The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

ALSO BY MICHAEL ERIC DYSON

Mercy, Mercy Me

Why I Love Black Women

Open Mike

Holler If You Hear Me

I May Not Get There With You

Race Rules

Between God and Gangsta Rap

Making Malcolm

Reflecting Black

Copyright © 2004 by Michael Eric Dyson
Hardcover edition first published in 2004 by Basic Civitas Books
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Paperback edition published in 2004 by Basic Civitas Books

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Civitas Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

Books published by Basic Civitas are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge MA 02142, or call (617) 252-5298 or (800) 255-1514, or e-mail
[email protected]
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The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Dyson, Michael Eric.
    [Selections. 2004]
    The Michael Eric Dyson reader / Michael Eric Dyson.
        p.     cm.
    Includes bibliographical references.
    ISBN 0-465-01768-1 (hc.)
1. African Americans—Race identity.   2. United States—Race relations. 3. African Americans—Intellectual life.   4. African American philosophy. 5. African Americans—Social conditions—1975–.   6. African Americans in popular culture.   7. Popular culture—United States.   I. Title.
E185.625.D969    2004
305.896'073—dc22

2003017294

ISBN-13 978-0-465-01771-3 (pbk.)
ISBN-10 0-465-01771-1 (pbk.)
DHSB 05 06    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

eBook ISBN: 9780786725106

TO TWO EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN

Rosa Elizabeth Smith

(1921-2002)

Beloved matriarch

Wise counselor

Soulful confidante

and

Fiesty Mother-in-law

AND

Judith Rodin

President, the University of Pennsylvania, 1994-2004

Visionary leader

Brilliant thinker

Beautiful woman

and

Dear Friend

I first encountered Michael Eric Dyson on the page over ten years ago. I’d seen a few of his essays in
Z Magazine
sometime around 1989 or 1990, but at that time he was virtually unknown (to me, at least, but I was only two years out of graduate school and didn’t get out much). Then, in 1993, a copy of his first book,
Reflecting
Black: African-American Cultural Criticism,
crossed my desk, and the
Nation
magazine asked me to review it. Although it was a wide-ranging collection of essays, I found the book to be nicely organized, coherent, powerful, and critically relevant to the moment.

The old folks might remember that 1993 was a period when the so-called “black public intellectual” was coming into being, prompted largely by the publication of Cornel West’s
Race Matters
that same year. West’s collection of essays became a runaway bestseller, opening up critical black radical thought to a wider audience in an age when Los Angeles was still rebuilding from the rebellion of April 1992. But with West’s mass appeal came a backlash, from the left and right, against
Race Matters
and everything Professor West stood for. Of course, there were legitimate debates and criticisms that shed light on crucial issues of race, class, gender, and power, but much of the backlash was motivated by jealousy or a confused notion that “real” radicals cannot attract a mass audience without selling out. Indeed, I remember multiple backlashes against black academics, as well as some horrible battles between folks on the page that did not enlighten me or my peers one bit. This was the context in which I read Dyson’s first book. In my review in the
Nation
I mentioned the “nasty ad hominem reviews, petty jealousies, blanket condemnations of black scholarship, hateful and sinister commentaries.” “As I kick it down here with the ordinary faculty folk,” I complained, “writing grant proposals and reading sorry undergraduate essays—and witness the war of words—I have these perverse daydreams of Rodney King pleading with black intellectuals to get along while The Pharcyde, that funny, funky, Thelonious Monkloving West Coast hip-hop group chant ‘Who Is the Nigga in Charge?’”

Dyson’s book was a welcome relief from the wars of blackademe. Of course, he had his own debates to wage and own axes to grind, but for the most part he wrote about black people, what we’ve created, what we’ve come to represent, and why we should not be too quick to make snap judgments about what is “authentically black.” He warned against blind “race loyalty” and insisted that real liberation requires independent thinking and a willingness to criticize black leaders, intellectuals, and cultural heroes. His voice was fresh, his language vibrant,
and to top it all off, he was a working-class kid from Detroit committed to activism and the social gospel. “Evident in every essay,” I observed at the time, “is a belief that the Gospel is a lived struggle, not merely a popular compilation of writings, folklore, and pithy slogans separate from everyday life. Thus Dyson, like Cornel West, is concerned with what he sees as a spiritual crisis in America, especially among young people. But rather than follow the common trend nowadays of chastising African-American youth for relinquishing some golden-age spirituality and ethics of their parents’ generation, he seeks signs of the spirit in various secular cultural forms. Spirituality, Dyson recognizes, may be in crisis, but it ain’t gone. It looks different, and if we are going to locate it we must use different interpretive tools.”

So before I even met the man, I knew there was something special about him. Given his writing style at the time, I imagined him to be a modern-day holy man, meditative, contemplative, deeply spiritual. He probably talked slow like the old preachers, but he was only thirty-four years old. When I finally did meet him, a few weeks after the review appeared in the
Nation
, I wasn’t prepared for this tornado of a man who spoke faster than the speed of light and dropped more oneliners than Richard Pryor on a good night. He was as agile with Western philosophy as he was with soul, R&B, and hip-hop. It was as if W.E.B. DuBois and Fab Five Freddy had been merged together in some Frankensteinian experiment. And through it all, his lovely and brilliant wife, Marcia Dyson, kept him on the ground and balanced. Both kept us in stitches. I laughed so much and learned so much that night that the muscles in the back of my head cramped up.

The Michael Eric Dyson Reader
will have some skeptics, to be sure. How could anyone who experienced such a meteoric rise—from pastor to Ph.D. candidate to Distinguished Professor in a little over a decade—claim to have produced enough for a “reader”? He has published eight books in that short period, and he has more in press soon to see the light of day. And if you put this book on the scale, you’ll see that this carefully selected fraction of his output competes in the heavyweight division. Nevertheless, quantity isn’t everything, and his detractors will continue to call him names like “race hustler” and “charlatan” and related adjectives that suggest that Dyson doesn’t do his work and just slides by on his quick wit and glib tongue. (While I vehemently disagree with these assessments, I have thought of Michael at times as somewhat of a magician; he has an uncanny ability to pull lyrics and quotes and dictionary definitions out of his head, and the story of how he produced his dissertation, told in the
first chapter
of the
Reader
, is worthy of David Blaine.)

The truth is, Michael Eric Dyson is an incredibly hardworking intellectual, one who is on a mission to inspire the rest of us to remake the world. Most people, fans and critics alike, don’t realize how hard he works because he makes it look easy and he writes a lot without footnotes. But dig deeper and one quickly realizes that beneath the surface of his wit and humor one finds intellectual depth, scholarly integrity, and a startling level of erudition. As the works included here
reveal, Dyson is one of the few scholars in the country who can honestly be called multidisciplinary. His books and essays on black cultural production draw on the most sophisticated literary and cultural criticism, critical theory, sociology, ethnography, and history, and he brings to his work a rich and varied understanding of music and music criticism. What’s more, Dyson has been able to write for a general audience without minimizing his scholarly tone and rigor.

His essays selected here examine a wide terrain of culture, politics, and social criticism, and nearly all of his work is policy-oriented, immediate, and, I might add, politically engaged. His essays should be read as efforts to understand the plight of aggrieved populations—notably black working people, youth, and women—and how their lives and cultures speak to the conditions they face. On the other hand, he insists that people take responsibility for their behavior and criticizes black institutions for failing black communities. His essays on the Black Church, for example, are bold challenges to the failure of black clerical leadership and the apparent moral hypocrisy running through contemporary institutionalized religion. He had nothing to gain by writing these pieces, and they are well-documented and well-argued, and have played a crucial role in placing behind-the-scenes debates into a wider realm. The same goes for his scintillating work on black public intellectuals. He takes no prisoners, on the one hand, and yet offers smart, concise commentary on the debate over black intellectuals that takes a long, historical view of the work they have done over the past century. The “Coda,” in particular, is not a self-congratulatory essay but a call to arms, one that demands political engagement as a component of our intellectual work. Finally, for all the efforts to place music and other cultural forms within particular antiracist, class-conscious contexts, to see contemporary black culture as subaltern social struggles generated by racist backlash, poverty, and Reaganomics, Dyson refuses to over-interpret or romanticize. Nor does he accept the dualism of “nihilism” vs. “black radicalism” that has frozen too many writers.

As his work on Malcolm X and other political and cultural icons demonstrates, Dyson has a gift for grasping the politics of representation. Rather than quibble over the details of Malcolm’s life or his self-representation, Dyson chooses wisely to pay more attention to the meaning of Malcolm X for our time, whether in the academy or the theater. He succinctly captures what Malcolm, the icon, has meant to a rising generation of black nationalists. Unlike other commentators who dismiss African-American youth wearing X-hats as suffering from an infantile disorder, Dyson tries to make sense of these young people within the context of their time. He does not try to speak for them but allows them to speak for themselves. As he makes abundantly clear, the rise of hip-hop culture, the resurgence of black nationalism, and the success of
New Jack
and ghettocentric filmmakers are largely responsible for the return of the fallen minister to the pantheon of black heroes.

Ironically, the work that is represented with only one excerpt here happens to be my personal favorite:
I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.
(2000). I urge all of you who hold this book in your hand to add Dyson’s masterful study of Dr. King to your collection. He doesn’t attempt to find the “real” King, but he does juxtapose the ways in which he’s used politically (especially by rightwing antiCivil Rights activists, black nationalists, hip-hop generation youths, corporate America, etc.) with King’s own words, actions, and the movement histories on which we’ve come to rely. He delves deeply into primary and secondary sources and is not afraid to examine controversial issues such as King’s sexual liaisons, patriarchal attitudes, and his left-wing turn. He succeeds in toppling the icon of King and puts in his place a human being replete with flaws, weaknesses, and youthful exuberance. In a world where Malcolm X is often promoted as the embodiment of postwar black radicalism and King regarded as a safe voice in the wilderness, Dyson demonstrates just how his socialist, class, and antiwar politics persuaded the Civil Rights establishment to more or less silence him. And it was that silence, that suppression of history, which allowed conservatives and corporate leaders to claim King’s message as their own. While Dyson received a great deal of (unfair) criticism for his willingness to deal with King’s sexual escapades and missteps, to me this is one of the strengths of the book and of all of Dyson’s scholarship. Rather than suppress or ignore what we don’t like or what we might think is not relevant to the “real” King, Dyson embraces it, dissects, and tries to understand in the time and place of his subject, not from a presentist standpoint understand in the time and place of his subject, not from a presentist standpoint.

This is what Dyson is all about; it is a quality of his writing and speaking that I recognized ten years ago, and it is as strong as ever. He is willing to take the criticisms, the ribbing, the ridicule, because in the end speaking truth to power and standing up for justice is far more important than garnering good reviews and friends in high places. Among black academics, the battle royale still rages, but Dyson doesn’t jump into those three rings. Instead, he’s working his ass off trying to give white supremacy—and patriarchy, and classism, and youth bashing—a black eye.