The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (10 page)

Racism remains the central problem in our culture; its brutal persistence
brings out the ugliest features of the national character. I have spent
quite a bit of time reading, writing, and thinking about race, and no
small effort opposing racism’s malevolent expression. We must clearly
grasp the difference between race—the culturally determined base of
identity upon which social benefit and stigma rests—and racism—the
sordid expression of prejudice and hatred against a racial group with
the sanction of law and social custom. Otherwise, we won’t make much
headway in understanding why it is sometimes helpful to take race into
account, even as we continue to fight against white supremacy, one of
the most destructive forms of racism in history.

THE ABYSMAL STATE OF RACE RELATIONS in American culture is a continuing source of bewilderment and frustration. The reappearance of overt racist activity, especially on college and secondary school campuses, forces us to reevaluate our understanding of race as we approach the last decade of the twentieth century. In particular, the liberal theory of race, which has dominated the American understanding of race relations, has exhibited a crisis of explanation, manifested in its exponents’ inability to elucidate persistent forms of Afro-American oppression.

Robert Anson’s book
Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry
(New York: Random House, 1988), which recently appeared in paperback, reflects the crisis in liberal race theory. Anson’s perspective is rooted in a theory of race that prevents him from understanding the complex ways in which racism continues to exert profound influence over the lives of millions of black people. In particular, his explanation of the social and personal forces that besieged Edmund Perry’s life, and caused his death, is severely limited by Anson’s approach. By examining issues raised in Anson’s treatment of Perry’s life and death, I want to comment upon the
limits of the liberal theory of race and show how Anson’s use of it distorts crucial issues that need to be addressed.

In 1981, Edmund Perry, a black teenager “of exceptional promise,” left Harlem for Exeter, New Hampshire, in order to attend one of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools. On June 2, 1985, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy with honors, having been awarded a full scholarship to Stanford University. Ten days later, a short distance from Harlem on New York City’s Upper West Side, Perry was killed by Lee Van Houten, a young white plainclothes police officer. Van Houten reported that Perry and an accomplice had beaten him viciously during a robbery attempt on the night of June 12.

Van Houten stated that after yelling that he was a police officer, he managed, with blurred vision and failing consciousness, to pull his gun from its ankle holster and fire three shots. One attacker, who held him from behind, fled; Perry, who assaulted him frontally, lay on his back on the sidewalk, stilled by a wound to his stomach. At 12:55 A.M., after being taken to nearby St. Luke’s Hospital, Edmund Perry was pronounced dead. (Perry’s brother Jonah, then a nineteen-year-old engineering student at Cornell University, was said to have been the accomplice that night. Jonah Perry was later formally charged and cleared by a grand jury.)

Robert Anson is a freelance magazine writer and author. At the time of Perry’s killing his son was also a student at Exeter and, in fact, had sat behind Perry every day during school assembly. This connection accounts, in part, for Anson’s interest in the Perry story, even after widespread public shock over the shooting subsided. An even more powerful motivation, however, was the apparent contradiction Edmund Perry represented. On the one hand, Perry had “all the things anyone was supposed to need to climb out of poverty and make it in America.” On the other hand, if Perry had actually died trying to mug Van Houten, then something had gone “dreadfully haywire,” despite the “best intentions” of Harlem and Exeter. Anson’s book is his search for an understanding of Perry’s life, education, and killing, and thereby of racism in U.S. society.

Anson begins by looking for a conclusive account of what happened on the night of June 12. His investigation is fatally compromised by the fact that Lee Van Houten was the only eyewitness to the event. What Anson does is piece together circumstantial evidence that he believes supports Van Houten’s story. (The official police inquiry ruled the killing of Edmund Perry “justifiable homicide” and within departmental guidelines.)

Several factors—Perry’s personal reputation, the number of shootings of black men by New York City police, and especially the lack of concrete proof against Edmund and Jonah Perry and Van Houten’s inability to identify Jonah as one of the two assailants—lead me to conclude we will never be certain about the events of June 12. We should, however, still look seriously at other issues Anson raises (and doesn’t raise) in his search for an explanation of Perry’s life: the position of racial minorities in predominantly white institutions, the consequences of juggling
two cultures, the ongoing racism of American culture, and the inability of most existing race theory to illuminate racism’s malignant persistence.

Since Anson’s investigation leads him to rule out foul play or police attempts at cover-up, he follows the lead of one of the principal police investigators—a garrulous detective who tells him the streets had eaten Perry alive. Thus, Anson goes to Harlem.

Through a set of interviews that are the greatest strength of the book, Anson tries to piece together a picture of Edmund Perry’s life and the environment that produced and shaped him. We hear the proud voices of women who had driven dope dealers from the streets by their sheer physical presence; the admiring voices of friends who were inspired by Perry’s discipline and dedication to his ambitious goals; the knowing voices of former co-survivors of the vicious circle of drugs, poverty, and violence, one of whom contended that “Edmund died a natural death up here”; the perceptive voice of a pastor who appreciated Perry’s religious values and his ability to maneuver between two cultures; the empathetic voices of other blacks who had struggled with the difficulty and guilt of their departure from desolate and beleaguered circumstances; and the pained voices of former teachers and mentors who identified and nurtured Perry’s powerful intelligence and talent.

Above all, we hear the strikingly ambitious and sacrificial voice of Perry’s mother. Veronica Perry emerges as a powerful woman who fought tooth and nail the despair and cynicism that too often conform Harlem life to its ugly mold—a woman who sent both her sons to prestigious prep schools, successfully ran for the school board, and worked ceaselessly to raise the quality of life in her neighborhood.

The picture of Edmund Perry that formed was one of an extremely bright, hard worker who possessed a mature vision of life’s purpose and an infectious compassion for his people—a vision nurtured by strong religious beliefs. But Anson, sensing a canonizing impulse at work in the stories of friends, teachers, and mentors, searches for a fuller picture. He wants Edmund Perry, warts and all, and so he begins interviewing classmates, teachers, and administrators at Exeter.

Many at Exeter spoke of Perry’s intelligence, his eagerness to perform well, his quick wit, his enormous love for his mother, his pride in (and rivalry with) his brother, Jonah. Exeter’s chaplain said Perry was guarded, rarely revealing much about himself. Some black classmates, especially women, thought that initially Perry could be “pushy” or “cocky,” something they attributed to his neighborhood roots. Some white classmates were disturbed by what they perceived to be an extraordinary “racial sensitivity.” David Daniels, then one of only three blacks on the faculty and the adult closest to Perry at Exeter, conceded that point: Perry “was sensitive about race, probably more so than the other black students. I never saw any racial hostility though. Instead, there was frustration, exasperation.”

Anson also reports on the year Perry spent in Barcelona, as well as his troubled final year at Exeter. Perry told many people he experienced no racism in Spain,
but Anson contends this was deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. He observes that in this case, as in others, “it was becoming apparent that Eddie had a propensity for telling different stories to different people.”

During his final year at Exeter, Perry’s work fell off, and he became increasingly hostile. Anson details Perry’s participation in a club that demanded a sexual initiation, and discusses his (and others’) low-level drug dealing. Perry also delivered a “tough and angry” speech to a schoolwide assembly on Martin Luther King’s birthday. The speech, written immediately after King’s assassination by a former black Exeter student, used Black Power rhetoric to make a bristling declaration of black independence.

Overall, the picture of Perry that emerged from Exeter was one of a deeply troubled young man whose racial identity caused him and, by extension, those around him a great deal of pain. Now Anson is sure: “Edmund Perry had indeed been killed while trying to assault an officer of the law. Why he had done so was less apparent to me.”

Unfortunately, the assumptions that Anson brings to his search for an adequate explanation of Perry’s death guarantee that he will not find one. The backdrop for most of his reflections on Perry is a scissors-and-paste version of the liberal theory of race—a theory that even in its more sophisticated manifestations has never come to terms with the reality of structural racism.

The liberal understanding of race in the United States is modeled on the white European immigrant experience.
¹
In making this experience paradigmatic, liberal theorists have lumped race together with other variables—religion, language, and nationality, for example—and taken them all to constitute a larger ethnic identity that is more crucial than race in explaining the condition of black people. The focus on ethnicity means that liberal theories of race are primarily concerned either with ethnic assimilation or with the maintenance of ethnic identity through cultural pluralism.

Thus lawyer Madison Grant advanced his Anglo-conformity theory of ethnicity in the 1920s, contending that there must be total assimilation and conformity to Anglo-American life in order for white Americans to retain their racial purity. Historian Frederick J. Turner and Jewish immigrant Israel Zangwill composed the melting-pot theory, which asserted that America is best seen as a pot in which all ethnic groups are melting and merging together. Horace Kallen proposed the notion of cultural pluralism, saying that each culture maintains its own character while coexisting with other groups. And Moynihan and Glazer promoted the emerging culture theory, maintaining that cultures interact and the resultant combination produces a political and cultural
tertium quid,
the phenomenon of the hyphenated American (e.g., African-American).

The liberal theory of race has informed the party practices, jurisprudential reasoning, and legislative agendas of its most ardent and aggressive political proponents, the liberal Democrats. Liberal race theory experienced a fragile inception in FDR’s New Deal, a tentative strengthening under Truman’s Fair Deal, and a
substantial solidification in Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Great Society due to the civil rights movement. In sociopolitical dress, liberal race theory has argued for a greater black share in jobs, for integration of housing and education, and for desegregation of interstate transportation as strategies to assure black inclusion and assimilation in the larger circle of American privilege.

The problem with the theory is that it encounters an insurmountable obstacle: the irreducible reality of race. Because it conceives of race as merely a part of one’s broader ethnic identity, liberal race theory is unable to make sense of the particular forms of oppression generated primarily by racial identity. Much of the time, it cannot explain why blacks have failed to “assimilate” because it has not acknowledged the unique structural character of racism or historical content of racial oppression—slavery, Jim Crow laws, structural unemployment, gentrification of black living space, deeply ingrained institutional racism. At this point, however, instead of revising their fundamental assumptions, liberal race theorists tend to explain blacks’ failure to “assimilate” successfully by looking almost exclusively at problems
within
black culture and by treating these problems as givens.

More specifically, liberal theory opts for an explanation of the debilitating effects of racism that reduces them to their psychological effects on the black personality. It does not weave its psychological analysis into a dynamic understanding of the persistent social, historical, and political aspects of racism. While it is undeniable that racism’s effect on the black psyche is deleterious, to perceive that as racism’s
primary
damage obscures the persistent structural factors that enforce and reinforce perceptions of personal inferiority, rage, and hostility. That kind of reductionism hinders our understanding of personal identity as a construct of several different elements—social, psychological, political, and historical—and makes it likely that we will mislocate the causes of black failure to “assimilate.”