The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (26 page)

One of the most ingenious, deceitful strategies deployed by white supremacists is to insulate themselves from knowledge of white supremacy’s evil, of its thoroughgoing funkiness. In this mode, a crucial function of whiteness is to blind itself to its worst tendencies, its most lethal consequences. And one of the ways that dominant whiteness does this is by adopting a facade of ignorance, innocence, or naïveté in the face of claims of its destructiveness. Whether such a facade covers the deep knowledge its advocates possess of white supremacy’s ill effects is, and is not, relevant to how racial or ethnic minorities interact with whites in general. On one reading, such knowledge is irrelevant because even if the intent to harm does not exist, the malevolent consequences of white supremacy are just as real.

On the other hand, such knowledge is relevant when racial or ethnic minorities seek to forge coalitions with whites who reject the perspectives, practices, and privileges of white supremacy. How can blacks or Latinas be sure that such a rejection is abiding? The immediate response, of course, is that one must judge white allies, as one judges all people, by their actions. But this is precisely where matters get tricky: it is sometimes the actions of even the most devoted white allies that surprise, stun, shock, hurt, and disappoint blacks, Latinos, or Asians. The claim to ignorance, innocence, or naïveté by white allies in the face of offensive action is the cause of no small degree of discomfort in the relations between whites and racial minorities.

What is even more uncomfortable is when white allies make a merit badge of their resistance to what is increasingly thought of as the hypersensitivity of racial minorities. As a result, alleged white allies of blacks—for instance Bill Clinton—parade their racial accomplishments as a gateway to legitimacy in black communities and as a passport to do harm. The new white abolitionists and other progressive white allies are the first to decry this variety of neoliberal racial manipulation. A more difficult suspicion to overcome in many black communities is the historic pressure of whiteness to make virtues of its vices—and vice versa—even as it creates discursive space to deconstruct and demythologize its own socially constructed meanings.

That may explain why some blacks are skeptical of even progressive versions of white studies: it may be a sophisticated narcissism at work, another white hoax to displace studies of, but especially by, The Others at the height of their popularity and power with an encroaching obsession with the meanings, identities, practices, anxieties, and subjectivities—and hence the agendas, priorities, and preferences—of The Whites. On such a view, whiteness once again becomes supreme by trumpeting its need for demystification, dismantling, or abolition. Thus the cultural capital of otherness is bleached; to thoroughly mix metaphors, the gaze of race is returned to sender.

We’ve got to keep such skepticism in mind as we attempt to unmake and remake whiteness. As we scan the globe where whiteness has left its mark, the most
remarkable fact is not the willingness of whites to become disloyal to their whiteness, but the courageous rebellion of native, colonized, or enslaved folk who fought and, as best they could, remade the meanings of the whiteness they inherited or confronted. Their stories are worthy of serious study.

Related to that, let’s talk about in particular a place you just came from—Cuba—and how you see that disguising of the “funkiness” of whiteness functioning in U.S. relations with Cuba and the role that whiteness might play in our relationship with that country.

I’ll answer that in a couple of ways. First, the political measures that America has employed against Cuba are simply obscene. It is indefensible for America to treat a neighboring nation of beautiful people ninety miles away with such contempt while it grants China most favored nation status. Our relations with Cuba are hostile for one overriding reason: America has been unable to kill Castro. Like that little Energizer bunny, he just keeps on going. Our foreign policy with the Soviet Union is far better, a fact that is more than a little ironic. We have thawed the thick ice that once froze Soviet-U.S. relations, and in our post–Cold War generosity, we’ve embraced the big bear we used to fear and hate, but we still can’t embrace her cubs in Cuba.

The Helms-Burton Act extends unjust American policies to their logical, imperialist conclusion. The embargo we have against Cuba not only punishes that nation but punishes other nations that might cooperate with Cuba. Our bullying has cost the people of Cuba dearly: extreme poverty, severely curtailed luxuries, evaporation of resources, shrinking of capital, and the deprivation of essential goods and services. In the guise of ostensibly just foreign policy, our relation with Cuba, especially as driven by Helms, is white supremacy in its reckless, destructive mode. America is not killing Castro; he’s living well. We’re hurting decent, beautiful everyday folk who love their country and are proudly trying to extend the most democratic features of the Revolution: universal literacy, political representation of the poor, and government rooted in historical memory and national pride.

Finally, I think what’s interesting is that most Cubans have a very different understanding of race than we have in the United States. Many white Cubans, and black ones as well, denied that they had a race problem. To our American eyes and ears, to mix metaphors, that was a hard claim to swallow. The Cubans had undeniably worked to remove vestiges of discrimination from their official quarters; still, many of the members of our delegation of black Americans understood that the rhetorical and representational battles that bewitch racial equity were still being fought. It is equally undeniable that white and black Cubans have been able to forge a Cuban national identity that overcomes in important ways the schisms of ethnic tribalism.

Even if it is not what we black Americans, imbued with the rhetoric of our own racial difficulties, think is altogether just, black and white Cubans at least have the
real possibility of negotiating a livable racial situation. It may be what Ernest Becker termed a “vital lie”: a necessary deception that preserves the social fabric and keeps at bay the forces that destroy identity and community. The embargo has led to what the Cubans term a “special period,” the time of austerity that has thrown their culture into sustained crisis. In such a period, it is perfectly reasonable that Cubans understand race in the fashion they do to preserve the very survival of their nation. In many ways, they’ve done a much better job with race than we have under conditions of relative material prosperity.

Any closing comments on the past, present, or future of the study of whiteness?

I have just one observation. As we look to the next century of whiteness studies, the field will mature and reconstruct its genealogy by pointing b(l)ack—to those great figures from W.E.B. Du Bois to Zora Neale Hurston, from Langston Hughes to Ralph Ellison, and from Nella Larsen to James Baldwin. Such a genealogy for white studies brings to mind something Fannie Lou Hamer said. She argued that the mistake white folk made with black folk is that they put us behind them, not in front of them. Had they placed us in front of them, they could have observed and contained us.

Instead, white folk placed us behind them in what they deemed an inferior position. As a result, we were able to learn white folk—their beliefs, sentiments, contradictions, cultures, styles, behaviors, virtues, and vices. Black survival depended on black folk knowing the ways and souls of white folk. It’s only fitting now that we turn to African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American scholars, workers, intellectuals, artists, and everyday folk to understand whiteness.

Interview by Ronald E. Chennault
New York, New York, 1998

In the same way that many whites have no idea that their whiteness
gives them a racial identity, many men don’t realize they have a gender.
I have spent a great deal of my writing life exploring masculinity and its
edifying and harmful meanings. I have also probed the simple yet remarkably
unassimilated view that our culture holds ancient beliefs about
how men should enjoy privileges and powers that women should not. On
that foundation rests all sorts of vicious behaviors that have garnered the
support of social convention and legal precedent. Moreover, a great deal
of controversy has surrounded interracial relations, especially between
black men and white women, whose erotic liasions have spawned hostile
debate on all sides. It is vital to the nation’s moral health to unravel
patriarchy’s seductive webs while weaving an understanding of the intricate
interactions of men and women.

ON A RECENT TRIP TO KNOXVILLE, I VISITED Harold’s barbershop, where I had my hair cut during college, and after whenever I had the chance. I had developed a friendship with Ike, a local barber who took great pride in this work. I popped my head inside the front door, and after exchanging friendly greetings with Harold, the owner, and noticing Ike missing, I inquired about his return. It had been nearly two years since Ike had cut my hair, and I was hoping to receive the careful expertise that comes from familiarity and repetition.

“Man, I’m sorry to tell you, but Ike got killed almost two years ago,” Harold informed me. “He and his brother, who was drunk, got into a fight, and he stabbed Ike to death.”

I was shocked, depressed, and grieved, these emotions competing in rapid-fire fashion for the meager psychic resources I was able to muster. In a daze of retreat from the fierce onslaught of unavoidable absurdity, I half-consciously slumped into Harold’s chair, seeking solace through his story of Ike’s untimely and brutal leavetaking. Feeling my pain, Harold filled in the details of Ike’s last hours, realizing that for me Ike’s death had happened only yesterday. Harold proceeded to cut my hair with a methodical precision that was itself a temporary and all-too-thin refuge from the chaos of arbitrary death, a protest against the nonlinear progression of miseries that claim the lives of too many black men. After he finished, I thanked Harold, both of us recognizing that we would not soon forget Ike’s life, or his terrible death.

This drama of tragic demise, compressed agony, nearly impotent commiseration, and social absurdity is repeated countless times, too many times, in American culture for black men. Ike’s death forced to the surface a painful awareness that provides the chilling sound track to most black men’s lives: it is still hazardous to be a human being of African descent in America.

Not surprisingly, much of the ideological legitimation for the contemporary misery of African-Americans in general, and black men in particular, derives from the historical legacy of slavery, which continues to assert its brutal presence in the untold suffering of millions of everyday black folk. For instance, the pernicious commodification of the black body during slavery was underwritten by the desire of white slave owners to completely master black life. The desire for mastery also fueled the severe regulation of black sexual activity, furthering the telos of southern agrarian capital by reducing black men to studs and black women to machines of production. Black men and women became sexual and economic property. Because of the arrangement of social relations, slavery was also the breeding ground for much of the mythos of black male sexuality that survives to this day: that black men are imagined as peripatetic phalluses with unrequited desire for their denied object—white women.

Also crucial during slavery was the legitimation of violence toward blacks, especially black men. Rebellion in any form was severely punished, and the social construction of black male image and identity took place under the disciplining eye of white male dominance. Thus healthy black self-regard and self-confidence were outlawed as punitive consequences were attached to their assertion in black life. Although alternate forms of resistance were generated, particularly those rooted in religious praxis, problems of self-hatred and self-abnegation persisted. The success of the American political, economic, and social infrastructure was predicated in large part upon a squelching of black life by white modes of cultural domination. The psychic, political, economic, and social costs of slavery, then, continue to be paid, but mostly by the descendants of the oppressed. The way in which young black men continue to pay is particularly unsettling.

Black men are presently caught in a web of social relations, economic conditions, and political predicaments that portray their future in rather bleak terms.
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For instance, the structural unemployment of black men has reached virtually epidemic proportions, with black youth unemployment double that of white youth. Almost half of young black men have had no work experience at all. Given the permanent shift in the U.S. economy from manufacturing and industrial jobs to high-tech and service employment and the flight of these jobs from the cities to the suburbs, the prospects for eroding the stubborn unemployment of black men appear slim.
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The educational front is not much better. Young black males are dropping out of school at alarming rates, due to a combination of severe economic difficulties, disciplinary entanglements, and academic frustrations. Thus the low level of educational achievement by young black men exacerbates their already precarious
employment situation. Needless to say, the pool of high school graduates eligible for college has severely shrunk, and even those who go on to college have disproportionate rates of attrition.

Suicide, too, is on the rise, ranking as the third leading cause of death among young black men. Since 1960, the number of black men who have died from suicide has tripled. The homicide rate of black men is atrocious. For black male teenagers and young adults, homicide ranks as the leading cause of death. In 1987, more young black men were killed within the United States in a single year than had been killed abroad in the entire nine years of the Vietnam War. A young black man has a one in twenty-one lifetime chance of being killed, most likely at the hands of another black man, belying the self-destructive character of black homicide.

Even with all this, a contemporary focus on the predicament of black males is rendered problematical and ironic for two reasons. First, what may be termed the “Calvin Klein” character of debate about social problems—which amounts to a “designer” social consciousness—makes it very difficult for the concerns of black men to be taken seriously. Social concern, like other commodities, is subject to cycles of production, distribution, and consumption. With the dwindling of crucial governmental resources to address a range of social problems, social concern is increasingly relegated to the domain of private philanthropic and nonprofit organizations. Furthermore, the selection of which problems merit scarce resources is determined, in part, by such philanthropic organizations which highlight special issues, secure the services of prominent spokespersons, procure capital for research, and distribute the benefits of their information.

Unfortunately, Americans have rarely been able to sustain debate about pressing social problems over long periods of time. Even less have we been able to conceive underlying structural features that bind complex social issues together. Such conceptualization of the intricate interrelationship of social problems would facilitate the development of broadly formed coalitions that address a range of social concern. As things stand, problems like poverty, racism, and sexism go in and out of style. Black men, with the exception of star athletes and famous entertainers, are out of style.

Second, the irony of the black male predicament is that it has reached its nadir precisely at the point when much deserved attention has been devoted to the achievements of black women like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Terry McMillan.

The identification and development of the womanist tradition in AfricanAmerican culture has permitted the articulation of powerful visions of black female identity and liberation. Michele Wallace, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison have written in empowering ways about the disenabling forms of racism and patriarchy that persist in white and black communities. They have expressed the rich resources for identity that come from maintaining allegiances to multiple kinship groups defined by race, gender, and sexual orientation, while also addressing the challenges that arise in such membership.

Thus discussions about black men should not take place in an ahistorical vacuum, but should be informed by sensitivity to the plight of black women. To isolate and examine the pernicious problems of young black men does not privilege their perspectives or predicament. Rather, it is to acknowledge the decisively deleterious consequences of racism and classism that plague black folk, particularly young black males.

The aim of my analysis is to present enabling forms of consciousness that may contribute to the reconstitution of the social, economic, and political relations that continually consign the lives of black men to psychic malaise, social destruction, and physical death. It does not encourage or dismiss the sexism of black men, nor does it condone the patriarchal behavior that sometimes manifests itself in minority communities in the form of misdirected machismo. Above all, AfricanAmericans must avoid a potentially hazardous situation that plays musical chairs with scarce resources allocated to black folk and threatens to inadvertently exacerbate already deteriorated relations between black men and women. The crisis of black inner-city communities is so intense that it demands our collective resources to stem the tide of violence and catastrophe that has besieged them.

I grew up as a young black male in Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s. I witnessed firsthand the social horror that is entrenched in inner-city communities, the social havoc wreaked from economic hardship. In my youth, Detroit had been tagged the “murder capital of the world,” and many of those murders were of black men, many times by other black men. Night after night, the news media in Detroit painted the ugly picture of a homicide-ridden city caught in the desperate clutches of death, depression, and decay. I remember having recurring nightmares of naked violence, in which Hitchcockian vertigo emerged in Daliesque perspective to produce gun-wielding perpetrators of doom seeking to do me in.

And apart from those disturbing dreams, I was exercised by the small vignettes of abortive violence that shattered my circle of friends and acquaintances. My next-door neighbor, a young black man, was stabbed in the jugular vein by an acquaintance and bled to death in the midst of a card game. (Of course, one of the ugly statistics involving black-on-black crime is that many black men are killed by those whom they know.) Another acquaintance murdered a businessman in a robbery; another executed several people in a gangland-style murder.

At fourteen, I was at our corner store at the sales counter, when suddenly a jolt in the back revealed a young black man wielding a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun, requesting, along with armed accomplices stationed throughout the store, that we hit the floor. We were being robbed. At the age of eighteen I was stopped one Saturday night at 10:30 by a young black man who ominously materialized out of nowhere, much like the .357 Magnum revolver that he revealed to me in a robbery attempt. Terror engulfed my entire being in the fear of imminent death. In desperation I hurled a protest against the asphyxiating economic hardships that had apparently reduced him to desperation, too, and appealed to the conscience I hoped was buried beneath the necessity that drove him to rob
me. I proclaimed, “Man, you don’t look like the type of brother that would be doin’ something like this.”

“I wouldn’t be doin’ this, man,” he shot back, “but I got a wife and three kids, and we ain’t got nothin’ to eat. And besides, last week somebody did the same thing to me that I’m doin’ to you.” After convincing him that I really only had one dollar and thirty-five cents, the young man permitted me to leave with my life intact.

The terrain for these and so many other encounters that have shaped the lives of black males was the ghetto. Much social research and criticism has been generated in regard to the worse-off inhabitants of the inner city, the so-called underclass. From the progressive perspective of William Julius Wilson to the archconservative musings of Charles Murray, those who dwell in ghettos, or enclaves of civic, psychic, and social terror, have been the object of recrudescent interest within hallowed academic circles and governmental policy rooms.
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In most cases they have not fared well and have borne the brunt of multifarious “blame the victim” social logics and policies.

One of the more devastating developments in inner-city communities is the presence of drugs and the criminal activity associated with their production, marketing, and consumption. Through the escalation of the use of the rocklike form of cocaine known as “crack” and intensified related gang activity, young black men are involved in a vicious subculture of crime. This subculture is sustained by two potent attractions: the personal acceptance and affirmation gangs offer and the possibility of enormous economic reward.

U.S. gang life had its genesis in the Northeast of the 1840s, particularly in the depressed neighborhoods of Boston and New York, where young Irishmen developed gangs to sustain social solidarity and to forge a collective identity based on common ethnic roots.
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Since then, youth of every ethnic and racial origin have formed gangs for similar reasons, and at times have even functioned to protect their own ethnic or racial group from attack by harmful outsiders. Overall, a persistent reason for joining gangs is the sense of absolute belonging and unsurpassed social love that results from gang membership. Especially for young black men whose life is at a low premium in America, gangs have fulfilled a primal need to possess a sense of social cohesion through group identity. Particularly when traditional avenues for the realization of personal growth, esteem, and self-worth, usually gained through employment and career opportunities, have been closed, young black men find gangs a powerful alternative.