The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  That’s right, such a move simply doesn’t work. As Du Bois said, there’s no way to deal with race without going through race; there’s no way of overcoming race without taking race into account. What we’ve had in our nation for too long is a willed ignorance about race; on one reading, it’s a perverse application of philosopher John Rawls’s notion of the “original position” in the social contract where we are placed behind a veil of ignorance in order to execute justice in the social realm. When we’ve misapplied this model to race, it has been quite disastrous. It’s failed primarily because we can’t justly assume a statutory ignorance about race and because the means to apply racial justice fall disproportionately into the hands of those against whom claims of injustice have been convincingly levied.

  Further, the assumption of racelessness fails to account for the contents and identities of race that have always played a role in fashioning American views of justice. This is why I think identity politics must be given a historicist, materialist, and genealogical reading. Identity politics has been going on from the get-go in American culture, indeed, in cultures the world over. Aristotle and Plato and their followers were ensconced in identity politics; Descartes and Kant and their followers merely negotiating identity politics; Foucault and Derrida and their followers are embroiled in identity politics; and Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray and their followers are unquestionably involved in identity politics, though they, as I suspect the others I’ve named, would vehemently deny it.

  That’s because many of them are or were transfixed by the dream of transcendental truth, Enlightenment rationality, deconstructive practice, or semiotic analysis that, for the most part, severs questions of identity from questions of racial politics. What we must come to see is that even when we deal with intellectual or theoretical issues, they refer to—although by no means are they reduced to or equated with—considerations of identity, even if such considerations are not explicitly articulated. The disingenuous character of too many debates about identity in America is that they deny this process.

  After generating a genealogy of identity—which places our own accounts of universalism versus difference into historical context and acknowledges that identity politics occur in a variety of intellectual and social settings—we can press forward to an adequate and fair criticism of identity politics. As things stand, too many critics wrongly argue that we must move beyond narrow frameworks of identity to get to this universal identity. I have in mind the most recent writings of Todd Gitlin and Michael Tomasky. I share some of Gitlin’s and Tomasky’s concerns about the cultural dead ends of vicious identity politics that enshrine tribal preferences over the common good. But right away I disagree with them about what constitutes tribal preferences, how they can be justly eradicated, and what constitutes successful expressions of universal identities in the social and cultural realm.

  In regard to whiteness, Gitlin and Tomasky fail to acknowledge that the particular identities of white people were rendered universal by a cultural and political process that punished blacks and other minorities for seeking to come into their own: their own identities, their own cultural repertoires, their own linguistic and rhetorical facilities, their own styles of survival, and so on. Until we are able to concede this point, we won’t get far in this debate about identity, about racelessness, and about the proper role that race should play, both in the American public sphere and in private institutions.

  Do you see any contradiction between Clinton’s inviting everyone to the table to talk about race and yet not listening to all those voices in making policy—welfare reform, for instance—and excluding the very voices that we need to be hearing from?

  There’s no question that there’s a deep contradiction in Clinton’s methodology. Further, there’s no question that in the past Clinton has not been above race baiting through very subtle semantic distortions and ideological gyrations. This surfaced in Clinton’s first run for the presidency, when his crass opportunism got the best of him as he attacked Sister Souljah for her violent racism without providing a thicker account of the conditions that shaped her comments, something Clinton was clearly capable of effectively pulling off. It surfaced when Clinton, during his first campaign, sent coded signals to alleviate white fears by suggesting that he and Gore would focus their policies on rescuing suburbia and middle America. It surfaced as well when Clinton failed to justly read the complex writings of his close friend, Lani Guinier, thereby encouraging her unjust demonization as a “quota queen.” It surfaced with Clinton’s support for a heinous crime bill that, like the welfare reform he supported, targeted black men and women with vicious specificity. And on and on.

  More important, Clinton failed to understand that if we as a nation are to have a successful conversation about race, it must be seconded at the level of public policy and political implementation. The conversation about race must perform a crucial educational function as well. I think that too often Clinton caved in to the American tendency to demonize what Malcolm X termed the “victims of democracy.” Clinton heartily advocated a neoliberal rearticulation of the ideology of racial tolerance that has largely served to hurt the black and Latino poor. One of the great problems with neoliberal race theory is that it writes the check of its loyalty to the black and Latino poor against the funds of conservative rhetoric and social policy. Bill Clinton certainly has a troubled history when it comes to race, a matter about which we must be forthright.

  Clinton symbolizes, ironically enough, many white Americans who are well intentioned about race but constantly make faux pas in their quest to do the right thing. Of course, in Clinton’s case, his mistakes have cost millions of blacks, Latinas, Native Americans, and other minorities dearly. Clinton’s political position, his peripatetic bully pulpit, has given him the authority to amplify his intentions as well as the contradictions of his racial beliefs. But he is as representative of the misguided rhetoric of neoliberal race thinking as we’re likely to get. The mixed blessing of such representation is that we get a clear glimpse of just how difficult it will be for the average white American to adequately confront the history and continued function of white supremacy, especially as it is manifested in neoliberal intolerance of radical black insurgence against racism. The bitter irony is that in Clinton black folk are being hurt by friendly fire. The bitter reality is that we have no choice but to find ways to work with him, as limiting as that may be, in the hope of reconstructing racial destiny in American culture.

  In addition to what you’ve already mentioned, how do you in specific ways talk about whiteness, such as in your writing, your public lectures, and your classroom?

  As I’ve lectured across the country, I’ve witnessed the resistance by many whites to identify and name whiteness in its supremacist ideological mode. Many whites believe that white supremacy is old news, which it is, but they fail to see how it’s also today’s news. Many believe that pointing to it is divisive and adds to the racial and cultural Balkanization that we’re told we’re living through. It’s extremely difficult to break the hold such a perception has on many whites. So, one of the strategies I try to adopt—in lectures, sermons, speeches, op-eds, articles, book reviews, and books—is the imaginative redescription of white supremacy in its cultural and ideological manifestations.

  I also think it’s important to emphasize the heterogeneity of whiteness, to stress how the meanings of whiteness are not exhausted by discussions of domination or supremacy. One of the good results of constructivist views of race—and in American culture, “race” has usually signified “black”—is that whiteness is increasingly viewed as a source and site of racial identities and practices. As much as I admire and appreciate the important work of David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, Mab Segrest, and other new abolitionist thinkers, I think we have to proceed cautiously with the project of reconstituting white identities through their abolition. We have to pose a multipronged question: Do we want to abolish whiteness, or do we want to destroy the negative meanings
associated with white identities? I think the latter is what we should aim for.

  Of course, Roediger, Ignatiev, Segrest, Allen, and other new abolitionist writers would concede that the whiteness they have in mind to abolish is precisely the socially constructed, culturally sanctioned, ideologically legitimated value of white supremacy that has been a scourge to our nation. In that sense, perhaps they’d agree that we don’t want to destroy white identity—because then we’d have to destroy those meanings of whiteness that have been mobilized to resist supremacist thought, or, for that matter, to abolish whiteness. Rather, we want to abolish the lethal manifestations of white identity. The salient issue is whether we can completely and exclusively identify whiteness with destruction, negativity, and corruption. In any case, I applaud their desire to reject white skin privilege and to historicize social and racial identities.

  Moreover, Roediger, Allen, Ignatiev, and the new abolitionists have got an extremely useful point: whiteness has been manifest in our nation in hegemonic, destructive, and at times evil ways. Although many whites are loath to admit it, whiteness in its supremacist mode, which has been its dominant mode, has polluted our moral ecology through slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. Still, I’m uncomfortable with the notion of destroying white folks and cultures, which, by the way, isn’t what Ignatiev and the folks around the journal Race Traitor have argued. I do think we have a moral obligation to destroy white supremacy. We must speak and think about the rearticulation, reconstitution, and recasting of whiteness to expand, enhance, and embrace its more redemptive, productive features.

  This is why cultural studies and theoretical interrogations of whiteness are crucial. Besides the work of the new abolitionists—including Roediger, Allen, Ignatiev, Segrest, John Garvey, Alexander Saxton, and many others—we should remember the important work of W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Thomas Kochman, Eric Foner, Lerone Bennett Jr., bell hooks, Toni Morrison, George Lipsitz, Marilyn Frye, Vron Ware, Ruth Frankenberg, Adrienne Rich, and Peggy McIntosh. And much of the recent work on whiteness is indispensable in coming to terms with its complex cultural manifestations: the brilliant books of Henry Giroux and Tukufu Zuberi, and the important work of Fred Pfeil, Linda Powell, Becky Thompson, Michelle Fine, John Dovidio, Lois Weis, John Hartigan Jr., Robin D.G. Kelly, Annalee Newitz, Ron Sakolsky, James Koehnline, Jesse Daniels, Melvin L. Oliver, Thomas M. Shapiro, Eric Lott, Michael Rogin, Upski Wimsatt, Barbara Ching, Mike Hill, Paul Kivel, Patricia Hill Collins, Sean Wilentz, Jennifer Hochschild, Nancy Hartsook, Michele Wallace, Jose Saldivar, Matt Wray, Laura Kipnis, and on and on.

  We should also scrutinize, for instance, white studies of the underclass, which address, reflect, or extend the pathologization of the black poor. Many also reveal how white critics make use of blackness—which is an intellectual strategy worthy of examination—and how they construct the ghetto and articulate black identity and moral norms against a rhetorical backdrop of implicit whiteness.

  Or think of a brilliant text like Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. Douglas shows in her book how black and white figures were working, playing, loving, and thinking together, how they were engaging across the white-black divide in ways that have been relatively hidden. Douglas’s book is crucial to excavating a cultural tradition of interaction, exchange, appropriation, and influence between various forms of whiteness and blackness. Such works help us accent the stratified and complex character of whiteness while paying attention to the history of how whiteness became a socially useful, racially valued, and culturally hybrid identity.

  I’m glad you brought that up because I did want to talk about rescuing that productive content because that’s an important dimension, so that we get away from some of the accusations of talking about whiteness in terms of an essentialized notion, or of oversimplifying what whiteness is, or of only allying it with domination.

  That’s right. The importance of the studies of whiteness I’ve discussed above is that they uncover—indeed, recover—the contradictory, contested meanings of whiteness from hidden histories of racial practice. If we don’t speak about the productive, transgressive, subversive, edifying meanings of whiteness, we’re being intellectually dishonest. If we don’t narrate those stories, we’re doing a great disservice to the moral trajectory that our work of historical reclamation often follows. One of the most powerful ways of challenging and ultimately destroying the ideology of white supremacy, the myth of white superiority, and the narrative of white domination is to unearth sites of resistive memory, history, and practice. One way to rescue the productive meanings of whiteness is to accent transgressive whiteness: how whites cooperated with racial “others” in the unmasking of white skin privilege, the subversion of forms of white power, and the destabilization of forces of white oppression.

  I think that people tend to essentialize white identities because whiteness has been a consistently malevolent force in a great number of cultures over a long period of time. It is also true that white allies to racial emancipation have often sacrificed blood and body in expressing a redemptive disloyalty to oppressive meanings of whiteness. Hopefully, in a future that still appears too far away, white disloyalty to unjust privilege and power will fuse with the liberation struggles of oppressed people around the globe as we create a world where we can lay down the burden of race.

  I want to return to something you mentioned earlier: that is, some other ways of discussing intragroup differences within whiteness, other than focusing on ethnic variation, like, “I’m Irish and you’re Italian,” but focusing on gender difference and class difference.

  One of the benefits of, for instance, ethnographies of white cultures, practices, and identities is that we begin to get a fuller picture of differentiated whiteness. The fissuring and fracturing of whiteness, especially along axes of class and gender, gives us greater insight into how white cultures have adapted, survived, and struggled in conditions where their dominance was modified or muted.

  It’s also important to explore histories of white difference to highlight how whiteness has not been made by whites alone. Part of what it means to be white in America is to be black. To paraphrase Ralph Ellison: “I don’t want to know how ‘white’ black folk are, I want to know how ‘black’ white folk are.” If we completely, indiscriminately destroy whiteness, we’re also destroying what blacks and other racial minorities contributed—sometimes covertly, sometimes symbiotically, often in hybrid interactions, and occasionally in extravagant fashion—to white behaviors, identities, styles, and intellectual traditions. One of the great paradoxes of race is that whiteness is not exclusively owned or produced by whites. White is also black. As we discover how black whiteness is, we discover how interesting and intricate whiteness is. We discover how whites and blacks have cooperated in very shrewd ways to produce alternative structures, rituals, and cultures to dominant whiteness.

  Interrogating whiteness in the manner I’ve just outlined opens discursive space for a post-appropriationist paradigm of cultural and racial exchange. Such a paradigm accents the unbalanced power relations, racial inequality, and economic injustice that often mediates, say, black-white artistic exchanges, where black ideas, products, styles, and practices are stolen, borrowed, or appropriated without attribution or reward. But it also accents the revisioning of whiteness through the prism of black cultural practices, especially as white subjectivities are reconceived and recast in the hues of transgressive blackness.

  That’s why it’s important to explore racialized communitas and habitas where whites live and commune—to understand the productive meanings of whiteness through the reproduction and rearticulation of the productive meanings of blackness. In this connection, it makes sense to examine the phenomenon of the substitute nigger or the “wigger”—the white nigger, whites who have been viewed, or view themselves, as black. What uses have they made of blackness? How has blackness allowed them to alter dominant modes of whiteness? How have their knowledges and cultura
l practices pitted ontological contents of racial identity against strictly biological or phenotypical ones? All of these lines of inquiry are opened up by fracturing and fissuring, by differentiating, whiteness.

  In what ways has whiteness in the American context spread its tentacles globally or had some effect at the international level, in productive or in oppressive ways?

  Let me answer your question in two ways. First, I’ll briefly address how the oppressive meanings of whiteness in the American context have global implications. Then I will address black skepticism about the uses of even productive whiteness to unmask and unmake itself.

  There’s no question that one of the most powerful claims—though it is often dressed in racially essentialist terms—that certain postcolonialist, black separatists make is that whiteness has screwed things up the world over. It’s relatively easy to supply historical verification for such a claim; after all, the oppressive meanings of whiteness have destroyed minority hearth and home, and kith and kin, around the globe. Wherever it has taken root, oppressive, colonizing, imperialistic whiteness has subjugated or tyrannized native peoples, indigenous populations, and aboriginal tribes. Along these lines, American visions of white supremacy have exported well, inspiring, for instance, South African apartheid and modern varieties of European neocolonialism.

  The problem with certain criticisms of oppressive whiteness is that they are grounded in discourses of biological determinism and genetic inheritance, turning out to be The Bell Curve in reverse: whites are genetically incapable of humane behavior and sane social interaction. Other varieties of racial geneticism and biological determinism—such as that found in Frances Cress-Welsing’s The Isis Papers, a perennial best-seller in black communities—maintain that white supremacy grows from whites’ fear of genetic annihilation because they lack melanin, while blacks, who possess it in abundance, are guaranteed survival. In such versions of reductive pseudo-science, white supremacy is genetically encoded and biologically reproduced. In light of such theories, it’s understandable that antiracist critics of new abolitionism shudder when they hear of the need to abolish the white race, even if it is conceded that it’s a social construction the abolitionists aim to destroy.