The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (19 page)

In the October 2001 issue of the
Village Literary Supplement,
I
argued that the most vexing moment in the literary landscape over the
last twenty years was, “hands down, the publication of Allan Bloom’s
The Closing of the American Mind.
It made snobbishness fashionable,
bigotry acceptable, and intellectual imperialism a thing to be
imitated in a slew of trailing tomes.” Bloom’s book was indeed the rallying
cry to war against a host of “enemies” of Western culture: blacks,
lovers of rock & roll, leftists, feminists, and basically whoever else didn’t
uncritically co-sign the superiority of dead white men. Although it is
true that even worthy causes sometimes flail in the crosswinds of cultural
fads, our culture is helped by robust multiculturalists who pursue their
aims without apology—in part, because the love of dead white men is
not foreign to those who want to open the canon beyond their books. It
has never been a question for multiculturalists of whether one should
love Whitman or Wright, but rather, how the resistance to widening
our view of greatness and nobility in the culture tells on our flawed and
biased literary custodians.

THE WHIRLWIND OF CONTROVERSY THAT surrounds the figure of Dr. Leonard Jeffries obscures the complex problems that must figure in an understanding of the nerve he has struck deep in the decadent cavity of race in America. The outspoken chairman of the black studies department of the City College of New York is the lightning rod for a gaggle of issues that embody a contemporary cultural crisis: theories of biological or environmental determinism, the rise of Afrocentric education, and claims about the African origin of civilization.

A speech Jeffries made in July 1991, in which he said Jews and Italians had collaborated in Hollywood to denigrate blacks and that Jews had financed the slave trade, drew outrage from many whites who felt that such alleged bigotry and antiSemitism warranted disciplinary action from the college. On October 28, 1991, the trustees effectively put Jeffries on probation as department head, although his employment was protected by his tenured status. However, further allegations that Jeffries had also threatened the life of a Harvard student journalist during an interview put Jeffries in danger of being dismissed for “conduct unbecoming a member of the staff.” City College had announced that it would investigate the allegations, which Jeffries called “scurrilous” and part of “a media lynching.”

Jeffries continues to be a popular figure among black students on campus and certain activists in the community. What seems to draw their interest are his alleged
statements about the role of the skin pigment melanin in shaping culture and behavior and his provocative use of the metaphor of sun people (who are warm, cooperative, and community-minded) versus ice people (who are cold, territorial, and aggressive). Few realize that the popular contemporary source of the sun people/ice people typology is a 1978 book,
The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western
Man’s Racism, Sexism, and Aggression
, by white Canadian author Michael Bradley.
¹

The melanin theory, however, has its genesis in a broad body of literature published mostly by independent or black presses and in highly technical studies in scientific and medical journals. Black authors like psychiatrist Richard King, in his book titled
African Origin of Biological Psychiatry
,
²
Carol Barnes in his privately published monograph
Melanin
, and lecturers such as Baltimore psychiatrist Patricia Newton have stimulated interest in the role of melanin in biological, mental, and racial development. Newton and King have also been a motivating behind-thescenes force in organizing a series of “Melanin Conferences,” held annually since 1987 in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., Dallas, and Los Angeles. Each conference has drawn more than five hundred participants—laypeople and community activists joining with scholars.

But the most prominent figure to introduce a consideration of the possible behavioral and cultural consequences of melanin to broad public discussion has been black psychiatrist Frances Cress-Welsing. Cress-Welsing first articulated in 1970 the Cress Theory of color confrontation and racism (white racism), which links the development of white supremacist ideology to white fear of genetic annihilation. Her theory maintains that “whiteness is indeed a genetic inadequacy or a relative genetic deficiency state, based upon the genetic inability to produce the skin pigments of melanin (which is responsible for all skin color). The vast majority of the world’s people are not so afflicted, which suggests that color is normal for human beings and color absence is abnormal. . . . Color always ‘annihilates’ (phenotypically and genetically speaking) the non-color, white.”
³
Cress-Welsing further states that because of their “color inferiority,” whites respond with a psychological vengeance toward people of color, developing “an uncontrollable sense of hostility and aggression,” an attitude that has “continued to manifest itself throughout the history of mass confrontations between whites and people of color.”
⁴

Ironically, Cress-Welsing now says she believes that the recent preoccupation with her melanin theory is a diversion from the more immediate problem facing people of color: white supremacy. “I put the discussion of melanin on the board in order to [describe how pigmentation] was a factor in what white supremacy behavior was all about,” she says. “If I had my way, there wouldn’t be all the discussion about melanin. I would say discuss white supremacy. White supremacy has guided the discussion to multiculturalism, diversity, to anything [but white supremacy].”
⁵

Indeed, white supremacy is a theme that Cress-Welsing single-mindedly pursues in her book
The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors
, a text that has sold nearly 40,000 copies, principally through black-owned retail outlets. But despite her currently stated interest in refocusing her message on white supremacy, she continues to develop her melanin theory, for example, by expounding on the neurochemical basis of soul and evil. Moreover, since her theory links white injustice with the inability of whites to produce melanin, her focus on white racism leads ineluctably to a concern with melanin.

Jeffries, too, has been attempting to distance himself from possible racist implications of the melanin theory. When he appeared on
Donahue
last fall, his first time on a national TV show, he said, “We do not have a theory of melanin that says black people are superior. It’s a joke. But it’s been run and run and run into the ground.” Jeffries contends that melanin is subsidiary to “the larger awakening of African peoples in terms of their real history,” because there is “an African primacy to human experience.”

But he just as often stressed the need for comprehending the crucial function of melanin in cultural and biological evolution. Jeffries noted that
Civilization or Barbarism:
An Authentic Anthropology
, the landmark book by the late Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, characterizes melanin as “the phenomenon which helps us establish that there’s only one human race, and that human race is African. Melanin is that phenomenon that comes about as a result of the sun factor.”

Jeffries says Diop links the development of melanin to a more involved theory about the origins of human civilization in Africa’s Nile River valley, where important distinctions in the qualities of persons and cultures would have been developed—hence his use of the reductionist sun people/ice people dichotomy to explain perceived differences in persons from the northern and southern cradles. “The value system of the northern cradle [ice people] . . . that rough survival value system, produces a premium on male physical strength and has produced this warrior value system,” Jeffries opined, “whereas [in] the value system of the south [sun people] where you can look at the spiritual relationship within the human and the cosmic family . . . you see the male and female principle in harmony and balance, you see nature in harmony and balance, you see the relationship of the sky and the moon and the sun to human development.” This amounts to biological, ecological, and racial determinism, and can hardly be substantiated.

Although Jeffries views himself as an Afrocentrist, Molefi Kete Asante, chairman of Temple University’s Department of African American Studies and often described as the “father of the theoretical and philosophical movement of Afrocentricity” (he is the author of
Afrocentricity
, published by Africa World Press), contends that Afrocentricity itself “is not a theory of biological determinism [but] essentially the idea that African people must be seen as subjects of history and of human experience, rather than objects.” Asante finds the melanin theory “intriguing” but disavows it as an Afrocentric theory.

Rigid categories based on essential, unvarying characteristics melt in the face of actual experience and human history. “Blacks are just as intellectual [as whites], and whites in some situations are just as feeling [as blacks],” says Cornell University professor Martin Bernal, author of
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical
Civilization
.
⁶
“My study of human societies and the way in which whites and blacks behave in their societies makes me believe that you can explain these things more satisfactorily in terms of society and social relations than you can in terms of physiology.”

Bernal, a white Briton whose recent scholarship explores the Egyptian roots of Greek civilization, admits a personal affinity for Egypt in part because “here is an African culture [that is] analytical and intellectual. You can have African societies of both types, just as you can have European societies of both types.” Bernal says his study of Egypt and Greece has taught him that both were such a “mixed culture.”

Egypt was one of the great civilizations of the ancient world, but so were China, Mesopotamia in the Middle East, and other cultures in Central America. So in attempting to overcome the bruising absence of constructive discourse about Africa, Jeffries and his cohorts have distorted the variety and legitimacy of other ancient civilizations through the lens of a compensatory racial and cultural hierarchy that assigns Africa artificial and romantic superiority.

Indeed, it was Jeffries’s courageous attempt to reverse the harmful effects of Eurocentrism through educational reform in the New York State school system that first brought him to national attention. Jeffries served as a consultant to the first of two task forces charged by the New York State Commission on Education with correcting deficiencies in the curriculum in regard to people of color. Not surprisingly, Jeffries and many of the task force members concluded that the experiences, histories, and contributions of nonwhite people were gravely underrepresented in New York’s educational curriculum. Brutal internecine battles developed, especially between Jeffries and his ideological opponents, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and educator Diane Ravitch, but many of Jeffries’s ideas were adopted in the committee’s final report, “A Curriculum of Inclusion.”

Schlesinger issued his dissenting opinions in
The Disuniting of America: Reflections on
a Multicultural Society
.
⁷
In it he invoked the timeworn metaphor of national unity forged as ethnic groups melted into the American character, in contrast to what he saw as the vicious ethnic tribalism evinced by people of Jeffries’s ilk. Apparently for Schlesinger, anyone who appeals to racial or ethnic identity as the basis of making radical social, political, or moral claims is what may be termed an ethnosaur, a recalcitrant ethnic loyalist who has not acknowledged the legitimacy of a superior and more sweeping national identity. Schlesinger contends that many Afrocentrists “not only divert attention from the real needs but exacerbate the problems.”

The call by Schlesinger and others for more “objective” historical scholarship fails to address the persistent historical patterns of racist exclusion of minority perspectives that are manifest in varying degrees from the elementary school to university education. “[Schlesinger] probably really believes that he and his contemporaries have been writing objective history,” says Bernal. “He seems to me remarkably lacking in self-consciousness and awareness and still sees white middleaged men as the only people capable of rendering acceptable historical judgments.”
In this context, Afrocentric attempts to articulate credible intellectual conceptions of the nature and shape of black racial experiences and to express profound disenchantment with the silence of majoritarian histories on the suffering and achievements of minority peoples are praiseworthy indeed. But while Jeffries’s diatribes against Eurocentrism are sometimes accurate, his embrace of various ideas in support of his version of Afrocentrism seems plain wrongheaded. Jeffries is promoting a rigid and romantic notion of racial identity.

Ironically, Jeffries is arguing for the same sort of unanimity of vision and experience that racism has artificially imposed upon African-American life. Perhaps he would do well to heed the words of fellow Afrocentrist Asante that “the virtue of Afrocentrism is pluralism without hierarchy.” Asante emphasizes that “Afrocentricity is not about valorizing your position and degrading other people. Whites must not be seen as above anyone; but by the same token they’ve got to be seen alongside everyone.”

Moreover, Jeffries’s romanticization of Egyptian culture as the seat of human civilization incorrectly views history through the idyllic lens of uncritical racial pride and narrow nationalist goals. Such simplistic distortions overlook the conflicts and corruption spawned by Egyptian civilization and repeat the fantastic egocentrism and therapeutic fables of Eurocentric history at its worst. “Eurocentric history as taught in schools and universities has had a very large egoboosting, if not therapeutic, purpose for whites,” acknowledges Bernal. “It’s in a way normal for the idea that blacks should have some confidence building in their pedagogy.” But he cautions against an uncritical celebration of racial and cultural roots. “I think there should be research history as well, and that will sometimes reveal facts that you don’t like.”