The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (2 page)

Over the last fifteen years, I have had the extraordinary privilege to be an academic and a public intellectual—an engaged and politically active scholar devoted to changing the world as best I can with the gifts at hand. I was the first person in my family to have the opportunity to pursue higher education and to live the life of the mind. For ten years now, I have had a Ph.D. I believe that obligates me, as a member of a historically oppressed group, to pursue social justice for those who have been closed away from school doors and the halls of economic opportunity for far too long. But my privilege also summons me to think sharply and substantively about a wide range of intellectual issues, and to address the social and moral crises of the culture. I have never, not for even a second, believed that one couldn’t at the same time be smart and good, informed and involved, thoughtful and active. They are for me flip sides of the same vocational coin.

For the last twenty-five years, I have had the high honor to be called “Reverend Dyson.” I found my calling in a black Baptist church in Detroit whose ministry prized intellectual preparation as the hallmark of faithful service. Although tough circumstances meant that I didn’t enroll in college until I was twenty-one, I learned very early—from my mother, Addie Mae; from my Sunday School instructors at church; and from my public school teachers—that education is the doorway to life and liberty. In my case, it was as well a path to a sense of ministry that embraces the head and heart. Even though I haven’t been a parish minister for twenty years now, I consider my role as an engaged intellectual the extension of my calling to “preach the gospel to the poor,” and to “heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.”

Since my second year of graduate school, I have written professionally for a wide range of academic and popular journals, magazines, and newspapers. During the last decade, I have also published eight books—some with scholars in mind, others aimed at a literate general public—all with the intent of reflecting on important and interesting topics in the life of the mind, the life of the soul, the life of the race, and the life of the nation. Because of my writing, I have lectured at universities and in union halls; held forth in junior colleges and in juvenile detention centers; preached in churches and in synagogues, temples, and mosques; addressed civil rights groups and professional gatherings; spoken to public and private grade schools, middle schools, and high schools; engaged adults and adolescents in jails and prisons across America; and traveled over water to deliver talks in Italy and Brazil, in Amsterdam and in Cuba, and in Jamaica and the Bahamas. It is also because of my writing that I have appeared across the mediascape on
radio and television programs throughout the land—and in cyberspace—to debate current affairs and pressing social issues, and to hold up the banner of progressive politics. In my mind, writing is thinking, struggling, fighting, imagining, loving, hoping, preaching, crying, wishing, and inspiring, all at once.

This book charts the geography of my intellectual journey. It maps the regions of my intellectual interests—religion and philosophy, race theory and rap music, masculinity and multiculturalism, feminist thought and gender relations, black identity and popular culture, moral thought and sexuality, cultural criticism and critical theory, intellectual life and institutional racism, soul music and jazz history, black film and postmodernism, and a great deal besides. This reader is a diagram as well of the intellectual and rhetorical treasures I have mined over the years and a record of the struggles I have waged to understand better, to think deeper, and to write clearer about matters of life and death. What guides all of my thought and action is the belief that human beings who think creatively and act boldly can shape history and relieve suffering for the good of the neighborhood and the planet. I hope you, the reader, enjoy this reader, and journey with me through the intellectual and political wilderness of our international life in the hopes of finding a city of moral beauty and justice for all.

As a pledge of my citizenship in such a city, I would like to thank those who have helped me along the way. I would like to thank my wonderful editor Liz Maguire, my dear friend and intellectual compatriot who works with me to realize my vision in print. I would also like to thank Megan Hustad for all her concern and hard work. I would also like to thank Kay Mariea and her team who worked diligently and expertly to make this book appear. I would also like to thank my Penn family for their love and support, especially Tukufu Zuberi, Ann Matter, Sam Preston, Gale Garrison, Carol Davis, Onyx Finney, Marie Hudson—and, of course, Judith Rodin, our leader who we all love and miss already, and who is one-half of the dynamic duo to whom I dedicate this book. Finally, I would like to thank my family—Marcia (who, as usual, sacrificed greatly and put aside her own work to read mine; thanks so much), Michael, Maisha, and Mwata, and my mother, Addie Mae Dyson, and my brothers, Anthony, Gregory, and Brian—for their love and support. And to Everett Dyson-Bey, my brilliant and courageous brother who remains incarcerated after fifteen years, I pray for your imminent release and return to your family and to your work of enlightening and uplifting the world. And to Doc, Marcia, Beverly, Elaine, Geraldine, Jimmy, and Robert—with the memory of “Smally” and Michelle never far away—I hope the dedication of this book to your magnificent wife and beloved mother, Rosa Elizabeth Smith, acknowledges how much we all miss her big heart, her big smile, and her big spirit.

I can’t remember when I decided I wanted to be an intellectual. I’m not even sure if that’s the sort of thing one fully determines before it happens. For that matter, I can’t remember when I
became
an intellectual—a person with a great passion to think and study and to distribute the fruits of his labor in useful form. There was no bolt of lightning for me; unlike St. Paul, I didn’t have a dramatic conversion that saved me from ignorance and put me on a path of learning. It simply dawned on me in my various pursuits—as grade school spelling bee champ, as junior high school orator, as high school renegade who skipped class in search of better education, as factory laborer who preferred books to welding, and as a failed pastor who returned to college to complete my degree before heading to graduate school—that I had a calling to what Hannah Arendt gracefully termed “the life of the mind.”

I do remember when I became an academic—a scholar who makes a living as an intellectual in higher education. Already I’ve used terms that some see as roughly equivalent, but one might quibble with such a view. Not to be catty, but there are differences in the terms used to describe what people do who operate in higher education. An
academic
toils in the vineyards of higher learning, usually as a teacher who may also focus on research. A
scholar
is an academic (only in this case, since I’m referring to those who function within the academy; of course, there are many scholars who work outside of its precincts) whose focus is on research. And an
intellectual
in higher education is an academic or scholar who swims beyond her specialty and embraces the surging waves of knowledge as they wash against entrenched disciplines. It should be obvious that my take on the distinctions between academics, intellectuals, and scholars is quite subjective and more anecdotal than analytical. Of course, there’s no linguistic cop watching over these definitions to keep them from being mixed. No science lies behind my observation, except, of course, the science of observation.

There is no great advantage in admitting that one is, or wants to be, an intellectual. (For confirmation, one need only look at politics, where the current occupant of the White House got big campaign returns on depicting his opponent as an egghead elitist, even as he shrewdly played up his own bum-fumbling everydayness to identify with “the folk” and to preemptively strike against those who protested his lack of intellectual fitness for office.) Nevertheless, on a day-to-day basis, an intellectual is what I am—though, it must be noted, an intellectual whose baptism in black religion shows up decisively in my work. But since I’ve been booted out of the pastorate of a black church for attempting to ordain women, and given that my extremely liberal views on homosexuality run counter to the
received wisdom of black theological lights, I must confess that my version of the faith might provoke as many cries of heresy as it may win converts. I’ve taken to pulpits around the nation for a quarter century to proclaim my vision of the gospel, one whose keystones are social revolution, racial and economic equality, intergenerational understanding, and gender and sexual justice.

Except it’s nearly as tough these days being a preacher as it is being an intellectual, particularly with the ignorance that parades under the banner of religious belief. (Witness the attempt of a self-proclaimed God-fearing chief judge to plop down a two-ton replica of the Ten Commandments in a Montgomery, Alabama, courthouse, surrounded by a cloud of witnesses unified in their bitter opposition to secularists and errant believers like me who feel that God doesn’t need the protection of the state. And all of this, mind you, at the time of the fourtieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, whose leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., faced violent opposition to civil rights in Montgomery,
in the
name of God
, from the ancestors of some of the same folk who now want to ram their view of God down the throats of their fellow citizens. Besides, many of the protesters—supporters, no doubt, of the death penalty—wouldn’t wish officers of the court and justice system to obey at least one of the commandments, to wit, not to kill. Maybe that’s why King, an ordained Baptist pastor, was adamantly opposed to school prayer: he knew that many of the same folk who claimed to love God would just as well send some of God’s “other” children—those who don’t share their faith or even their race or nationality or politics—straight to hell.)

My religious background has a lot to do with how I see the life of the mind: not as career but vocation, and not as a pursuit isolated from the joy and grief of ordinary folk, but as a calling to help hurting humanity. I suppose, in retrospect, it would be fair to say that one of the reasons I became an intellectual was to talk back to suffering—and if possible, to relieve it. I wanted to be as smart as I could be about the pain and heartache of people I knew were unjustly oppressed. First off, there were the poor, working poor, and working-class black folk I saw in my own tribe and in the ghetto neighborhoods I lived in. Later, as I matured and traveled around the country, there were the people who suffered because of the skin or class into which they were born, or the way they had sex, or the way they thought about it. And finally, as I have learned the world, there are the folk on whom brutality descends because of their color, their native tongue, their religion, or the region of land to which their lives are staked.

Of course, these might be good reasons for becoming a minister, that is, if you embrace a social gospel, one that cares about people’s bodies and health and housing as much as it attends to their souls. But to many, these are poor grounds on which to base an intellectual life. For me they spring from the same soil. The intellectuals I admire most are just as eager to preach resistance to ignorance, pain, and yes, evil, as evangelists are to promulgate spiritual salvation. I haven’t the slightest interest in using my academic perch to proselytize students or colleagues to my way of thinking about God. (Get me in a pulpit, and it’s a different
matter altogether, although I am now far less interested in saving men’s souls from the hell to come as I am in inspiring my listeners to relieve the suffering of victims who live in hell in Detroit or Delhi.) In fact, some of the thinkers and activists I am in lockstep with about the way the world should go share nothing of my church or the Bible on which it rests. And, by turn, some of the same folk who share communion with me would just as soon see my way of thinking about race and politics perish in holy flames. (If I had to choose, I’d rather sink with atheists who say they don’t believe in God, yet love God’s children, and show it with the work they do and in their compassion for the vulnerable, than rise with believers whose view of God is shriveled and vicious, and who punish others, and themselves, ultimately, with hard-hearted moralizing, and a cruel indifference to the suffering of the unwashed that grows from the despotic ill-temperedness of the self-righteous.)

Intellectuals have an obligation to be as smart as we can possibly be, but we have an even greater obligation to be good with the smarts we possess. We don’t have to apologize for not being factory laborers, sanitation workers, or even politicians. There’s no shame in thinking well about the mathematics of black holes or the theory of social privilege, about the biology of evolution or the chemistry of genetic inheritance, about the philosophy of gender or the psychology of race, since they contribute to the knowledge of ourselves and the world we inhabit. But as for me and my house—those whose intellectual work takes a public bent, and whose knowledge can combat the plagues on our social and moral lives, and on our physical existence, too—we must consider the plight of factory laborers and sanitation workers. We’ve got to think about those who work under depressing and alienating conditions, and who suffer assaults on their worth in economies that ignore or exploit them. While a laundry list of oppressions, brutalities, and sufferings is hardly sufficient, it may be a necessary start to healing the ills of our fellow man and woman. Those who hurt because of race, class, sexuality, gender, age, health, environment, disability, religion, region, and the like must disturb intellectuals into action.

If the goal is to do more than recite such lists, then intellectuals must join the struggle to aid the vulnerable. I got the notion that struggle is key to the intellectual’s vocation from the communities I grew up in. In the fifth grade, I was transformed by the teaching of Mrs. James, mostly because she helped her students see themselves in a fresh and powerful racial light. My birth certificate says I’m a Negro, like all birth certificates of colored children born as I was in the late fifties. But Mrs. James helped us to shed old definitions and to embrace a new grammar of self-respect tied to what soul singer Curtis Mayfield called “a choice of colors.” She convinced us that we were black, not colored or Negro. Although what Malcolm X derisively called the “so-called Negro revolution” had altered the fate of millions of black bodies, it hadn’t changed nearly as many minds. Black was still considered an epithet among many Negroes, especially those who resented the kinky hairstyles and African pendants and clothing adopted by the youth. On
many a day I heard black folk repeat a saw they didn’t realize cut their psyches and history in half: “Don’t call me black; I ain’t no African.” To an outsider, and even to some of us on the inside, it was tricky trying to negotiate the terms that flocked to our identities. And there were quite a few choices, including colored, Negro, black, Afro-American, and later, of course, African-American. Which one you answered to depended a lot on how old you were, what part of the country you lived in, and how willing you were to examine yourself in the wake of a huge change in social status. Mrs. James took us on a whirlwind tour of black struggle. She took special delight in pointing out the exuberant champions of our survival: ministers and cowboys, lawyers and seamstresses, secretaries and inventors, railroad workers and politicians, folk who used their minds, pens, feet, mouths, and deeds to prove that we weren’t savages or coons and that we deserved respect for our intelligence and morality. At the very least, their example showed that we were the equals of our condescending “saviors.”

In unfolding her lesson plan, Mrs. James persuaded me that my skills and talents, like those of our leaders, must help the struggle for black freedom. As long as I have understood what an intellectual is—especially one who rises from a people for whom history is not a blackboard, like it is for those with power, but a skuzzy washrag with grime and stains—I have believed that she should combat half-truths about the people she loves. To skeptics, that smacks of provincialism, propaganda, and the hijacking of knowledge for ethnic therapy and consolation. To be sure, if that’s what we end up with, we’re mere replicas of the very forces we decry as inexorably biased. But such fear is relieved when we consider the context in which our intellectual lives play out. The life of the mind is tied to the public good, and unavoidably, at least initially, the promise of this good is defined by the well-being of
my
tribe and kin. If there are insuperable barriers to our getting a fair share of what everyone deserves, the public good is diminished. Under these circumstances, it is, at best, a disappointing abstraction of a social ideal that is placed unjustly beyond our reach. The identification of the public good with what’s good for my group has limits and dangers, of course, since at times the public good may run counter to my group’s benefit. In fact, in many instances—say, when the Voting Rights Act undercut the monopoly on political power for Southern whites, or when the Equal Rights Amendment gave women the chance to compete with men for jobs—the public good was served by cutting off an unjust group privilege. We have to be willing to wish for every other group what we wish for our own if we are to make the identification of the public good with the good of our group work. The public good is hampered when we idolize our slice of the social welfare and elevate our group above all others in the political order. Such a thing is bad enough if groups simply aspire to unjust social dominance, but if they’ve got the power to get it done, it greatly harms the commonweal.

If I say that as an intellectual I want to tell the truth about black culture and the folk I love, and thus contribute to the black freedom struggle, I’m not seeking to hog the social good for my group. I simply want to make society better by improving the plight of black and other oppressed people. Our plight affects the whole: if we prosper, society is better; if we go down, the larger culture suffers as well. It’s just as harmful for our society to embrace misinformation and half-truth about black folk as it is for blacks to keep silent about it. On that misinformation and half-truth rests public policies and social theories that take a yeoman’s intellectual effort to erode even a little. God knows what effort is needed to fight centuries of racial distortion and the fear of black identity fueled by stereotypes, myths, and outright lies. The struggle to specify the complex character of black life—how it is far more flexible, durable, and intricate, and contradictory and elusive too, than is usually acknowledged, even among some blacks—is part of the black freedom struggle too. Protest marches were crucial to our liberation; sit-ins and boycotts were fundamental to our freedom; and the court brief was decisive in striking down legal barriers to our social flourishing. But the will to clarify our aims and examine our identity is, in its own way, just as important to our freedom as the blows struck in our defense by revolutionary stalwarts. Neither does love cancel out criticism; nor should it prevent black intellectuals from publicly discussing hard truths about black life that might embarrass or anger us. The role of the black intellectual is to discover, uncover, and recover truth as best we can, and to subject our efforts to healthy debate and examination. I learned from Malcolm X in particular that the black freedom struggle is no good without self-criticism and holding each other morally accountable.