The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (91 page)

The “I’m Not a Prophet, But I Play One on TV” Award.
This goes to Christians like West, James Cone, and myself, and to those inspired by Buddhist spirituality, like bell hooks. We all use the term “prophet” in one way or another. Although you won’t catch us saying so, we sometimes mean it to apply to ourselves. Hold on. Let’s be honest here. This probably applies to
all
public intellectuals, who fancy themselves prophets of a sort. We mean well, but hey, I guess we’ve got to realize that real prophets—of whom there are precious few—lead much more dangerous, sacrificial lives. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve received our share of threats, nasty letters, vile communication, and hateful responses from unhappy readers, viewers, or listeners. And we are, well, deeply sacrificial, and, occasionally, prophetic. But when I think of a prophet like Martin Luther King Jr., we just don’t cut it. He spent his life paying the price for the title. Plus, King made something like $200,000 a year in speaking engagements and gave nearly every penny of it to the SCLC, keeping only $4,000 to supplement his $6,000 a year salary at his church. Black public intellectuals nowadays can make anywhere from $100,000 to over $1 million a year. We say critical things in public, a lot of people hate us for it, we often act brave. But we profit while we prophet.

The Barbara Mandrell “I Was a Public Intellectual When Public Intellectuals
Weren’t Cool” Award.
Angela Davis wins this, hands down. A long time ago—when gangsta rappers had the bourgeois blues in their diapers while she was stepping to the revolution; when most celebrated intellectuals were eating their Wheaties, going to Jack and Jill, and courting in the front parlor while she was applying Marcuse to social misery; when more-radical-than-thou critics were enjoying the creature comforts that stoke their dizzy nostalgia for marginality while she was taking three squares in a cramped cell; and when most postfeminists were getting pedicures to put their best foot forward at the debutante while she wore jungle
boots at the front line of class warfare—Angela Davis lived what we mean by black public intellectual. She continues to embody that. And she still fine!

The “Excuse the Accents But I’m a Wanna-Beatles” Award.
This goes to Paul Gilroy, a black British critic who, in his book,
The Black Atlantic,
has brilliantly forced Americans to think about black identity in an international context. So what’s the problem with this latest British invasion? Well, Gilroy just plain trashes most black American intellectuals, often calling us “wrong” for no compelling reason. And for a thinker who spends a lot of time talking about hybridity—meaning that black identity is complex and varied—he completely ignores black American intellectuals who talk about these issues with sophistication and skill. Plus, Gilroy pretty much disses any form of ethnic solidarity, failing to see how that solidarity has often been a means of black survival. After all, black folk weren’t oppressed as individuals; we were oppressed because of our group identity.

It’s painful to see Gilroy rake black folk over the coals in public lectures. He just doesn’t get it. Part of the deference paid to him has to do with his ties to England, a place America still cowers before intellectually. White folk love to hear that colonial accent employed to dog black rappers, public intellectuals, and all the other Negroes who don’t measure up. Gilroy may have the black Atlantic down pat; it’s the black specific that he needs to bone up on.

The “Hey, Don’t Compare Black Intellectuals to Jewish Intellectuals, Because
They’re Not That Good” Award.
This award goes to critics William Phillips and Leon Wieseltier. Phillips noted in
Partisan Review
how the New York intellectuals, a large number of whom were Jewish, didn’t stoop to the crass, pop cultural stuff that black intellectuals have gained notoriety for. And unlike black intellectuals, Phillips says, Jewish intellectuals weren’t obsessed with (in fact, they didn’t even talk about) their Jewish ethnicity or about race. And he’s bragging about that?

Wieseltier is painfully transparent. His vicious attack on Cornel West in the
New
Republic
is a bitter piece of calumny, a screed motivated in large part by jealousy. But Wieseltier’s sledgehammer approach to West’s work seems to package an even uglier view of the black–Jewish conflict: by setting West up as the premier black intellectual, and then knocking him down, Wieseltier is knocking the black intellectual enterprise in general. He does so, in part, by arguing that West’s use of the Hebrew prophets is ill-fated and dim-witted; Wieseltier, in effect, is rescuing sacred Jewish texts and teachers from what he seems to think is West’s inferior intelligence.

But those texts and teachers need to be rescued from Wieseltier’s nasty grip. After all, the best of Jewish sacred traditions counsels wise, balanced criticism, not the sort of wholesale bludgeoning Wieseltier practices. Although we often forget it, this critical juncture of head and heart is where blacks and Jews can still embrace.

The “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” Award.
This goes to talented Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who wrote a critique of black public intellectuals in
Dissent
. Really, it
was mostly about Cornel West; when he referred to me and bell hooks, it was as “another writer.” That little glitch, and Wilentz’s commentary, show several things. One, that white folk often choose one black to be the designated hitter, losing sight of other players, reinforcing what Zora Neale Hurston termed the “Pet Negro” system that they despise but help perpetuate. Two, by focusing on one black in what is at least a generational phenomenon, he slights the diversity of opinion, status, and style among black public intellectuals, which allows him to make generalizations that don’t hold up under closer investigation.

Three, Wilentz worries that fame, fortune, and celebrity will corrupt black intellectuals. In the attempt to help black public intellectuals avoid such seductions, why wasn’t Wilentz writing about black intellectual work a decade ago, before the market mandated it, before celebrity occasioned it? He would then look like a critic motivated by nothing save the best interests of black intellectual life, the academy, and so on. As it stands, he’s the big winner. Since writing in
Dissent
(a public intellectual venue) about the pitfalls of too much press and exposure, he’s written for the
New Yorker
, an even larger public intellectual organ, and gained more opportunity to express his views in public. I think Wilentz owes black public intellectuals some royalties!

The “Hoops At Harvard” Award.
This award goes to Henry Louis Gates Jr. Skip said he feels like the coach of the Dream Team, luring to Harvard such stars as Cornel West and William Julius Wilson to join team members like K. Anthony Appiah, Evelyn Higginbotham, and Orlando Patterson. Let’s face it, a lot of people are just plain jealous of what Gates—a gifted scholar, writer, and administrator—has been able to do at Harvard: gather big names at an elite institution to think hard and long about the problems black folk face. They have the juice, and some people just can’t stand it: they’re smart, sharp, sophisticated scholars. They deserve to be on The Team.

The problem comes when it’s said like the other places have, well, scrubs, folk that ought to think about retiring or who can only come off the bench, streak scorers who can’t really start at their positions. Boy, look at how the metaphor just goes downhill, Skip. Hey, Princeton’s team ain’t so bad, and neither is Yale’s. I hear Michigan’s going to the playoffs this year, and that Emory is one of the teams to watch.

Harvard’s is a great team, but maybe it’s not the Dream Team. Because then Gates would have to explain why David Levering Lewis—arguably the most virtuosic contemporary black intellectual, what with his books on Africa, the Harlem Renaissance, Martin Luther King, Jr., and W.E.B. Du Bois—isn’t signed. Or why Nell Painter, a formidable historian of the South, is missing. He’d have to tell us what happened to the erudite Africanist, V.Y. Mudimbe, or the learned historian of religion, Charles Long. Or why the astonishingly smart Patricia Williams isn’t suited up in crimson.

Besides, if Harvard’s faculty is really the Dream Team, they have an extra burden: they’re expected to win the gold every time. More than that, they can’t play
every pick-up game (conference, television show, lecture appearance, and the like) they’re offered. They can’t produce sloppy, insubstantial work. They’ve got to generate serious, thoughtful, well-wrought books and articles.

And if, as West and Gates have repeatedly claimed, the days of HNIC are over, then both have to do a difficult thing; spread some of the influence and surrender some of the power by which they’ve managed to affect the careers of other black scholars. Otherwise, saying they don’t desire to be HNIC becomes a cover for reinforcing their privileged status.

On the PR front, Skip, you’ve got to get together with Cornel so he can give you some lessons in Humility 101. (I definitely need to sit in on these as well!) First thing you learn is that from now on you say, “I’m pleased that we’re assembling a marvelous collection of scholars here at Harvard. We’re certainly not the only place where such good intellectual company may be found, but we’re proud to be one of them.” Then I’m voting you Coach of the Year. That is, if you can sign Dennis Rodman!

The problems and possibilities of black public intellectuals are huge. We’ve got a chance to make a difference in the world—something a lot of folk can’t say, a chance a lot of scholars don’t get. We shouldn’t allow pettiness or jealousy to stop us. If black intellectuals keep bickering, bellyaching, and bitterly attacking one another, we’ll blow it. And we shouldn’t allow the forces and resources of the marketplace to set us against one another. We should be using our minds to shine a light on the real foes of black folk and democracy: poverty, capital flight, rightwing extremists, religious fundamentalists, and the politics of conservatives and neoliberals that hurt the working class and the working poor.

1
. My argument here is based on the important work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant in
Racial Formation in the United States
(New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

2
. Cornel West, “A Genealogy of Modern Racism,” in
Prophesy Deliverance! An AfroAmerican Revolutionary Christianity
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), pp. 47–68; West,
Prophetic Fragments
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1988).

1
. Michael Bradley,
The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man ’s Racism, Sexism, and Aggression
(New York: Kayode, 1978).

2
. Richard King
, African Origin of Biological Psychiatry
(Germantown, Tenn.: Seymour-Smith, 1990).

3
. See Frances Cress-Welsing, “The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy),” in Cress-Welsing,
The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors
(Chicago: Third World Press, 1991), pp. 1–16.

4
. Ibid., p. 4.

5
. Ibid., p. 5.

6
. Martin Bernal,
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

7
. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society
(Knoxville, Tenn.: Whittle Communications, 1991).

1
. There is a growing literature on the socially constructed meanings of whiteness. For some of the best of this literature, see David Roediger,
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the
Making of the American Working Class
(New York: Verso, 1991); David Roediger,
Towards the
Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History
(New York: Verso, 1994); Theodore W. Allen
, The Invention of the White Race: Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social
Control
(New York: Verso, 1994); Fred Pfeil,
White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and
Difference
(New York: Verso, 1995); Jessie Daniels,
White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse
(New York: Routledge, 1997); Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds.,
White Trash: Race and Class in America
(New York: Routledge, 1997); Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and L. Mun Wong, eds.,
Off White: Readings on Race,
Power, and Society
(New York: Routledge, 1997).

2
. Renato Rosaldo
, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis
(Boston: Beacon, 1983, 1993), pp. 68–87.

3
. For a small sample of such criticism, see Todd Gitlin,
The Twilight of Common Dreams:
Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995); Michael Tomasky,
Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America
(New York: Free Press, 1996); Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
The Disuniting of America
(Whittle Direct Books, 1991); and Richard Bernstein,
The Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the
Battle for America ’s Future
(New York: Knopf, 1994).

4
. See Michael Eric Dyson,
Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of
Malcolm X
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and
Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line
(New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996).

5
. Tomasky
, Left for Dead
, pp. 10, 15–17.

6
. Roediger,
The Wages of Whiteness
and
Towards the Abolition of Whiteness
.

1
. For a look at the contemporary plight of black men, especially black juvenile males, see
Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species
, ed. Jewelle Taylor Gibbs (Dover, Mass.: Auburn House, 1988).

2
. See William Julius Wilson,
The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and
Public Policy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

3
. See Wilson,
The Truly Disadvantaged
. For Charles Murray’s views on poverty, welfare, and the ghetto underclass, see his influential book,
Losing Ground: American Social Policy
, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic, 1984).

4
. This section on gangs is informed by the work of Mike Davis in
City of Quartz
(New York: Verso, 1991).

1
. Stanley Hauerwas and Michael Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ: Why Freedom of Belief Is Not Enough,”
DePaul Law Review
42 (1992).

2
. Ibid.

3
. Ibid.

4
. For a sampling of Hauerwas’s criticism of Christian ethical defenses of democracy, see “A Christian Critique of Christian America,” in
Community in America: The Challenge of
Habits of the Heart
, eds. Charles H. Reynolds and Ralph V. Norman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 250–265. See also
The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian
Ethics
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 12–13, 111. For claims about prophetic black Christianity’s contention that democracy is a fundamental norm of prophetic black Christianity, see Cornel West,
Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American
Revolutionary Christianity
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), pp. 18–19.

5
. George Will, “Scalia Missed Point but Made Right Argument on Separation of Religion,”
Durham Morning Herald
, Apr. 22, 1990, p. 5. I am not suggesting that Hauerwas’s treatment of the First Amendment is limited to this essay, or that the tension between church and state, and religion and politics, is a new subject for him, or one exclusively pursued in this essay. Anyone familiar with Hauerwas’s work will know of his long-standing views on such matters. See in particular Hauerwas’s books,
A Community of Character: Toward
a Constructive Christian Ethic
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981);
The
Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983);
Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society
(Minneapolis: WinstonSeabury, 1985); and
Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World and Living In-Between
(Durham, N.C.: Lambrinth, 1987). I am treating, however, the specific context of Hauerwas’s (and Baxter’s) remarks as they relate to points they make about Will’s interpretation of the First Amendment.

6
. Hauerwas and Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ.”

7
. See Walter Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” in
The Moral Foundations of
the American Republic
, ed. Robert H. Horwitz (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), p. 208.

8
. See Bernard Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967), p. 260. Also see Martin Marty
, Pilgrims in Their
Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America
(New York: Penguin, 1984), pp. 162–163.

9
. James Madison, quoted in Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
, p. 260.

10
. Ibid.

11
. See Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” p. 220.

12
. Ibid.

13
. Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” pp. 219–225. For an exposition on Locke’s views of Christianity, see Michael P. Zuckert, “Locke and the Problem of Civil Religion,” in
The Moral Foundations of the American Republic
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), pp. 181–203.

14
. For Madison on religion as opinion, see Marty,
Pilgrims in Their Own Land
, p. 163.

15
. Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Hauerwas and Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ,” p. 4.

16
. As Robert Bellah defines it in “The Idea of Practices in Habits: A Response,” in
Community in America
, eds. Reynolds and Norman, Constantinianism is the danger that “Christianity will be used instrumentally for the sake of creating political community but to the detriment of its own authenticity” (p. 277). As Hauerwas understands the term (building on the work of John Howard Yoder), which is drawn from Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, it is the assumption that “Christians should or do have social and political power so they can determine the ethos of society. . . . Constantine is the symbol of the decisive shift in the logic of moral argument when Christians ceased being a minority and accepted Caesar as a member of the church.” See Hauerwas, “A Christian Critique of Christian America,” in
Community i n
America
, eds. Reynolds and Norman, p. 260.

17
. See Hauerwas’s works cited in notes 15 and 16.

18
. For the pressure these groups brought to bear upon the colonies for freedom of religion, see Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
, pp. 257–258.

19
. Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” p. 206.

20
. Interestingly, Hauerwas raises the possibility of challenging the ideals that underlay the Jonestown community, but only through intellectual or religious debate or criticism of the community; even in light of the atrocities committed there, he doesn’t entertain the possibility of state intervention, or active Christian intervention, to protect the exploited victims of Jim Jones’s practices. He says in “On Taking Religion Seriously: The Challenge of Jonestown,” in
Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 103: “Our tragedy is that there was no one internal or external to that community able to challenge the false presuppositions of Jones’s false ideals. Our continuing tragedy is that our reactions to and our interpretations of the deaths of Jonestown reveal accurately how we lack the convictions to counter the powers that reigned there.” On the other hand, John Bennett sees Jonestown as an indication that freedom of religion is not absolute and as an example of the difficulty of determining when and if state intervention into religious practices should occur. Unlike Hauerwas, however, he concedes the possibility that state intervention is a plausible course of action under admittedly difficult-to-define circumstances. In “Church and State in the United States,” in
Reformed Faith and Politics,
ed. Ronald H. Stone (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983), p. 122, Bennett says: “That . . . religious freedom from any limitation by the state is not absolute is well illustrated by the terrible events in Jonestown. After those events it is easy to see there should have been protection of people against such exploitation and even lethal abuse by a religious leader, but it is not easy to say exactly at what point and by what method the state should have entered the picture.”

21
. This view among the Founders is characterized in Martin Marty’s summary of Benjamin Franklin’s views on established religion in Marty,
Pilgrims in Their Own Land
, p. 158: “Yet [Franklin] attacked churchly establishment: when a religion was good, it would support
itself. If a religion could not support itself and God did not care to come to its aid, it was a bad sign if then the members had to call on government for help.”

22
. Bennett, “Church and State in the United States,” pp. 121–122.

23
. It must be admitted that religion under the First Amendment becomes a matter of private choice versus public coercion, but that meaning of privacy is not in question here. Rather, it is whether religion under the First Amendment is rendered necessarily and exclusively private without the possibility of its public expression.