/CBS Records, 1987.

  18. Michael Jackson, performer, “Man in the Mirror” (co-written by Siedah Garrett and George Ballard), Bad, Epic/CBS Records, 1987.

  19. For a penetrating examination of rock music videos and a plausible way of categorizing MTV videos, see E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987), esp. chap. 4. Many of Jackson’s videos are more closely akin to short films, and thus demand a reading that regards them as such. Also, the religious, cultural, and racial contexts of Jackson’s video films must be examined, as I attempt in my analysis of two of Jackson’s video films and of a live performance on the 1988 Grammy’s telecast.

  20. For the effect of Niebuhr on King’s thought, see his essay, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 35–36.

  21. Goldberg and Handelman, “Is Michael Jackson for Real?” p. 138.

  22. Robert Sam Anson, Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry (New York: Random House, 1987). For a hard-hitting, highly critical review essay of Anson’s book, see Michael Dyson, “Edmund Perry: The Help That Hurts,” Christianity and Crisis 48 (1988): 17–21, expanded as “The Liberal Theory of Race,” chap. 9, this volume.

  CHAPTER 34 . BE LIKE MIKE? MICHAEL JORDAN AND THE PEDAGOGY OF DESIRE

  1. I do not mean here a theory of commodification that does not accentuate the forms of agency that can function even within restrictive and hegemonic cultural practices. Rather, I think that, contrary to elitist and overly pessimistic Frankfurt School readings of the spectacle of commodity within mass cultures, common people can exercise “everyday forms of resistance” to hegemonic forms of cultural knowledge and practice. For an explication of the function of everyday forms of resistance, see Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance .

  2. For a critical look at Jordan behind the myth, see Sam Smith, The Jordan Rules (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).

  CREDITS

  Chapter Previous Publication

  1. Not from Some Racial Zeus’s Head: My Intellectual Development. From Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture and Religion (New York: BasicCivitas, 2003), pp. 3–22.

  2. Letter to My Brother, Everett, in Prison. From Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 3–21.

  3. This I Believe. From Quest, Spring, 1971, p. 31.

  4. The Liberal Theory of Race. From Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis, MN: Univer
sity of Minnesota Press), pp. 132–143. Originally published in Z Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3, March 1989, pp. 52–57.

  5. When You’re a Credit to Your Race, the Bill Will Come Due: O.J. Simpson and Our Trial by Fire. From Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (Reading, MA: AddisonWesley, 1996), pp. 10–46.

  6. Debating Affirmative Action. Recorded at Wistar Institute, University of Pennsylvania, February 11, 2003.

  7. A Reprieve for Affirmative Action. From Philadelphia Inquirer, June 25, 2003, p. A15.

  8. Leonard Jeffries and the Struggle for the Black Mind. From Reflecting Black: African- American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 157–163. Originally published in Emerge, February 1992, pp. 32–37.

  9. Shakespeare and Smokey Robinson: Revisiting the Culture Wars. From Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 120–134.

  10. The Labor of Whiteness, the Whiteness of Labor, and the Perils of Whitewishing. From Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Reconstruction of America, eds. Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman (Boston: Mariner Books, 1997), pp. 164–172.

  11. Giving Whiteness a Black Eye. From Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture and Religion (New York: Basic Civitas, 2003), pp. 99–125. Originally published in White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America, ed. Joe Kincheloe et al (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 1998), pp. 299–328.

  12. The Plight of Black Men. From Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 182–194. Originally published in Z Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 2, February 1989, pp. 51–56.

  13. Another Saturday Night, or Have All the Brothers Gone to White Women? From Why I Love Black Women (New York: Basic Civitas, 2003), pp. 195–232.

  14. In O.J.’s Shadow: Kobe Bryant’s Predicament. From Savoy, October 2003, pp. 64, 66, 68.