The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (11 page)

This psychological reductionism is nowhere more apparent than in the second half of
Best Intentions
. As Anson interviews Perry’s classmates, teachers, and administrators, he draws a psychological portrait of Perry as an angry, hostile, and belligerent person. True, but Anson never really tells us why. He does not connect his psychological portrait to any social structural analysis—either of Exeter or of Harlem as Perry experienced them. When we do get hints of an explanation of Perry’s actions—from either his white classmates or Anson—they are usually by way of further appeals to psychological factors. His classmates say Ed had a chip on his shoulder because of race, indeed that he was a racist himself. Anson wonders whether the stories of white racism that Veronica Perry told Ed “shaped” him, because he was “impressionable,” possibly causing him to attempt to mug a New York police officer.

To his credit, Anson considers the possibility that Ed’s psychic turmoil was occasioned by the clash of cultures between Harlem and Exeter. But aside from a brief review of common understandings of race relations, liberal social policy, and Harlem history of the last few decades, he doesn’t even begin to cover the moral,
political, socioeconomic, and historical ground that psychology shares in a plausible explanation of Perry’s life and behavior. The condition of the black underclass, the way in which gentrification of black living space continues to shrink black life options, an understanding of the psychic, spiritual, and physical attack on black men—all these factors would help chart a comprehensive approach to Perry’s life and death.

Such an approach would avoid merely personalistic explanations that totally blame Perry. It would also avoid merely structural explanations that totally absolve Perry of any responsibility for the choices he made. In short, it would provide the richest detail possible about the circumstances of Perry’s life so that he is rendered as a human being faced with difficult choices, choices that must be made within a complicated configuration of personal and structural constraints. Anson simply has not done this.

Instead, he gets mired in a great myth of liberal theory—the myth of meritocracy—and fails to comprehend how a person of Perry’s talent could have failed. The dominant belief that legitimates the central place of achievement in U.S. culture and explains the distribution of goods and privileges is that all things being relatively equal, one gets what one merits, based upon intelligence, industry, and a host of other American character traits. The single most important social issue that has focused the problems and contradictions of the meritocratic approach is affirmative action.

Throughout
Best Intentions
Anson employs Perry as an example of the “legitimate” complaints white Exeter students had against blacks for receiving “preferential treatment.” He says that Perry’s race helped him gain admission to Stanford and Yale. Furthermore, Anson reports, several Exeter faculty members admitted this point, referring to the experience of the white valedictorian in Perry’s senior year “who possessed an academic and extracurricular record far more distinguished than Eddie’s,” and who applied to Stanford, “but was not admitted.” This example is intriguing because throughout the book Anson reports that Perry was, by most accounts, an extremely intelligent, articulate youngster “sought after by name” by places like Princeton and Yale. But its importance lies elsewhere. It reflects the confusion of effect with cause that underlies Anson’s view of Perry. Anson seems to forget that affirmative action was instituted to redress inequality of opportunity; whites who inherit the privileges of economic resources, old boy networks, and the like are not making it on “merit” alone.

The kind of assumptions that inform Anson’s thinking are precisely what exacerbated Perry’s situation as a black student at a predominantly white institution. On the one hand, many “liberals” want to address past wrongs by admitting qualified minority students to elite educational institutions. On the other hand, these same students are then blamed for extending and perpetuating inequality by being the recipients of “preferential treatment.” Unfortunately the terrain on which this battle is fought is the lives of minority students. How can Anson grasp Perry when he, too, is a victim of the same limited understanding?

Anson might have overcome the limits of his approach if he had made a more sustained attempt to acquaint himself with Afro-American culture. But as is clear in several places in
Best Intentions
, he just doesn’t understand the general concerns or basic themes of Afro-American life.

Anson asks whether the stories Veronica Perry told her son, stories about the evils of white racism and the need not to “judge all whites harshly,” had made Perry “racially proud” or “angry enough, possibly, to have vented that rage on a seemingly innocuous white boy on a darkened city street.” What Anson apparently doesn’t understand is that in telling her son these stories Veronica Perry was performing the tragically necessary task most black parents face: telling her child about the viciousness of racism while ratifying her Christian belief that hate is not the proper response for victimized blacks. Thus, she was preparing Edmund Perry to negotiate the difficult process of identifying and acknowledging racism while channeling the resulting, and justifiable, anger into creative and redemptive strategies for coping.

Anson remarks that Perry told different stories to different people, pointing to the obvious fact that he was “pretending” in order to augment his image as a ghetto street tough. But there is more. As is obvious throughout the book, Perry more easily (although sometimes only after extensive scrutiny) formed close associations with other blacks and especially sympathetic whites, able to tell and share one story with them and another with the rest of Exeter. Perry most likely learned, as do most black people, that he could not afford to bare his soul often—either because truth telling could not be borne by particular moods of the white conscience or because it could not be tolerated by many aspects of the white worldview. For example, when told by a teacher that he needed counseling, Perry said there wasn’t anyone on campus he could talk to, that the only people he could talk to were black, and that “anytime he tried to open up to whites and be honest, he always wound up hurting someone’s feelings.” Or again: a white student who shared many classes with Perry told him that “people are just people,” and that “some people are white and some people are black, and if you are going to get bummed out about it, it’s pretty dumb.”

Thus, in order to avoid a discourse of perpetual blame (whose payoff is usually only increased frustration) and the pain of having to explain oneself, to argue for the logic or legitimacy of one’s being, Perry adopted a familiar coping strategy: he knew when, and when not, to open and reveal himself. While, as a maturing youth, Perry undoubtedly “pretended” and lied, it is important not to confuse this with strategies adopted to deal with an environment that is hostile and insensitive to one’s identity. Ironically, Anson’s psychological perspective does not comprehend this crucial point.

More poignantly, throughout the book Anson quotes and refers to Veronica Perry’s strong religious beliefs, which Anson thinks are “extremely intense.” He sees Veronica Perry’s swing from profound belief in the wisdom of God in taking her son to a bitter denouncement of the police system that killed him as a possible
indication of her emotional instability. (She had had a nervous breakdown.) In fact, her “mood swing” may be understood as ad hoc theodicy, an attempt to come to grips theologically as best she could with the evil that killed her child. It is an attempt to vindicate—through faith—belief in a good and loving God who may appear absent or silent in the face of human suffering, without at the same time excusing the human beings who inflict that suffering. It is a theme that runs through the Afro-American Christian engagement with the world, and it is a central problem in Christian theology.

Finally, a most telling moment comes when, in speaking of what led to Perry’s death, Anson concludes, “The only villain I found was something amorphous, not a person or thing, just a difference called race.” He then checks his conclusion with “the only black friend I really had.” It happens that Anson’s phantom friend also knew Edmund Perry. The disturbing aspect of this is that Anson checks the viability of his interpretive vision against the understanding, insight, and knowledge of one black man, who, Anson says, offered to “guide me as my reporting went along, not by providing specific leads, but by confirming whether or not what I came up with was correct.” We are thus left with the definite impression that Anson does not know very much about the
diversity
of Afro-American thought and culture. In what constitutes an irony of liberalism, he depends upon his only black friend, thereby tokenizing that thought and culture and segregating himself from a powerful tradition that might have deepened his reflections on Perry’s life and death.

The upshot of Anson’s approach is that even though he unearths the conflicts and consequences of being socially and culturally amphibious, of negotiating the psychological demands of two different worlds, his findings just pass him by. He cannot fashion an understanding of Edmund Perry’s life and death. All we hear is the restatement of a “difference called race” without any attempt to explain what difference that difference makes.

Two other approaches to race might have helped Anson understand what made Edmund Perry’s life hell. The first is the racial formation theory advanced by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their book
Racial Formation in the United States
. In going beyond liberal race theory, Omi and Winant want to avoid the economic determinist and class reductionist elements in most progressive and leftist race theory, and conceive race as an irreducible category, like gender and class, for social theorizing about oppression. Racial formation theory, then, seeks to capture the process by which racial categories are formed, transformed, destroyed, and reformed. Furthermore, it treats race as a central axis of social relations that resists being subsumed under a larger category like ethnicity. It takes seriously the psychological, social, political, cultural, and historical as crucial explanatory strands in a full-blown theory of race.

The second theory is Cornel West’s analysis of race, first articulated in
Prophesy
Deliverance!
and now developed in an essay in his new book,
Prophetic Fragments
.
²
West, like Winant and Omi, seeks to avoid reductionist accounts of racism. West’s
theory permits him to trace the emergence and development (or genealogy) of the idea of white racism and supremacy in modern Western discourse. Such an approach promotes the unearthing of the material, economic, political, cultural, psychological, sexual, and spiritual forces that express and respond to the social practices of racism within the cultural traditions of Western civilization. West’s theory has three stages: (1) a radical historical investigation of the emergence, development, and persistence of white supremacy; (2) an analysis of the mechanisms that develop and maintain the logic of white supremacy in the everyday lives of people of color; and (3) an examination of how class exploitation, state repression, and bureaucratic domination operate in the lives of people of color. Both theories, then, offer an analysis of racism that takes seriously the psychological, social, political, cultural, and historical as crucial explanatory strands. They therefore offer a much more comprehensive picture, in alliance with the broader and deeper perspective of Afro-American culture, of the complex, stubborn reality Edmund Perry faced.

In a revealing passage early in the book, Anson tells of the time Martin Luther King came to Chicago to march for open housing. It was the summer of 1966, and Anson, fresh out of Notre Dame, was a correspondent for
Time
. He marched with King and was present when King was hit on the head with a rock. He was one of the people who “pulled him up and shielded him.” The supreme irony may be that twenty years later, while intending to shield King’s legacy, Anson has left it more vulnerable and exposed.

—ZORA NEALE HURSTON
“THE ‘PET’ NEGRO SYSTEM,” 1943

THE STUDIO CRACKLED WITH EXCITEMENT. Although I had appeared on Black Entertainment Television (BET) a few times before, this night was special. In fact, it was extraordinary. Former BET anchor Ed Gordon, my Detroit homeboy, had snagged the first televised interview with O.J. Simpson since his acquittal for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her companion, Ron Goldman. BET asked me to give “color commentary” before and after Simpson’s appearance. A large irony, indeed. I’d written about Simpson in my previous book, and I’d discussed his trial on other national television shows. But there was poetic justice in me talking about Simpson’s trials and tribulations, and those of black America, on the only television station that caters to black folk.

I must confess that I was an O.J. addict. I watched the trial every day for hours at a time. I was completely mesmerized. I knew it was a vulgar display of American excess. I knew it was the revelation of the gaudiness behind the lifestyles of the rich and famous. (Of course, I took delight in seeing so many rich folk exposed for the shallow people many of us hoped they’d be.) I knew it was the theater of the absurd meets the Twilight Zone. I knew as well that the trial was a painful choreography of black grief—that of O.J. and of every black person who identified with him—before an international audience. I knew it was totally artificial, a sordid drama full of kitsch that fiendishly aspired to the status of morality play. I knew it was the story of a black man who had made good but who had forgotten what made it possible, which made it bad. I knew it was all that and much, much more. And I couldn’t stop watching.

Even as questions about O.J.’s guilt or innocence fade from daily debate, we continue to grapple with the wounds the trial exposed, with the trial’s revelations of the pernicious rules of race in America, ‘90s style. That night, as I viewed Simpson on the big screen in BET’s green room, I was struck again by how flawless his face is, how smooth his skin is. But I was taken as well by the jagged horrors his eyes never gaze on—how many white folk now hate his name, how they wish he would disappear. And some wish him dead. And how black folk look at him with a mix of pity and disdain. Like the member of the family you have to recognize but hate to, because the recognition embarrasses him as well. I was struck by the size of the denials by which Simpson lives, as if he must now draw energy from the resentment that he can’t afford to acknowledge, though its sheer vehemence defines and confirms his every step. Seeing Simpson so resiliently spiteful that night—not in any way bitter against whites, just against the idea that they might not love him—made it painful for me to have to say anything after he spoke. It was the final step in my loss of a hero who had once thrilled me, as he, in Ralph Ellison’s words, “slice[d] through an opposing line with a dancer’s slithering grace.” A part of me was now gone. It was sad, and sadly disorienting.

Something of the same disorientation gripped America when Simpson was set free. When the not-guilty verdicts in the O.J. Simpson double-murder case were handed down, the compass of race went haywire. The Simpson case has made many Americans doubt if we can all get along. The case has rudely reminded us
of a gigantic and numbing racial divide. It reminds us, too, that boasting about racial progress often hides racial pain. The response to the verdicts knocked down the floodgates that hold back the waters of racial hostility The Simpson case also taught us a tough lesson: the more settled race relations seem to be, the more likely they are raging beneath the surface.

Americans have become addicted to the Simpson case for more than its grotesque exaggeration of our secret racial fears. From its very beginning the case was overloaded with huge social meanings we claim not to be able to understand under normal circumstances. We have become dependent on the Simpson case to represent complicated truths that we think can only be illustrated by catastrophe. That dependence shows contempt for ordinary signs of ruin. It ignores the experience of common people, especially blacks, whose silent suffering is the most powerful evidence of decay. What their experience shows us is this: a two-tiered universe of perception rotates around an axis defined by race. While good fortune lights one side, despair darkens the other. It is rarely sunny at the same time in white and black America. In a nutshell, that’s what the Simpson case reminds us of.

That O.J. Simpson is at the heart of the most ugly racial spectacle to hit America in decades is a symptom of just how crazy things are. For a quarter century, Simpson symbolized the icon-next-door. His athletic genius was revered by many blacks. His athletic skill and “colorless” image were attractive to millions of whites.

Simpson’s sleek form and catlike grace as a running back brought glamour to a brutal sport. Simpson beautifully combined judgment and intuition. His sixth sense for where his pursuers were likely to pounce on him allowed him to chisel arteries of escape around heaving bodies.

As with many famous athletes, Simpson’s athletic exploits gave him influence beyond the boundaries of his sport. This is hardly natural. After all, why should athletes receive tons of money and notoriety beyond the recognition and compensation they earn in sports? The absurdity of this is masked by the fact that we take for granted that such things should occur. That’s not to say sports don’t teach us valuable lessons about life. Sports are often a powerful training ground for moral excellence. Take the case of Willis Reed, the injured center for the 1969–1970 New York Knicks who was not expected to play in the seventh and deciding game for the NBA championship. When Reed emerged from the locker room, limping but determined to compete, several virtues were literally embodied: sacrifice of self for the sake of the larger good; the courage to “play through pain”; and the sort of moral leadership that rallies one’s teammates and lifts their level of expectation and achievement. These virtues transcend sport. They inspire ordinary people to overcome obstacles in achieving their goals.

There’s another way, one wholly beyond his choosing, that the rare athlete has managed to rise beyond the limits of his sport. Some figures have served as heroic symbols of national identity. Others have heroically represented achievement against the artificial restrictions imposed on a group of people. In those cases, a restriction was also placed on competition as an ideal of democratic participation.
Joe DiMaggio, of course, fit the first bill. His fifty-six-game hitting streak in baseball thrilled America in 1941, a colossal feat of endurance to which the nation would turn its attention time and again as our preeminence as a world power began to fade after World War II. Jackie Robinson fit the second meaning of heroism. As major league baseball’s first black player, Robinson performed gallantly in the face of bitter opposition. His gifted play paved the way for blacks in his sport and beyond the bounds of baseball.

Joe Louis managed the difficult art of fulfilling both sorts of heroism. He existed in a racial era just as complex—if more violent—as the one Robinson faced. As was true of DiMaggio’s Italian world, Louis’s black community celebrated its ethnic roots while affirming its American identity. Louis captured the genius of American citizenship and the protest of blacks against their exclusion from full citizenship in a single gesture: the punch that sunk German boxer Max Schmeling at the height of Nazism. That punch transformed Louis into an American hero. It also revealed the hidden meaning of Louis’s heroic art: beating white men in the ring was a substitute argument for social equality. Louis’s prizefighting was an eloquent plea to play the game of American citizenship by one set of rules.

Simpson never aspired to that sort of heroism. In part, that’s because the times didn’t demand it. Near the start of Simpson’s pro career in the late ’60s, the tension between the older civil rights establishment and the newer black power movement produced a more acerbic model of black heroism. Instead of integration, many blacks preferred separating from white society to build black institutions. Black antiheroism gave an angry face to the resentment that festered in pockets of black life. To be an American and a Negro—later still, a black man—were not considered flip sides of the same coin. They were different currency altogether.

Judging from Simpson’s behavior during the height of his career, he had no interest in claiming whatever remained of Louis’s heroic inheritance. Neither was Simpson attracted to the sort of antiheroism championed by his contemporary, Muhammad Ali. Ali’s self-promoting verse and brilliant boxing proved to be sparring matches for his real battle: the defiance of white authority because of his religious beliefs. And Simpson certainly wasn’t drawn to the plainspoken demeanor of fellow athlete-turned-actor Jim Brown. Brown’s militant, studly image had Crazy Negro written all over it. It was the opposite of everything Simpson seemed to stand for. That is, until he was charged with brutally slashing his ex-wife and her companion.

Simpson’s appeal beyond sports rested on two related but distinct factors: commerce and the conscious crafting of a whitened image. Simpson came at the beginning of an era when athletes began to make enormous sums of money inside sports. (To be sure, Simpson’s highest salary was pittance compared to what even mediocre sports figures now make.) He also helped pioneer the entrepreneurial athlete. Simpson hawked everything from tennis shoes to soft drinks. He turned charisma into cash on television. Now that Michael Jordan has eclipsed everyone
who came before him, it’s easy to forget that Simpson’s Hertz commercials used to be the star that athletes aimed for in marketing their fame.

The wide adulation heaped on Simpson beyond his gridiron glory also owed much to his absent, indeed
anti
-racial politics. Simpson soothed white anxieties about the racial turmoil caused by black radicalism. Simpson’s Teflon racelessness assured white citizens and corporations that no negative, that is, exclusively black, racial inference would stick to his image. That is Jordan’s charm as well. He is a latter-day Simpson of sorts. His universal appeal derives from a similar avoidance of the entanglements of race. As the old black saying goes, it’s alright to
look
black, just don’t act your color. As Simpson’s case suggests, the Faustian bargain of trading color for commercial success may prove devastating in the long run.

Simpson’s silence about race didn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. After all, given the history of their relative powerlessness, blacks have a heroic tradition of fighting in ways that cloak their rebellion. They adapt their speech and activity to the language and styles of the dominant society. Silence in the presence of whites was often a crucial weapon in the war to survive. If it looked like blacks were happy to be oppressed, all the better. Such appearances greased the track of covert action on which black freedom rolled. For instance, slaves sang spirituals both to entertain their masters and to send each other coded messages about plans of escape.

Still, Simpson’s privileged perch in white America led many blacks to hope that he might cautiously speak about the troubles of ordinary blacks. It soon became clear, however, that Simpson was having none of that. What many blacks wanted from Simpson was no different from what was expected of other blacks. Simpson was not expected to be a politician. At least not in any way that departed from the political behavior required of all blacks in O.J.’s youth, who had to carry themselves with an acute awareness of their surroundings. To do less meant early death. Or, more crushing, it meant a slow, painful surrender of life in gasps of frustrated energy because you just didn’t understand the rules of survival in a white world.