The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (88 page)

The contested and conflicted meanings of race in the 1960s were frequently papered over and smoothed out, resulting in the McDonaldization of Martin Luther King Jr. in a McLuhan universe where the medium was the message. It’s important to me that the medium through which Dr. King was articulated for me was a televisual apparatus—since I never met him in the flesh. And the message I got from him was about social change. My early identification with TV grew from the fact that it had the radical potential to transform, not merely to anesthetize, to open up and not merely to constrain, to shatter and not merely to constitute, social reality. I saw it as an imaginative apparatus through which, ideologically, we could resist and challenge dominant racial and cultural narratives. Now, I didn’t know all of this back then, but I felt a connection to King that transcended time and place and allowed me to identify with this figure whose life just revolutionized my consciousness. So, there’s no question that television changed my life.

The next week in Sunday school I remember that our teacher asked us about that. That, I’m sure, was one of the very few times an adult asked about our response to current events. If I remember correctly, it was a Wednesday or Thursday evening when King was assassinated. That was when
Batman
came on. That was probably why I was hanging out in front of the tube—waiting for
Batman
.

Aww, man! Batman and Robin, brother! My boys Adam West and Burt Ward! And there was Bruce Lee as Cato on the
Green Hornet,
and I don’t remember the cat who played the Green Hornet that Cato drove around in the Hornet’s Lincoln Continental.

I remember that on the Sunday following my Sunday school teacher asking us how the assassination made us feel—probably the only time anyone asked us. One girl in the class said she was glad King died because some show she wanted to watch had been interrupted. There was some TV show she wanted to see, but the news preempted all that. That seems, again, to be one of the interesting ways television plays out in our culture. And occasionally I’m one of those people—I’d rather watch some sitcom than the Republican convention. I can catch what I need to later on CNN or C-SPAN. I don’t have to sit there and watch it all unfold live.

These news programs are part of the option glut that television now presents. Our nation, indeed our world, has been deeply affected by the CNNing of American discourse where all information, or at least the information that is deemed worth knowing, is immediately available. Therefore, there’s little psychic space for reflection, little intellectual or emotional space in which to recover what we learn or reconstitute the ideas we absorb. We have little time to figure out the meaning of what we learn. As Derrida taught us, understanding is not simply about what something means but how it signifies. However, you can’t even figure that out unless you have some space, some remove, from hugely influential events. I’m not embracing the myth of news objectivity, since I think the best we can hope for is fairness, which includes placing our biases right out in the open. I’m thinking here of the need to recover the fragments of events, and to experience them as fully as possible through interpreting and articulating them.

What the immediacy of communications technology has done is to make us believe that because we’ve perceived something, that because we’ve got the raw data through our senses, we’ve thoroughly experienced it. But we don’t know what we know until we begin to think critically about what it means, and until we intervene with a conscious, deliberate intent to classify, to categorize, and to filter our experiences. It takes much more than empirical access to information to create understanding. Without interpretation and analysis, experience remains mute and inarticulate beneath the sheer fact of its existence. The phenomenological weight of immediacy results in a distorted capacity for interpretation and analysis.

As you mention the idea of space, there is a glut of options and information such that if you know that you need space to reflect, interpret, and reinterpret, you don’t have time before the next fragment hits you. This is a totally unplanned but nice little segue. There was a Jay Wright symposium here at which Harold Bloom was a speaker. Jay Wright said this in a 1983 interview: “These last two terms, explication and interpretation, should call attention to one of my basic assumptions: that naked perception (just seeing something), is misprision in the highest degree. Every perception requires explication and interpretation. Exploration means just that. A simple report of experience, if you could make such a thing, isn’t good enough.” Although he’s talking about the art of poetry,
this seems to apply to this sort of experience of information. One of the things that Harold Bloom lamented at this conference was the absence of learnedness, although he put Jay Wright on this wonderful pedestal as a learned poet in the tradition of Dante and Milton. Somehow, it occurred to me that there’s something about this peculiar postmodern information glut that makes “learnedness” impossible. Bloom mentioned that earlier in his career, although it wasn’t often, he would hear people referred to as a “learned” scholar.

In the light of our postmodern option glut, erudition becomes nearly obsolete and impossible to attain, at least according to a specific understanding of the concept. You can’t master the discursive tongues that have proliferated via the media in our own time. In some senses, I lament the loss of such erudition because I’m a nontraditional traditionalist at that level, reared on
The Harvard Classics,
TV, and Motown. I saw no disjuncture between
Two Years Before the Mast
by Richard Dana, and William “Smokey” Robinson’s “My Girl” sung by the Temptations. Although I understand and even empathize with elements of Bloom’s lament, I’ve got disagreements with him and other critics over canon formation and related literary issues, because I think there are multiple canons and multiple forms of literacy that we ought to respect. The intellectual and rhetorical integrity of these traditions ought to be acknowledged, and not in a condescending, compensatory fashion designed to make sure that “the other” is represented, except such inclusion is usually a procedural and not a substantive engagement with a given work. We’ve got to take the revelations about America that “minority” authors offer as seriously as we do conventional heroes of literature. We have much to learn from black writers’ engagement, for instance, with what Baraka termed “vicious modernism.”

On the other hand, I think that there’s a need to historicize our conceptions of erudition, too. We should constantly be reevaluating what we mean by learnedness and erudition, since those qualities were never absolutely divorced from the priorities and prisms of the dominant culture. The learned and erudite were not simply revered for their knowledge, but they reflected a hierarchy of privilege that provided some the opportunity to acquire such a status while foreclosing the possibility to others in an a priori fashion. Ironically enough, even though the possibility of a particular kind of erudition may be quickly vanishing with the proliferation of information systems, it may offer a relatively more democratic conception of literacy that invites us to acknowledge a wider range of people as legitimate bearers of “learning.”

In the past, the erudite person could only be a white male whose prodigious learning was acknowledged by his peers and intellectual progeny. Now, at least, we’ve widened the view of what counts as erudite and learned, and in many ways that’s a very good thing.

Interview by Jonathan Smith
St. Louis, Missouri, 1996

I have strived as an intellectual to enhance the public good by thinking
as broadly and deeply as possible about issues of supreme importance to
the nation. Although I derive immense pleasure from the sheer act of
thinking, reading, and writing, I believe that those of us blessed with the
leisure of such pursuits should also, if we are so inclined, and sufficiently
capable, help our fellow citizens reflect on pressing social problems. In this
role of engaged academic, or public intellectual, I have appeared on
countless television and radio programs; written for numerous newspapers,
journals, and magazines; lectured in universities, public forums,
and political gatherings; and preached in pulpits around the nation,
with the hope of bringing intellectual insight and moral clarity to complex
matters. Public intellectuals—black ones in particular—have come in for a
great deal of criticism: we are said to be more interested in fame than
rigor, more moved by money than vocation, and more taken with praise
than pupils. Despite the undeniable shortcomings of public intellectual
life, and despite the legitimate criticism that is launched our way, I think
it is honorable to serve one’s society by analyzing our nation’s mores, folkways,
intellectual habits, social practices, and political behaviors.

______________________

—HORTENSE SPILLERS
“THE CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL: A POST-DATE,” 1994

GENTLE READER, I BEGIN THIS CHAPTER WITH a confession and a warning. First, the warning. This is not an objective examination of the contentious debates surrounding the rise of so-called black public intellectuals. (You haven’t heard of us? Well, the debates are mostly “inside baseball.” To tell the truth, the debates are more like inside-the-academy bickering. Okay, you’ve got me: they’re tempests in teapots, even though the teapots are pretty prestigious. But if it’s any consolation, the debates offer the same sort of mudslinging, backbiting, gossiping, and dozens-playing you’re likely to find in a supermarket tabloid.) Mine is a partisan account of how black intellectuals got into the fix of being lauded and lambasted, admired and despised, in the same breath. This is simply one black public intellectual’s teeth-baring, tongue-in-cheek mea culpa and apologia rolled into one.

Now the confession: I have been chosen as one of the lucky few. I have been the recipient of great praise (and sharp criticism, but more on that later) for my writing and speaking at universities and before the general public. Along with a relatively few others—including Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, bell hooks, Robin Kelley, Patricia Williams, and Stephen Carter—I’ve been dubbed a public intellectual. This designation emphasizes how our work contributes to public debate, especially about race and American society. The term public intellectual is certainly not new. It’s been applied to a range of scholars and intellectuals throughout Europe and America. Other terms, like political intellectual and organic intellectual, hint at the same public function for the thinker. The term public intellectual gained fresh currency in the late ’80s with the publication of Russell Jacoby’s book,
The Last Intellectuals
.

But never before has such a highly educated and vastly literate group of black thinkers had access to the Public Mind of America—and acclaim or derision for managing to do so. We have been hailed and harangued by publications ranging from the
New Yorker
and the
Atlantic Monthly
to the
Village Voice
. And most of us have appeared on
Oprah Winfrey
,
Charlie Rose
,
Nightline
, and a spate of other television shows, to talk about a range of subjects, and a lot about race. So I’ve got no complaints about the publicity my work receives. (Well, I’ve got a few, but they’re the carps of the privileged, so I’ll spare you.) I’ve been very fortunate indeed.

You’d think that academics everywhere, especially black ones, would be proud that they’d see in our achievements their investments in us, and those like us, paying all sorts of dividends. Increased visibility for the profession. Heightened respect for black intellectual work. And a celebration of the unsung giants, especially the black ones, on whose shoulders we all stand. And many, many scholars and intellectuals do brim with pride and joy. But a lot don’t. They simmer in resentment and prophesy trouble. Much of what makes them troubled is legitimate. Then, too, much of their resentment stems from pettiness, parochialism, and snobbishness.

In my case, as with many other black public intellectuals, there has been a strident, severe, but altogether predictable “blacklash.” I’ve been called a “sellout.” Cornel West’s work has been viciously dismissed as “completely worthless.” bell hooks has been assailed for being “a hustler.” After my appearance on
Nightline
to
talk about making the Million Man March more than a walk for testosterone or bigotry, I was accused of playing “Goebbels,” the shrewd and perverted Nazi propagandist, to Farrakhan’s Hitler. (Yeah, that’s pretty libelous, but the guy who wrote it is named Adolf; I guess it was a case of vicarious nostalgia.) As you can tell, things have gotten nasty. What’s the problem?

According to critics, there are several. First, there is the question of how the few of us who are deemed public intellectuals got anointed. Second, our work suffers from an intellectual thinness that could be remedied if only we weren’t busy pontificating, prophesying, or playing pundit on television or radio. Third, the prestige, fame, and fortune bestowed on us are corrupting, making us sellouts. Fourth, we public intellectuals play an authenticity game, claiming to speak as politically rooted prophets for The Race as we peddle distorted meanings of blackness to the undiscerning white masses. Fifth, we’re treated with kid gloves by colleagues and not really criticized. Finally, we all want to be HNIC (for the uninitiated, Head Negro In Charge).

Let’s face it, there’s some truth to some of these charges, and, depending on whom we’re talking about, there’s a lot of truth to many of these charges. Still, we don’t have to give up on being public intellectuals. It’s an honorable, even critical vocation. After all, just because counterfeit money exists, we don’t have to stop spending the real thing. (Uh-oh, maybe the criticism about materialism is right; it’s even seeping into my analogies!) We’ve just got to pay attention to fair criticisms, confess our masked and bald opportunism, admit that we’re susceptible to the seductions of fame and fortune, and acknowledge that there are other equally gifted intellectuals who could do what we do, maybe even better. We’ve also got to face head-on the vicious personal attacks that get palmed off as brave commentary. And we’ve got to call a spade a spade: there’s a lot of jealousy out here.

The irony of all this infighting and name-calling is that just as black intellectuals begin to receive our due—that is, a few of us, which, as you
can’t
tell by the fury of the complaints, is more than received it in the past, the rule being the less there is to go around the more you fight over who gets it—we begin to knock each other off. Or others do the job for us. Hateful assaults from black and white writers often reveal their ignorance, or their distorted views, of how we got where we are. There’s a difference between sharp criticism and the animus of ad hominem and ad feminem roasting. Sure, when you’re the object of even the healthy kind of criticism, it can sting for days. And sometimes a literate intellectual licking leaves you feeling like you’ve been mugged by a metaphor. But you gird your loins to write again.

Why are so many critics hot and blathered?

The anointing of a few voices to represent The Race is an old, abiding problem. For much of our history, blacks have had to rely on spokespersons to express our views and air our grievances to a white majority that controlled access to everything from education to employment. For the most part, powerful whites only wanted to see and hear a few blacks at a time, forcing us to choose a leader—when we could. Often a leader was selected for us by white elites. Predictably,
blacks often disagreed with those selections, but since the white elites had the power and resources, their opinions counted.

Such an arrangement created tensions in black communities because it reduced blackness to its lowest common denominator. Only what could be condensed into speeches, editorials, and other public declarations survived transmission to white elites. Complexity was often sacrificed for clarity. It also made the content of what was communicated about black culture conform to the spokesperson’s gifts, vision, or interests. Thus, a spokesperson had a profound impact on what goods or services the rest of his or her black constituency received. The accountability of such leaders was often low.

Complicating matters further was the fact that the choice of spokespersons didn’t always turn on issues that were of greatest interest or importance to blacks. Often a spokesperson was selected because his themes, style, and ideology were acceptable to the white majority. Many black leaders were viewed skeptically by their constituencies. Booker T. Washington is a prime example of this model of leadership.

Naturally, these conditions introduced considerable tension into the relationship between those who did the speaking and those who were spoken for. Black spokespersons acquired influence because they were given legitimacy by the white majority, whose power to establish such legitimacy was far greater than that of the black minority. As a result, these spokespersons used their power in black communities to reward loyal blacks and to punish dissidents. This arrangement meant that patronage more than moral principle determined the allocation of the limited resources for which the spokesperson was a funnel. As a result, few blacks benefited from the leadership that was supposed to speak for them all.

This legacy of anointment and appointment hangs like a stone cloud over the debate about black public intellectuals. Who gets to be a black public intellectual, who chooses them, and what have they done for you lately? We can answer these questions by first posing a more basic question: Why are black public intellectuals presently enjoying such prominence?

The fact that race is being bitterly debated as the national issue has a lot to do with the rise of black public intellectuals. Race has always been a deep, characteristic American problem. The refusal to face race, or our courageous confrontation with its complex meanings, defines our national identity And it goes in cycles. At some points in our nation’s history—for instance, during the civil rights movement—we were forced to contend with race. At other times, such as during the erosion of racial progress in the Reaganite ’80s, we believed we could just as well do without all those remedies like affirmative action, which, in any case, had been manufactured to give a leg up to undeserving blacks. Well, Edgar Allan Poe met Yogi Berra: the pendulum of race has swung back, and it’s déjà vu all over again. Race is once more an inescapable force on a variety of fronts: the school yard, the job market, the justice system, politics, everywhere we look. So, living down to the crude, stereotypical version of American pragmatism, we call in the race experts to tell us what’s going on.

The enhanced currency of black public intellectuals also rides the wave of popularity that sections of black life are enjoying. If there’s one fact of black life in white America we can’t deny, it’s this: black folk go in and out of style. Most of the time our identities are exploited for white commercial ends, or ripped off to further the careers of white imitators. Blackness is today a hot commodity, but of course, it always has been: the selling of black bodies on the slave market, minstrel shows, Elvis’s cloning of black gospel and blues singers all point to the fetish of black skin and skill in American popular culture. Once the barriers to black achievement were lowered, black folk ourselves got more of the fat.

Black bodies are “in” now, that is, if you don’t happen to be a black man with a car, tangling with the police in Los Angeles or the white suburbs of Pittsburgh. Rodney King was the L.A. driver, and, well, you know what happened to him and to all of us because of what the police did and what the white jury didn’t do. Jonny Gammage was the second driver, and he was stopped and subsequently choked to death by white police because he was wheeling his football star cousin Ray Seals’s sports car in a neighborhood where everybody knows a black man shouldn’t drive. You’re alright if your black body shows up on professional basketball courts, where nearly 80 percent of the players are black. Or in the entertainment industry, where, despite the preponderance of decent parts doled out to whites, more blacks have slightly thicker pickin’s and more leftovers to compete for than in the past. And hip-hop culture, to the chagrin of a whole lot of black folk, has literally darkened the face—some would say given it a black eye—of popular music.