The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Finally, a most telling moment comes when, in speaking of what led to Perry’s death, Anson concludes, “The only villain I found was something amorphous, not a person or thing, just a difference called race.” He then checks his conclusion with “the only black friend I really had.” It happens that Anson’s phantom friend also knew Edmund Perry. The disturbing aspect of this is that Anson checks the viability of his interpretive vision against the understanding, insight, and knowledge of one black man, who, Anson says, offered to “guide me as my reporting went along, not by providing specific leads, but by confirming whether or not what I came up with was correct.” We are thus left with the definite impression that Anson does not know very much about the diversity of Afro-American thought and culture. In what constitutes an irony of liberalism, he depends upon his only black friend, thereby tokenizing that thought and culture and segregating himself from a powerful tradition that might have deepened his reflections on Perry’s life and death.

  The upshot of Anson’s approach is that even though he unearths the conflicts and consequences of being socially and culturally amphibious, of negotiating the psychological demands of two different worlds, his findings just pass him by. He cannot fashion an understanding of Edmund Perry’s life and death. All we hear is the restatement of a “difference called race” without any attempt to explain what difference that difference makes.

  Two other approaches to race might have helped Anson understand what made Edmund Perry’s life hell. The first is the racial formation theory advanced by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their book Racial Formation in the United States. In going beyond liberal race theory, Omi and Winant want to avoid the economic determinist and class reductionist elements in most progressive and leftist race theory, and conceive race as an irreducible category, like gender and class, for social theorizing about oppression. Racial formation theory, then, seeks to capture the process by which racial categories are formed, transformed, destroyed, and reformed. Furthermore, it treats race as a central axis of social relations that resists being subsumed under a larger category like ethnicity. It takes seriously the psychological, social, political, cultural, and historical as crucial explanatory strands in a full-blown theory of race.

  The second theory is Cornel West’s analysis of race, first articulated in Prophesy Deliverance! and now developed in an essay in his new book, Prophetic Fragments.2 West, like Winant and Omi, seeks to avoid reductionist accounts of racism. West’s theory permits him to trace the emergence and development (or genealogy) of the idea of white racism and supremacy in modern Western discourse. Such an approach promotes the unearthing of the material, economic, political, cultural, psychological, sexual, and spiritual forces that express and respond to the social practices of racism within the cultural traditions of Western civilization. West’s theory has three stages: (1) a radical historical investigation of the emergence, development, and persistence of white supremacy; (2) an analysis of the mechanisms that develop and maintain the logic of white supremacy in the everyday lives of people of color; and (3) an examination of how class exploitation, state repression, and bureaucratic domination operate in the lives of people of color. Both theories, then, offer an analysis of racism that takes seriously the psychological, social, political, cultural, and historical as crucial explanatory strands. They therefore offer a much more comprehensive picture, in alliance with the broader and deeper perspective of Afro-American culture, of the complex, stubborn reality Edmund Perry faced.

  In a revealing passage early in the book, Anson tells of the time Martin Luther King came to Chicago to march for open housing. It was the summer of 1966, and Anson, fresh out of Notre Dame, was a correspondent for Time. He marched with King and was present when King was hit on the head with a rock. He was one of the people who “pulled him up and shielded him.” The supreme irony may be that twenty years later, while intending to shield King’s legacy, Anson has left it more vulnerable and exposed.

  Five

  WHEN YOU’RE A CREDIT TO YOUR RACE, THE BILL WILL COME DUE: O.J. SIMPSON AND OUR TRIAL BY FIRE

  The cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal has written that I “became one of the brightest lights among black public intellectuals in the aftermath of the O.J. Simpson trial, providing commentary during the trial (and immediately after the jury decision) for NPR and appearing as the ‘color commentator’ on BET, when Ed Gordon sat down with Simpson after his acquittal.” My participation that night on BET was surely memorable—it was Simpson’s first interview after vacating his famous Los Angeles jail cell. Still, it wasn’t as memorable as the call Simpson placed to me on the evening of the fifth anniversary of the Nicole Simpson/Ron Goldman murders. I had appeared earlier that day on NBC’s Today Show, along with television host Geraldo Rivera and critic Neal Gabler. “Should I call you Reverend, Professor, or Doctor Dyson?” the famous voice politely quizzed me before launching into an animated forty-five-minute discussion of his innocence, the evidence in his criminal trial, the bias of Marcia Clark, the false accusation that most of his friends were white, and the unheralded work he did on behalf of the black community—especially his participation in a golf tournament sponsored by The Links, an elite black women’s service organization. That conversation with Simpson remains one of the most surreal moments I’ve experienced in all my years of punditry. This chapter from Race Rules is my attempt to come to grips with one of the most inglorious racial spectacles the nation has endured in the past fifty years.

  Now it says here, “And every white man shall be allowed to pet himself a Negro. Yea, he shall take a black man unto himself to pet and to cherish, and this same Negro shall be perfect in his sight. . . .” The appointee has his reasons, personal or political. He can always point to the beneficiary and say, “Look, Negroes, you have been taken care of. Didn’t I give a member of your group a big job?”

  —ZORA NEALE HURSTON

  “THE ‘PET’ NEGRO SYSTEM,” 1943

  THE STUDIO CRACKLED WITH EXCITEMENT. Although I had appeared on Black Entertainment Television (BET) a few times before, this night was special. In fact, it was extraordinary. Former BET anchor Ed Gordon, my Detroit homeboy, had snagged the first televised interview with O.J. Simpson since his acquittal for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her companion, Ron Goldman. BET asked me to give “color commentary” before and after Simpson’s appearance. A large irony, indeed. I’d written about Simpson in my previous book, and I’d discussed his trial on other national television shows. But there was poetic justice in me talking about Simpson’s trials and tribulations, and those of black America, on the only television station that caters to black folk.

  I must confess that I was an O.J. addict. I watched the trial every day for hours at a time. I was completely mesmerized. I knew it was a vulgar display of American excess. I knew it was the revelation of the gaudiness behind the lifestyles of the rich and famous. (Of course, I took delight in seeing so many rich folk exposed for the shallow people many of us hoped they’d be.) I knew it was the theater of the absurd meets the Twilight Zone. I knew as well that the trial was a painful choreography of black grief—that of O.J. and of every black person who identified with him—before an international audience. I knew it was totally artificial, a sordid drama full of kitsch that fiendishly aspired to the status of morality play. I knew it was the story of a black man who had made good but who had forgotten what made it possible, which made it bad. I knew it was all that and much, much more. And I couldn’t stop watching.

  Even as questions about O.J.’s guilt or innocence fade from daily debate, we continue to grapple with the wounds the trial exposed, with the trial’s revelations of the pernicious rules of race in America, ‘90s style. That night, as I viewed Simpson on the big screen in BET’s green room, I was struck again by how flawless his face is, how smooth his skin is. But I was taken as well by the jagged horrors his eyes never gaze on—how many white folk now hate his name, how they wish he would disappear. And some wish him dead. And how b
lack folk look at him with a mix of pity and disdain. Like the member of the family you have to recognize but hate to, because the recognition embarrasses him as well. I was struck by the size of the denials by which Simpson lives, as if he must now draw energy from the resentment that he can’t afford to acknowledge, though its sheer vehemence defines and confirms his every step. Seeing Simpson so resiliently spiteful that night—not in any way bitter against whites, just against the idea that they might not love him—made it painful for me to have to say anything after he spoke. It was the final step in my loss of a hero who had once thrilled me, as he, in Ralph Ellison’s words, “slice[d] through an opposing line with a dancer’s slithering grace.” A part of me was now gone. It was sad, and sadly disorienting.

  Something of the same disorientation gripped America when Simpson was set free. When the not-guilty verdicts in the O.J. Simpson double-murder case were handed down, the compass of race went haywire. The Simpson case has made many Americans doubt if we can all get along. The case has rudely reminded us of a gigantic and numbing racial divide. It reminds us, too, that boasting about racial progress often hides racial pain. The response to the verdicts knocked down the floodgates that hold back the waters of racial hostility The Simpson case also taught us a tough lesson: the more settled race relations seem to be, the more likely they are raging beneath the surface.

  Americans have become addicted to the Simpson case for more than its grotesque exaggeration of our secret racial fears. From its very beginning the case was overloaded with huge social meanings we claim not to be able to understand under normal circumstances. We have become dependent on the Simpson case to represent complicated truths that we think can only be illustrated by catastrophe. That dependence shows contempt for ordinary signs of ruin. It ignores the experience of common people, especially blacks, whose silent suffering is the most powerful evidence of decay. What their experience shows us is this: a two-tiered universe of perception rotates around an axis defined by race. While good fortune lights one side, despair darkens the other. It is rarely sunny at the same time in white and black America. In a nutshell, that’s what the Simpson case reminds us of.

  That O.J. Simpson is at the heart of the most ugly racial spectacle to hit America in decades is a symptom of just how crazy things are. For a quarter century, Simpson symbolized the icon-next-door. His athletic genius was revered by many blacks. His athletic skill and “colorless” image were attractive to millions of whites.

  Simpson’s sleek form and catlike grace as a running back brought glamour to a brutal sport. Simpson beautifully combined judgment and intuition. His sixth sense for where his pursuers were likely to pounce on him allowed him to chisel arteries of escape around heaving bodies.

  As with many famous athletes, Simpson’s athletic exploits gave him influence beyond the boundaries of his sport. This is hardly natural. After all, why should athletes receive tons of money and notoriety beyond the recognition and compensation they earn in sports? The absurdity of this is masked by the fact that we take for granted that such things should occur. That’s not to say sports don’t teach us valuable lessons about life. Sports are often a powerful training ground for moral excellence. Take the case of Willis Reed, the injured center for the 1969–1970 New York Knicks who was not expected to play in the seventh and deciding game for the NBA championship. When Reed emerged from the locker room, limping but determined to compete, several virtues were literally embodied: sacrifice of self for the sake of the larger good; the courage to “play through pain”; and the sort of moral leadership that rallies one’s teammates and lifts their level of expectation and achievement. These virtues transcend sport. They inspire ordinary people to overcome obstacles in achieving their goals.

  There’s another way, one wholly beyond his choosing, that the rare athlete has managed to rise beyond the limits of his sport. Some figures have served as heroic symbols of national identity. Others have heroically represented achievement against the artificial restrictions imposed on a group of people. In those cases, a restriction was also placed on competition as an ideal of democratic participation. Joe DiMaggio, of course, fit the first bill. His fifty-six-game hitting streak in baseball thrilled America in 1941, a colossal feat of endurance to which the nation would turn its attention time and again as our preeminence as a world power began to fade after World War II. Jackie Robinson fit the second meaning of heroism. As major league baseball’s first black player, Robinson performed gallantly in the face of bitter opposition. His gifted play paved the way for blacks in his sport and beyond the bounds of baseball.

  Joe Louis managed the difficult art of fulfilling both sorts of heroism. He existed in a racial era just as complex—if more violent—as the one Robinson faced. As was true of DiMaggio’s Italian world, Louis’s black community celebrated its ethnic roots while affirming its American identity. Louis captured the genius of American citizenship and the protest of blacks against their exclusion from full citizenship in a single gesture: the punch that sunk German boxer Max Schmeling at the height of Nazism. That punch transformed Louis into an American hero. It also revealed the hidden meaning of Louis’s heroic art: beating white men in the ring was a substitute argument for social equality. Louis’s prizefighting was an eloquent plea to play the game of American citizenship by one set of rules.

  Simpson never aspired to that sort of heroism. In part, that’s because the times didn’t demand it. Near the start of Simpson’s pro career in the late ’60s, the tension between the older civil rights establishment and the newer black power movement produced a more acerbic model of black heroism. Instead of integration, many blacks preferred separating from white society to build black institutions. Black antiheroism gave an angry face to the resentment that festered in pockets of black life. To be an American and a Negro—later still, a black man—were not considered flip sides of the same coin. They were different currency altogether.

  Judging from Simpson’s behavior during the height of his career, he had no interest in claiming whatever remained of Louis’s heroic inheritance. Neither was Simpson attracted to the sort of antiheroism championed by his contemporary, Muhammad Ali. Ali’s self-promoting verse and brilliant boxing proved to be sparring matches for his real battle: the defiance of white authority because of his religious beliefs. And Simpson certainly wasn’t drawn to the plainspoken demeanor of fellow athlete-turned-actor Jim Brown. Brown’s militant, studly image had Crazy Negro written all over it. It was the opposite of everything Simpson seemed to stand for. That is, until he was charged with brutally slashing his ex-wife and her companion.

  Simpson’s appeal beyond sports rested on two related but distinct factors: commerce and the conscious crafting of a whitened image. Simpson came at the beginning of an era when athletes began to make enormous sums of money inside sports. (To be sure, Simpson’s highest salary was pittance compared to what even mediocre sports figures now make.) He also helped pioneer the entrepreneurial athlete. Simpson hawked everything from tennis shoes to soft drinks. He turned charisma into cash on television. Now that Michael Jordan has eclipsed everyone who came before him, it’s easy to forget that Simpson’s Hertz commercials used to be the star that athletes aimed for in marketing their fame.

  The wide adulation heaped on Simpson beyond his gridiron glory also owed much to his absent, indeed anti-racial politics. Simpson soothed white anxieties about the racial turmoil caused by black radicalism. Simpson’s Teflon racelessness assured white citizens and corporations that no negative, that is, exclusively black, racial inference would stick to his image. That is Jordan’s charm as well. He is a latter-day Simpson of sorts. His universal appeal derives from a similar avoidance of the entanglements of race. As the old black saying goes, it’s alright to look black, just don’t act your color. As Simpson’s case suggests, the Faustian bargain of trading color for commercial success may prove devastating in the long run.

  Simpson’s silence about race didn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. A
fter all, given the history of their relative powerlessness, blacks have a heroic tradition of fighting in ways that cloak their rebellion. They adapt their speech and activity to the language and styles of the dominant society. Silence in the presence of whites was often a crucial weapon in the war to survive. If it looked like blacks were happy to be oppressed, all the better. Such appearances greased the track of covert action on which black freedom rolled. For instance, slaves sang spirituals both to entertain their masters and to send each other coded messages about plans of escape.

  Still, Simpson’s privileged perch in white America led many blacks to hope that he might cautiously speak about the troubles of ordinary blacks. It soon became clear, however, that Simpson was having none of that. What many blacks wanted from Simpson was no different from what was expected of other blacks. Simpson was not expected to be a politician. At least not in any way that departed from the political behavior required of all blacks in O.J.’s youth, who had to carry themselves with an acute awareness of their surroundings. To do less meant early death. Or, more crushing, it meant a slow, painful surrender of life in gasps of frustrated energy because you just didn’t understand the rules of survival in a white world.

  It’s easy to understand how O.J. and other blacks wanted to escape the demands of being representatives of The Race, its shining symbols. Standing in for the group was a burden. It was also risky. You could never be sure that your efforts were taken seriously. In fact, a law of inversion seemed to apply. For most blacks, only the negative acts seemed to count. Even the positive became a negative good: it only counted as a credit against black liability, against all the Wrong things black folk inevitably did. The good you did simply meant that you, and, by extension, all blacks, didn’t mess up this time. When the good was allowed to count, it only underscored one’s uniqueness, that one was not like other black folk. For many whites, excellence made blacks exceptions to, not examples of, their race. Ironically, to be thought of as an exception to the race still denied a pure consideration of individual merit. As long as race colored the yardstick, a real measurement of individual achievement was impossible. It is a bitter paradox that the evaluation of individual achievement that blacks yearned for was subordinated to a consideration of any achievement’s impact on, and relation to, the race. Blacks were routinely denied the recognition of individual talent that is supposed to define the American creed. This history is barely mentioned now that blacks are made by many whites to look as if they duck individual assessment while embracing group privilege.