Michael Eric Dyson

by Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?

  * not inspired but honored, because knowledge is power and they have inlighted me on sertain aspects about my self.

  Girls

  * I just want to read his book called Why I Love Black Women

  * Yes I want to respect myself first.

  * Yes, to respect myself as a woman.

  * He inspired me to say how I feel and express my feelings.

  * Yes, strength within and women coming together to support one another.

  DID THE AUTHOR CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK/FEEL ABOUT YOUR LIFE?

  Boys

  * To me the author change the way I think. When he gave his speech I thought in my mind I need to start doing right and stay out of trouble and stop coming to jail.

  * Yes he did because now I know there are some people who care about us.

  * Made me feel better about myself inside.

  Girls

  * Yes, he proved you didn’t have to sell your body to have some one to love you.

  * Yes, because I like to see authors alot

  * He made me think a little more

  * Yes, I wasn’t thinking about my feelings or my body until he came and spoke with us.

  * I feel better about myself

  If we could reach more, many, many, more, of our young people, and touch them, hold them and love them, then we might be able to change their lives and how they view themselves. But until we radically alter our educational system, and solve the problems of poverty and social deprivation, our children will continue to spiral down stairwells of suffering and oppression. While Bill Cosby’s frustration is understandable, his mean-spirited attacks on the vulnerable and the poor will do nothing to lift them from the catastrophes they endure. Until we fight on the educational, political and social fronts—and change the way resources are drained from black schools, homes and neighborhoods, and redistribute them within our own black spaces—all of the raving and ranting in the world will only embolden the vicious enemies of black children to do even less, while it will dishearten those who want to see a better world for some of the most beautiful but buffeted children on the globe.

  Chapter Three

  What’s in a Name (Brand)?

  Are you not paying attention, people with the hat on backwards, pants down around the crack. Isn’t that a sign of sometin’, or you waitin’ for Jesus to pull his pants up? (laughter and clapping ). Isn’t it a sign of sometin’ when she’s got her dress all the way up into the crack … and got all kinds of needles and things going through her body. What part of Africa did this come from? (laughter). We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans, they don’t know a damned thing about Africa. Wit’ names like Shaniqua, Taliqua, and Muhammad and all that crap, and all of ’em are in jail.

  Bill Cosby is not the first person to lash out at poor black youth for how their bodies are clothed and modified, and for what seems to be the infernal nonsense of their names. His disgust echoes ancient white and black protests of strutting and signifying black flesh. It is impossible to gauge Cosby’s disdain, and the culture’s too, without following the black body on the plantations and streets where its styles were seen as monstrous and irresistible. We might then see how depressing it is for Cosby to be so ignorant of black youth and the issues they are up against, and what’s more, we should mourn his determination, and that of many more, to stay that way.

  Human beings use clothing to create and control their identities.1 That’s especially true for poor youth, who often feel powerless to influence the world around them. For young people, styles of fashion often encourage extravagant self-expression. When they select clothes, young folk do more than drape their bodies in the latest styles; they are also helping to shape identities they have either inherited or invented. Their clothes may suggest playful excess or curious understatement, depending on their moods or needs, and young folk often see their bodies as works of art in need of relentless restyling.

  Black urban youth can hardly help viewing their bodies as targets—of cultural opposition and creative opportunity. Since they are so widely talked about and often feared, their flesh is a mobile laboratory of personal expression where style is both the hypothesis and the experiment. There is little doubt that fashion in black urban circles rises to performance art, a necessary trait in a culture where performance has always been at a premium. Black urban fashion constantly reminds young folk of just how culturally durable they are, since they are among the most imitated and appropriated people on the globe, though often without footnotes, copyrights or royalties. But they are vulnerable too, and despite their achievements they are often devalued by elders like Cosby who have already made up their minds about black youth’s bodies. Their flesh may be celebrated in stylish cultural theories of resistance, but the plain fact is that hating the dress of black youth, or, really, the lower classes in general, is older than the baggy pants and short dresses that ride up Cosby’s nerves.

  Ever since we have been free, black folk’s style of dress in urban centers has been a concern to white society and bourgeois Negroes.2 At first, whites laughed at ex-slaves as they strolled along the streets of southern cities in the late nineteenth century. Black folk were considered repulsive and ludicrous in their imitation of the fine clothing worn in white society. Hateful whites, and even less vicious commentators, played up the contrast between fine clothing and awful, ugly black flesh. Darker hued black women were singled out for their alleged grotesqueness: big lips, noses and eyes protruding beneath bonnets and lace caps as their blue-dark skin shined remorselessly out from get-ups deemed unsuitable for the Negro body.3 The very stylishness of blacks also angered many whites. They were not used to seeing well-dressed blacks during slavery and became severely agitated by the sight of elegantly dressed men and women attending social gatherings in northern cities like New York in the 1820s. Whites called the New York police when they were outraged at seeing in public well-adorned blacks strolling in style to their rare place of recreation, a club called the African Grove, which was immediately shut down. Later, when an African theater that featured the debut of legendary actor Ira Aldridge was established on the same spot, white rioting and police harassment closed its doors as well.4

  But white laughter soon turned to scorn as whites caught on to blacks who were using the streets as a performance arena. Forced by economic hardship and racial segregation into the public spaces of black neighborhoods, especially the corners and main walkways, black folk were literally performing their newfound freedom from slavery by moving and displaying their bodies. Making a virtue of necessity, since they had to compete with whites for public space, blacks in the late nineteenth century took to the streets and remade them into a theater of self-expression, parading and strolling back and forth in the clothing that was the most visible sign of their emancipation. There was certainly a compensatory function to their raiment: Blacks who were otherwise poor and deprived would nevertheless invest in clothing and perform their liberty by freely experimenting with fashion.

  This trend continued into the early twentieth century. By then, whites resented and feared the ways that black bodies invaded sectors of southern urban culture. The black streets had by then become a largely masculine domain where black males experimented as extravagantly with their social identities as they did with their colorful dress. Despite the brutal confinement of black life under Jim Crow law, black folk in the early 1900s refashioned the streets with some of their most uplifting and imaginative performances: A constant parade of black bodies claimed formerly terrorized social space with stylish abandon. Blacks still had to be careful, however, because looking too good offended whites. They didn’t want to believe that the same colored folk who had scraped the bottom of the barrel could now rise higher than whites had either hoped or expected. Good dressing among blacks signaled resistance to the lowly status they had been forced to accept. A great outfit carried ominous symbolic weight far beyond the segregated borders of black life.

  The social customs of subordina
tion on southern streets revolved around clothing: Black men had to have their hats in their hands to show deference, or tip their hats to whites to show respect.5 Whites aimed to control and monitor black life—which was the meaning, after all, of laws that restricted black mobility in the white world—and bore down on even the most intimate details of black life before they, well, got out of control. The black sense of the ornate carried political meanings that whites surely didn’t miss; they were insulted by good black dress because it meant that blacks had, however subtly, shredded social barriers. Their way of dress gestured to the beginning of the long, slow death of social apartheid. If black folk could wear the clothes that white folk wore, and look good in their defiance of white culture, it wouldn’t be long before they would want to slip into the prestige and authority whites enjoyed as well. As Shane White and Graham White write, just as “slaves, in the antebellum world, had been expected to look the part, shunning any sign of assertiveness and even demonstrating their contentment, so, under the racial system that had crystallized by the turn of the century, African Americans were required to dress, walk, comport themselves, and direct their gaze in a manner that registered uncomplaining subservience.”6

  In the north, where the Great Migration in the early 1900s swept Negroes by the thousands into industrial cities from Chicago to Detroit, city sidewalks were jammed with signifying black bodies that were to a degree free of the intrusive eye of white society. Although they contained women and girls, the streets remained a masculine haven, filtering the mores and values, the styles and sensibilities, the worries and fears, and the joys and hopes of black males, accounting for the streets’ vibrancy and their occasional, unavoidable terror, given the cramped circumstances of black living. Lower-class men overtook the streets to perform their distinctive modes of masculine identity: in the clothes they wore, the walks they perfected—including “shooting the agate,” or strutting coolly with one’s hands at one’s sides with the index fingers protruding—and the thrilling way they captivated the corners with their commerce, recreation and carousing.7

  Looking good on their streets was of high value to the black middle class and black elite as well.8 In Afristocratic circles, sartorial splendor was differently judged; the aesthetic of black elegance and dignity countered stereotypes of black savagery and contrasted favorably with the gaudy extremes associated with lower-class blacks. The class divide found a sure index in competing styles of dress. Middle-class blacks “and members of the elite were keen to distance themselves from the dress and demeanor of ordinary African Americans and, at the same time, to curb what they viewed as the sartorial and kinesic excesses of those they saw as their social inferiors.”9 The black elite saw their dress as part of “genteel performance,” where black aristocrats “exercised the self-restraint, both in the parlor and on the street, that were the prime attributes of gentility. For them, the genteel performance no more allowed boisterous laughter and conversation on a streetcar than it did shouting during a church service.”10 Black aristocrats disdained “overdressing” and the “exaggerated styles” that black female aristocrats associated with “Boulevard women.”11

  The extravagant dress of lower-class blacks, perfected in the stroll down any number of northern streets, is part of what may be termed jubilant performance, marked by social verve, resistance to convention, and the willingness to experiment. There was a freer, more improvisational character to dress as well: Blacks embraced unique fashion combinations that reflected the hodgepodge manner in which black urban identities were carved together. To be sure, jubilant performance was also associated with antitypes of secular black culture, including “pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, hustlers, numbers runners, bootleggers, and drug dealers,” evoking criticism from white and black quarters.12

  The black aristocracy was unnerved by the black poor—how they dressed, how they spoke, how they behaved—because they constantly felt the stares of white disapproval. Although blacks successfully battled whites to garner space in the urban north and transact their cultural affairs, they still fell under white scrutiny. The black elite’s fear that the ways of poor black folk would make their own tenuous positions in society even more vulnerable prompted black aristocrats to carry out a program of moral rebuke disguised as social uplift. They lectured, preached, cajoled, beseeched and condemned the black poor for the good of the race, or, rather, for the good of members of the race who were fatally obsessed with white approval. To a degree, the black elite acted out of necessity, but perhaps to a larger degree, their actions proved how they had unconsciously drank in the poisonous view of the black poor that whites forced on them. The Afristocracy, therefore, became accomplices to white panic and surveillance.

  To be sure, strong traditions of black conservative morality make it hard to write the black elite off as mere tokens of white consciousness or pawns of white control. But there was a measure of ethical substitution involved, as the ideals of white society were part of a reverse invasion of black life: Having endured the occupation of blacks in significant, though largely destitute, social spaces, white authority struck back with a black hand. Every time the black aristocratic finger pointed at poor black folk’s pathology, four more fingers of white moral unease folded into its palm. There is little doubt that Afristocrats were mercilessly prodded into their reactionary pose by white society, and that they were themselves the subject of extraordinary scrutiny. But it must be acknowledged that in the black elite’s strained relations with poorer blacks, white supremacy got two for the price of one. The overly watched black aristocracy over-watched the black poor, themselves already fixed by a damning white gaze in the optics of racial paranoia. No matter how each clothed itself, whether in elegant concession to white culture or in extravagant resistance, black aristocrats and the black poor were stitched together in the fabric of white rejection.

  Up north, the black poor and struggling weren’t interested in performing deference to whites in public with demeaning rituals like those practiced by their southern kin. There would be little hat holding, eye averting or brim tipping to accommodate white authority. Instead, blacks on northern streets riotously explored jubilant performance through fashion, song and recreation, wringing as much joy as possible from a harsh existence of constant toil and meager wages. The black elite were frightened and enraged by the refusals of the black poor to color their lives with white values and black bourgeois demands. The black aristocracy used newspapers and pulpits to whip the black poor into order, to shame them, if they could, into acting right, which often meant acting white.13 Not only did black aristocrats fear that jubilant performance would be seen as too aggressive, but they felt that poor and struggling blacks confirmed every stereotype of uncouth behavior. The conflicts among blacks of different classes were nearly as bruising as those between the races, blasting the delusion that, before segregation’s demise, black folk of every station were knit together in harmony.

  There was great harmony, and melody, too, in the triumphant musical notes that black folk blew into the midst of their struggles. Besides relief from doldrums and despair, black musicians supplied an example of what could happen when black expression was unfettered by self-doubt or cultural sneering. To be sure, there were many cultured despisers of popular black art, especially jazz, on both sides of the racial divide, but black musicians outlasted and outplayed their opposition with their colossal gifts. They performed a vision of excellence in which their people took enormous pride. Their talent often extended to elegant and stylish dress as well, and in the 1920s, as now, black musicians were “arbiters of fashion, as well as its avant garde.”14 Their styles ranged from the formal, well-coiffed elegance of Earl Hines, decked out in tuxedo and Chesterfield overcoat, to the sharp-as-blades sartorial extravagance of Cab Calloway’s colorful zoot suits. Black musicians often blended aristocratic bearing with jubilant performance in elevating the illicit meanings of the streets (one thinks of the zoot suit’s political meanings of resistance to white
fashion and values and how its literally outlawed extravagance came into play in prestigious artistic circles and beyond).15 In the art and clothing of these musicians, black urban culture marked the cultural landscape in unforgettable fashion.

  Today, the relation between the streets and art holds steady. Developments in black life, technology and race relations over the last few decades have only increased the influence of black urban culture in the nation. Black artists still shape the world’s perception of black street culture, except now, instead of jazz, they draw from the bravado and flourish of rap music. Rarely has a secular black culture as proudly, and defiantly, embraced the extravagant excesses and exaggerated poses of poor black identity as they do hip-hop. Even more than their predecessors, hip-hop artists play a critical role in circulating the meanings and messages of urban black culture. Hip-hop stars and impresarios like Sean “P. Diddy” Combs (Sean John), Jay-Z (Rocawear) and Russell Simmons (Phat Farm) have branded their products—compact discs, films and especially fashion lines—across a number of media, proving that black urban styles have global reach in the international marketplace. Like all youth subcultures, black urban youth shape their identities through style and appearance.16 Black youth both embrace and resist the mainstream in finding their place in the aesthetic ecology, the living environment of style and image that thrives on organic forms of self-presentation. The working class, in particular, became a locus of youth rebellion against social convention; their clothing expressed outrage, alienation and distrust of the sartorial and moral standards of adult society. Moreover, by selecting clothes whose style was associated with lower and working classes, youth were able to express antiestablishment attitudes through “garments that are unclean, unkempt and disordered.”17