The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (20 page)

As mature African-American scholars, teachers, students, and citizens, we must embrace the rich and varied racial past that has contributed to our making. We must also acknowledge the profound degree to which we have alternately enjoyed and endured a terrible but sometimes fruitful symbiosis with European American culture how we have helped shape many of its cultural gifts to the world, even against its will; and how those expressions emerged in the crucible and turmoil of our uniquely African American experience.

I CAN HARDLY THINK OF A SUBJECT MORE strained by confusion and bitterness than the relation of race to identity. Our anguish about this matter is at least three centuries older than the current turmoil stamped in the culture wars. American views on race and identity have wearily tracked our Faustian bargain with slavery, an accommodation of moral principle to material gain that has colored national history ever since.

The paradox of our situation is that Americans are continually fatigued and consumed by race. We sense, indeed fear, that its unavoidable presence is the truest key to our national identity. Yet we are as easily prone to deny that race has any but the most trivial affect on human affairs, and that it has little to do with personal achievement or failure. Therefore, the people whose lives have been shaped by the malicious meanings of race—to be sure, there are ennobling ones as well—must now endure the irony of its alleged disappearance in silence.

If they speak of the continued effect of racial bigotry, for instance, they are accused of exploiting unfairly their status as victims. If they talk of the injury inflicted by coded speech that avows neutrality even as it reinforces bias, they are called supporters of political correctness. If they appeal to black, or Latino, or Native American heritage as a source of security in the face of hostility or neglect, they are said to practice the distorting politics of identity. And if they
Shakespeare argue that Emerson be joined by, say Baldwin, in getting a fix on the pedigree of American literary invention—if they insist that the canon jams, occasionally backfires when stuffed with powerful material poorly placed—they are maligned for trading in a dangerous multicultural currency.

All of this makes clear that language is crucial to understanding, perhaps solving, though at other times even intensifying, the quandaries of identity that vex most blacks. Speaking and writing are not merely the record of our quest to conquer illiteracy or ignorance (they are not the same thing). Neither are they only meant to hedge against the probability of being forgotten in the future by marking our stay with eloquent parts of speech that add up to immortality. Language simply, supremely, reminds us that we exist at all.

Whether this is positive or negative, an uplifting or degrading experience, depends largely on how language—plus the politics it reflects and the power it extends—is used on our behalf or set against us. This is especially true for blacks. Early in American life the furious entanglements of ideology and commerce caused disputes about black folk to follow a viciously circular logic; slaves deprived of the mechanics of literacy for fear of their use in seeking liberation were judged inhuman and unintelligent because they could neither read nor write. Even those blacks who managed to show rhetorical or literary mastery were viewed as exceptional or hopelessly mediocre. However unfair, language became the most important battlefield upon which black identity was fought. This is no less true today.

The most important concerns of black life are intertwined in the politics of language—from the canon to gangsta rap, from the debate about welfare reform to the fracas about family values, from the roots of urban violence to the place of black religion. In my view, a happy though unintended effect of the culture wars is that they force Americans to see that from the beginning our language has been indebted to political transaction.

It is not just now that ideological intimidation has allegedly ruined the prospect of objective judgment, or that its advocates have crashed the party and lowered the American standard of artistic achievement. Our literary traditions and rhetorical cultures eloquently testify to the influence of class upon taste, and reveal how power shapes the reception of art.

Black culture lives and dies by language. It thrives or slumps as its varied visions, and the means elected to pursue them, are carefully illumined or deliberately distorted. The threats, of course, are not entirely from the outside. The burden of complexity that rests at the heart of cultures across the black diaspora is often avoided in narrow visions of racial identity within black life. Its earnest proponents evoke the same old vocabulary of authenticity and cry of purity in their defense. But such moves echo as a hollow chant when voiced in league with the resounding complexity of identities expressed in the literature and music, the preaching and art of black culture.

Likewise, prolonged concentration on a fictitious, romantic black cultural purity obscures the virtues of complex black identity. An edifying impurity infuses
black experiments with self-understanding and fires the urge to embrace and discard selves shaped in the liberty of radical improvisation. Fiction and jazz, for instance, urge us to savor the outer limits of our imagination as the sacred space of cultural identity. When advocates of particular versions of Afrocentrism and black nationalism claim a common uniqueness for black life, they deny the repertoire of difference that characterizes African cultures.

Such conflicts teach us to spell black culture and language in the plural, signifying the diversity that continually expands the circumference of black identities. If this is true for black culture, it is even more the case with American culture. The two are intimately joined, forged into a sometimes reluctant symbiosis that mocks the rigid lines of language and identity that set them apart. American culture is inconceivable without African-American life.

Can we imagine the high art of fusing religious rhetoric with secular complaint without Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X? Their craft lifted freedom and democracy from their internment in ink and unleashed them as vital motives to social action. Can we think of contemporary American fiction, and its fiercely wrought negotiations with the cataclysmic forces of modernity, without the magisterial art of Morrison, Naylor, Wideman, and Walker?

Can we imagine the will to spontaneity, and what anthropologist Melville Herskovits termed the “deification of Accidence,” that threads through American music without the artistry of Armstrong, Coltrane, and Ellington? And can we think intelligently about the American essay, that venerable form of address that splits the difference between opinion and art with felicitous abandon, without the elegiac anger of Baldwin and the knowing sophistication of Ellison?

These few examples point up the resolute dismissiveness that mark knee-jerk responses to multiculturalism at its best. Opponents to the opening of the American mind would have us believe that multiculturalism is the graffiti of inferior black art scrawled against the pure white walls of the American canon. This claim reveals how black cultural purists have nothing on the defenders of an equally mythic American literary tradition.

Among other influences, the American voice carries a British accent, even as it rallies to sublime expression the coarser popular elements of the times it both inhabits and transcends. It must be remembered that
Moby-Dick
, claimed by critics to be a work of Shakespearean magnitude by a writer of Shakespearean talent, gained such stature because Melville hitched the bard’s cosmic grandeur to the motifs and genres of mid-nineteenth-century popular literature. Imagine Hemingway doing a number on Jacqueline Susann, or Doctorow remaking Sidney Sheldon. The hybrid textures of the American grain are the most powerful argument for relinquishing beliefs in American orthodoxies and for celebrating the edifying impurity behind democratic experiments with culture and identity.

In this strict sense, multiculturalism doesn’t argue for a future state of affairs to come into being. It simply seeks to bring to light the unacknowledged history of the trading back and forth along racial, and by extension, gender, class, and sexual lines. Multiculturalism is a request by minorities for this nation to come out of the closet, to own up to its rich and creolized practice in every corner of American life. In such an environment, it makes sense to ask, as Shelly Fisher Fishkin’s poignant book about Twain’s character does,
“Was Huck Black?”

In a broader sense, though, multiculturalism cannot proceed painlessly. It must topple conventions precisely because they are erected on myths that exclude traditions and distort histories. The struggle over language and identity—over which work is legitimate and which is not, and over who gets to decide—is unmistakably a struggle of power. Plus, all the naysaying and hem-hawing that goes on around debates about multiculturalism neglect the manner in which African-American artists have often investigated both sides of the hyphen.

Ellison owed the habit of a critical style of reading, and the title of his first book of essays, to T. S. Eliot. Baldwin’s essays draw equally from the gospel sensibilities and moral trajectory of the black sermon and the elegant expression of the King James Bible. And so on.

The fear of radical anti-multiculturalists that a democratized canon will trash Western tradition is mostly unfounded. At their best, multiculturalists expose the shifting contours of literary taste and the changing ways in which literacy is judged. (For instance, Homer could neither read nor write, but he is hardly frowned upon in our culture.) Multiculturalists also embrace the superior achievements of talented, towering figures. Such an operation bears little resemblance to hyperventilated protests that an ethic of racial compensation guides the selection of worthy work, and that its bad consequences will, in the words of Harold Bloom, “ruin the canon.” I think of my own early education as an illustration of the possibility of black and white books together shaping a course of wide learning.

In the fifth grade I experienced a profound introduction to the life and literature of black people. Mrs. James was my teacher, a full-cheeked, honey brown skinned woman whose commitment to her students was remarkable. Mrs. James’s sole mission was to bathe her students in the vast ocean of black intellectual and cultural life. She taught us to drink in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes. In fact, I won my first contest of any sort when I received a prized blue ribbon for reciting Dunbar’s “Little Brown Baby.” I still get pleasure from reading Dunbar’s vernacular vision:

Little brown baby wif spa’klin’ eyes,
Who’s pappy’s darlin’ an’ who’s pappy’s chile?
Who is it all de day nevah once tires
Fu’ to be cross, er once loses dat smile?
Whad did you get dem teef? My, you’s a scamp!
Whah did dat dimple come f ’om in yo’ chin?
Pappy do’ know you- I b’lieves you’s a tramp;
Mammy, dis hyeah’s some ol’ straggler got in!

Mrs. James also taught us to read Margaret Walker Alexander. I can still remember the thrill of listening to a chorus of fifth-grade black girls reciting, first in turn and then in unison, the verses to Alexander’s “For My People.”

The girls’ rhetorical staccatos and crescendos, their clear articulation and emotional expressiveness, were taught and encouraged by Mrs. James.

Mrs. James also opened to us the lore and legend of the black West long before it became stylish to do so. We read about the exploits of black cowboys like Deadwood Dick and Bill Pickett. We studied about great inventors like Jan Matzeliger, Garrett Morgan, and Granville T. Woods. The artists and inventors we learned about became for us more than mere names, more than dusty figures entombed in historical memory. Mrs. James helped bring the people we studied off the page and into our lives. She instructed us to paint their pictures, and to try our own hands at writing poetry and sharpening our own rhetorical skills. Mrs. James instilled in her students a pride of heritage and history that remains with me to this day.

Before it became popular, Mrs. James accented the multicultural nature of American culture by emphasizing the contributions of black folk who loved excellence and who passionately and intelligently celebrated the genius of black culture. She told us of the debates between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, and made us understand the crucial differences in their philosophical approaches to educating black people. There was never a hint that we could skate through school without studying hard. There was never a suggestion that the artistic and intellectual work we investigated was not open to criticism and interpretation. There was never even a whisper that the work we were doing was second-rate. There was no talk of easing standards or lowering our sights.