The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (5 page)

As if that wasn’t enough, there were strains of overt racism poisoning the common good. This was during the time that
Roots
was being televised. I came home to my dorm room one evening to find a newspaper cartoon of one of the
Roots
characters tacked to my door, with the words scribbled on it: “Nigger, go home.” Some students also anonymously circulated a cassette tape about the black students that we got hold of. On the tape, a voice says in exaggerated
southern cadence, “We’re going cigar fishing today. No we’re not, we’re going ‘nigar’ fishing. What’s the bait? Hominy grits!” On another occasion, a white student expressed the wish to place a bottle of sickle-cell anemia in the school’s quadrangle to “kill off all the undesirables.” So it was very tough for me. I got lost, did some crazy stuff—like helping to devise a system to dial out of the dorm on a phone without a face, allowing me and some friends to call our girlfriends and run up huge bills, which I had to get a second job to pay for while their parents ponied up—didn’t do well in school, got expelled, and went back to Detroit a failure after being a golden boy. That was tough to handle. Then I finished night school, which I don’t think they have any more, and got my diploma from Northwestern High School.

Almost immediately after I graduated, I met a woman, got her pregnant, married her, and then divorced her. It was a very trying period in my life. I was eighteen years old, she was twenty-six. She eventually had to give up her job as a waitress when she started to show—she had one of those jobs where the waitresses wore hot pants and tiny tops—and I was eventually fired from a job at Chrysler that my wife’s uncle helped me to secure (an unjust firing, I might add, as I’ll never forget my boss’s words, “it had to be somebody’s ass, and I’d rather it be yours than mine”). We were forced to live on welfare, since I lost my job a little more than a month before my son was to be born. We got food stamps and government medical assistance to pay the costs of delivering our baby. My wife was enrolled in WIC, or Women, Infants, and Children, and I stood many a day in those long lines and collected packets of powdered milk and artificial eggs—just as I did at the welfare office, where the civil servants were often rude and loud, making the experience that much more degrading.

Why did you marry her, Michael?

I married her because she was pregnant. I suppose those southern values were in effect—my parents were from Alabama and Georgia—and I was, after all, a church boy who believed that if you got a woman pregnant, you should marry her. I didn’t want my son to be born out of wedlock. Of course, that was a narrow, naive view, but I suppose I had to learn the hard way. But I really did love Terrie, the woman I got pregnant. I just discovered too late that she didn’t love me. She told me two months into our marriage that she didn’t love me and should have never married me. I was devastated. By that time, however, she was well into her pregnancy. So we made as good a go of it as possible for young people who were poor, stressed, often unemployed, on welfare, and unequally yoked in affection. We had our son, a wonderful, beautiful boy who is now nineteen years old. I spent quite a bit of time attending to him. I did much of the night duty. I loved my son and wanted to bond with him.

That’s a startling contrast to many black fathers today.

I don’t know. I think many more black men than are given credit want to love and nurture their children. It is true that I lived in a moral universe with an ethical framework that dictated that one should acknowledge one’s responsibility, and in my case, the obligation to marry in the belief that marriage itself would protect and preserve the family. At this time in my life, I think such a belief can be downright wrong. Still, I suppose there’s something to be said for wanting to assume responsibility for what one does. But that couldn’t prevent our almost inevitable breakup, so after working in a factory, hustling, cutting grass, shoveling snow and painting houses, working as an emergency substitute janitor for the public school system, working as a maintenance man in a suburban hotel, doing construction jobs, getting laid off, getting fired, going on welfare, and seeing my marriage dissolve, I decided right before my twenty-first birthday that I’d had enough, and I wanted to go to college. I had in my late teens felt a call to ministry, and that call, in tandem with my desire to better provide for my son’s future, sent me to school. Plus, my desire to fulfill my early promise, which had been greatly tarnished by the events of my life after being kicked out of Cranbrook, goaded me to take my destiny into my own hands.

To many onlookers, I suppose I looked like a loser, a typical, pathological, selfdefeating young black male. That may help explain why I empathize with such youth in the hip-hop generation; I was one of those brothers that many social scientists and cultural critics easily dismiss and effortlessly, perhaps literally, write off. In any regard, there were two people in my church who had gone to Knoxville College, a historically black college in Knoxville, Tennessee. I called the college and asked the dean if they had space for a young black man from Detroit. When he replied in the affirmative, the next day I “grabbed me an arm full of Greyhound,” as Sam Cooke once sang, and took the fifteen-hour bus trip from Detroit to Knoxville. I went to college there and initially worked in a factory, then pastored three different churches as I completed my undergraduate studies at CarsonNewman, a small, white southern Baptist school. I transferred from Knoxville College because I wanted to study philosophy, and they didn’t offer but a few courses in the subject. Carson-Newman was a true baptism in Southern Baptist theology and worldviews, many of which were problematic and sometimes racist, even as members of the academic community encouraged students to nurture their spiritual faculties. But my time in east Tennessee was crucial to my intellectual development, and taught me to navigate some perilous racial and cultural waters.

During the time frame you became a Baptist minister, it seems like there again you were operating on a number of levels. You were obviously fascinated by theology and philosophy, but I detect something else stirred you to commit yourself to that course of study.

No question. I was influenced to enter the ministry by having a pastor who was broadly learned and extremely erudite, who reflected critically on social and
spiritual issues and who had read widely and deeply in philosophy and theology. Later on, as a burgeoning scholar, I was also influenced by scholars such as religious historian James Melvin Washington, a renowned bibliophile whom I met in the early ’80s in Knoxville, and the great Cornel West, Washington’s colleague at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, whom I met in early 1984 at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, during a lecture series West was giving at the college. I had driven there from Tennessee, when I was an undergraduate student at Carson-Newman, a junior I believe, and he was a professor of philosophy of religion on his way to teach at Yale Divinity School. Within African American religious studies and theology, I was also influenced by the work and example of scholars like James Cone, Charles Long, J. Deotis Roberts, William R. Jones, Cecil Cone, Jacqueline Grant, and Riggins Earl. These are figures whose commitment to black theology and, to a lesser degree, to black philosophy, had whetted my appetite to study philosophy and religion.

At Carson-Newman, I experienced a growing desire to wed the life of the mind to the life of the heart. As an undergraduate, I was getting quite an introduction to the ministry in pastoring three different churches, and addressing the issues of life and death: I was preaching to my congregation, counseling them, and marrying and burying them. It was exciting, and at times quite stressful, but I increasingly sought a stronger academic vocabulary to express my intellectual goals and interests. Hence my sharpened focus on philosophy, social theory, literary criticism, and what would later be termed critical race theory. But I have never been one to think that religion dulled one’s cutting edge or critical capacities. Of course, if one is honest, there are some tremendous difficulties in maintaining one’s commitment to a religious tradition that says, “We know by faith and not by sight,” while maintaining habits of critical inquiry that rest on relentless interrogation of the warrants, grounds, bases, and assertions of truth put forth in all sorts of intellectual communities, including religious ones. So there are tensions and, in fact, these multiple tensions define my intellectual projects and existential identities: tensions between sacred and secular, tensions between the intellectual and the religious, tensions between radical politics and mainstream institutions, tensions between preaching and teaching, and so on. But I think they are useful, edifying tensions, tensions that help reshape my ongoing evolution as a thinker, writer, teacher, preacher, and activist.

In many ways, I see myself as a rhetorical acrobat, navigating through varied communities of intellectual interest and pivoting around multiple centers of linguistic engagement, since all of these commitments have their own languages, rhetorics, and vocabularies. I view myself as a work in progress, an improvised expression of identity that is constantly evolving through stages and vistas of selfunderstanding. Such language owes several debts and has many sources, including my religious tradition’s plea to, as the James Cleveland song goes, “Please be patient with me, God is not through with me yet”; my musical roots in jazz, and now in hip-hop, where relentless improvisation and restless experimentation are
artistic hallmarks; and postmodern philosophical ruminations on the fluidity of identity. Plus, openness to new experience is critical, but you can’t be so open that you lose sight of the crucial references, the haunting paths, the transforming traces, and the grounding marks of your identity. But one has got to constantly evolve and regenerate, stretching the boundaries of identity in a way that permits you to integrate new strains, new molds, new themes, and new ideas into the evolving self-awareness that occupies your heart and mind.

When did you know, finally recognize that your star was rising? When did all this start to take shape for you, Michael?

Good question. Throughout my college years, I struggled financially. Early on, I had to live in my car for almost a month because I didn’t have a place to live. My pastor would dig into his pocket to help me out. My father was able to give me a used station wagon after my raggedy old car died, but he had no money to give me. For the most part, I paid for my own education. I borrowed money and had loans that I only recently paid back because I was deep in debt as a result of supporting myself through college. I had to make it on my own, which wasn’t new since 1’d basically been living away from my parents’ home after starting boarding school at sixteen. I knew I’d come a long way when I got to Knoxville and, after working in a factory, I was able to get some acclaim for my preaching and began to pastor. But in my third church, I was booted out for attempting to ordain three women as deacons in the male supremacist black Baptist church, so I went back to school. I had, ironically enough, been kicked out of Carson-Newman because I refused to attend chapel, a mandatory assignment every Tuesday morning. I was protesting the dearth of black scholars and preachers who were invited to campus, especially after it was explained to me by an administrator that, based on the small number of blacks, one speaker a year was all we could expect.

But after my church let me go—and isn’t this more than a little ironic, since it was named Thankful Baptist Church?—with a month’s severance pay, and with nowhere to land to support my family, since I had remarried and got temporary custody of my son, I headed back to Carson-Newman in 1983 to finish my studies. I received no scholarship money from the school, despite maintaining a straight-A average in philosophy, so I borrowed more money and graduated
magna cum laude,
and as outstanding graduate in philosophy, in 1985. I applied and got into Vanderbilt University’s Ph.D. department of philosophy, and into Brown and Princeton’s departments of religion. I was interested in Vanderbilt because of Robert Williams, a respected philosopher of black experience, and because I wanted to study with Alisdair MacIntyre, a renowned philosopher whose book
After Virtue
had recently made a huge splash in moral philosophy. I remember meeting with him on my visit to Vanderbilt, and I remember him asking me why anyone who had gotten into Princeton wanted to come to Vanderbilt to study. I told him I was wrestling with whether to become a philosopher with an interest
in religion, or a scholar of religion who took philosophy seriously. His eyes lit up, and he uttered, “That’s precisely the question you must answer.”

I decided on the latter course, and after visiting Brown and Princeton, I chose to attend Princeton. But there was a snag: Carson-Newman refused to release my final transcript to Princeton because I owed them money, a little more than $7,000, a sum that I knew wouldn’t exist if they had given me the scholarship help I thought I deserved. I was quite nervous until a dean at Princeton’s graduate school told me that I could come to Princeton without my final grades, since they had already accepted me on my documented performance. It was the closing of a widely gyrating circle of promise that had begun in the ghetto of Detroit where my teachers, my pastor, and some of my peers had foreseen, and in many cases, through their contributions, had assured my success. I realized at Princeton, as great a school as it is, that my being there was nothing less than what I should be doing in living out the early promise that they—my teachers, pastor, and peers—detected in me.

As a second-year graduate student at Princeton in 1987, I began to write professionally, if by that it is meant that one is compensated for one’s work. I wrote for religious journals of opinion, for newspapers, for scholarly journals, and for mass-market magazines, much of this before completing my master’s degree in 1991 and my Ph.D. in 1993. In fact, I wrote the lead review essay in the
New York
Times Book Review,
which ran longer than five thousand words, when they had such a feature in the book review back in 1992. I had begun to write book reviews for the
New York Times
in 1990, along with reviews for the
Chicago Tribune
book review. I wrote the “Black America” column for the left-wing
Z Magazine
in the late ’80s and early ’90s, which I inherited from Cornel West, and during this time, I also wrote op-eds for the
Nation
and later for the
New York Times, Washington
Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times,
and other papers. I also wrote essays and chapters for several books. So I guess I took off pretty quickly after hitting graduate school, which, while not unique, I suppose was nonetheless rare enough. Interestingly enough, I ended up writing my first book,
Reflecting Black,
before I wrote my Ph.D. thesis. That fact encouraged me to complete my degree before my book was published in 1993. In fact, I received my Ph.D. from Princeton in June 1993, and my book was printed in late May 1993, and published later in June. I just made it!