The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  I grew up as a young black male in Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s. I witnessed firsthand the social horror that is entrenched in inner-city communities, the social havoc wreaked from economic hardship. In my youth, Detroit had been tagged the “murder capital of the world,” and many of those murders were of black men, many times by other black men. Night after night, the news media in Detroit painted the ugly picture of a homicide-ridden city caught in the desperate clutches of death, depression, and decay. I remember having recurring nightmares of naked violence, in which Hitchcockian vertigo emerged in Daliesque perspective to produce gun-wielding perpetrators of doom seeking to do me in.

  And apart from those disturbing dreams, I was exercised by the small vignettes of abortive violence that shattered my circle of friends and acquaintances. My next-door neighbor, a young black man, was stabbed in the jugular vein by an acquaintance and bled to death in the midst of a card game. (Of course, one of the ugly statistics involving black-on-black crime is that many black men are killed by those whom they know.) Another acquaintance murdered a businessman in a robbery; another executed several people in a gangland-style murder.

  At fourteen, I was at our corner store at the sales counter, when suddenly a jolt in the back revealed a young black man wielding a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun, requesting, along with armed accomplices stationed throughout the store, that we hit the floor. We were being robbed. At the age of eighteen I was stopped one Saturday night at 10:30 by a young black man who ominously materialized out of nowhere, much like the .357 Magnum revolver that he revealed to me in a robbery attempt. Terror engulfed my entire being in the fear of imminent death. In desperation I hurled a protest against the asphyxiating economic hardships that had apparently reduced him to desperation, too, and appealed to the conscience I hoped was buried beneath the necessity that drove him to rob me. I proclaimed, “Man, you don’t look like the type of brother that would be doin’ something like this.”

  “I wouldn’t be doin’ this, man,” he shot back, “but I got a wife and three kids, and we ain’t got nothin’ to eat. And besides, last week somebody did the same thing to me that I’m doin’ to you.” After convincing him that I really only had one dollar and thirty-five cents, the young man permitted me to leave with my life intact.

  The terrain for these and so many other encounters that have shaped the lives of black males was the ghetto. Much social research and criticism has been generated in regard to the worse-off inhabitants of the inner city, the so-called underclass. From the progressive perspective of William Julius Wilson to the archconservative musings of Charles Murray, those who dwell in ghettos, or enclaves of civic, psychic, and social terror, have been the object of recrudescent interest within hallowed academic circles and governmental policy rooms.3 In most cases they have not fared well and have borne the brunt of multifarious “blame the victim” social logics and policies.

  One of the more devastating developments in inner-city communities is the presence of drugs and the criminal activity associated with their production, marketing, and consumption. Through the escalation of the use of the rocklike form of cocaine known as “crack” and intensified related gang activity, young black men are involved in a vicious subculture of crime. This subculture is sustained by two potent attractions: the personal acceptance and affirmation gangs offer and the possibility of enormous economic reward.

  U.S. gang life had its genesis in the Northeast of the 1840s, particularly in the depressed neighborhoods of Boston and New York, where young Irishmen developed gangs to sustain social solidarity and to forge a collective identity based on common ethnic roots.4 Since then, youth of every ethnic and racial origin have formed gangs for similar reasons, and at times have even functioned to protect their own ethnic or racial group from attack by harmful outsiders. Overall, a persistent reason for joining gangs is the sense of absolute belonging and unsurpassed social love that results from gang membership. Especially for young black men whose life is at a low premium in America, gangs have fulfilled a primal need to possess a sense of social cohesion through group identity. Particularly when traditional avenues for the realization of personal growth, esteem, and self-worth, usually gained through employment and career opportunities, have been closed, young black men find gangs a powerful alternative.

  Gangs also offer immediate material gratification through a powerful and lucrative underground economy. This underground economy is supported by exchanging drugs and services for money, or by barter. The lifestyle developed and made possible by the sale of crack presents often irresistible economic alternatives to young black men frustrated by their own unemployment. The death that can result from involvement in such drug- and gang-related activity is ineffective in prohibiting young black men from participating.

  To understand the attraction such activity holds for black men, one must remember the desperate economic conditions of urban black life. The problems of poverty and joblessness have loomed large for African-American men, particularly in the Rust Belt, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Baltimore. From the 1950s to the 1980s, there was severe decline in manufacturing and in retail and wholesale trade, attended by escalating unemployment and a decrease in labor force participation by black males, particularly during the 1970s.

  During this three-decade decline of employment, however, there was not an expansion of social services or significant increase in entry-level service jobs. As William Julius Wilson rightly argues, the urban ghettos then became more socially isolated than at any other time. Also, with the mass exodus of black working and middle-class families from the ghetto, the inner city’s severe unemployment and joblessness became even more magnified. With black track from the inner city mimicking earlier patterns of white flight, severe class changes have negatively affected black ghettos. Such class changes have depleted communities of service establishments, local businesses, and stores that could remain profitable enough to provide full-time employment so that persons could support families, or even to offer youths part-time employment in order to develop crucial habits of responsibility and work. Furthermore, ghetto residents are removed from job networks that operate in more affluent neighborhoods. Thus, they are deprived of the informal contact with employers that results in finding decent jobs. All of these factors create a medium for the development of criminal behavior by black men in order to survive, ranging from fencing stolen goods to petty thievery to drug dealing. For many black families, the illegal activity of young black men provides their only income.

  Predictably, then, it is in these Rust Belt cities, and other large urban and metropolitan areas, where drug and gang activity has escalated in the past decade. Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York have had significant gang and drug activity, but Chicago and Los Angeles have dominated of late. Especially in regard to gangrelated criminal activity such as homicides, Chicago and L.A. form a terrible onetwo punch. Chicago had forty-seven gang-related deaths in 1987, seventy-five in 1986, and sixty in 1988. L.A.’s toll stands at four hundred for 1988.

  Of course, L.A.’s gang scene has generated mythic interpretation in the Dennis Hopper film Colors. In the past decade, gang membership in L.A. has risen from 15,000 to almost 60,000 (with some city officials claiming as much as 80,000), as gang warfare claims one life per day. The ethnic composition of the groups include Mexicans, Armenians, Samoans, and Fijians. But gang life is dominated by South Central L.A. black gangs, populated by young black men willing to give their lives in fearless fidelity to their group’s survival. The two largest aggregates of gangs, composed of several hundred microgangs, are the Bloods and the Crips, distinguished by the colors of their shoelaces, T-shirts, and bandannas.

  The black gangs have become particularly dangerous because of their association with crack. The gangs control more than 150 crack houses in L.A., each of which does over $5,000 of business per day, garnering over half a billion dollars per year. Crack houses, which transform powdered cocaine in
to crystalline rock form in order to be smoked, offer powerful material rewards to gang members. Even young teens can earn almost $1,000 a week, often outdistancing what their parents, if they work at all, can earn in two months.

  So far, most analyses of drug gangs and the black youth who comprise their membership have repeated old saws about the pathology of black culture and weak family structure, without accounting for the pressing economic realities and the need for acceptance that help explain such activity. As long as the poverty of young black men is ignored, the disproportionate number of black unemployed males is overlooked, and the structural features of racism and classism are avoided, there is room for the proliferation of social explanations that blame the victim. Such social explanations reinforce the misguided efforts of public officials to stem the tide of illegal behavior by state repression aimed at young blacks, such as the sweeps of L.A. neighborhoods resulting in mass arrests of more than four thousand black men, more than at any time since the Watts rebellion of 1965.

  Helpful remedies must promote the restoration of job training (such as Neighborhood Youth Corps [NYC] and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act [CETA]); the development of policies that support the family, such as child care and education programs; a full employment policy; and dropout prevention in public schools. These are only the first steps toward the deeper structural transformation necessary to improve the plight of African-American men, but they would be vast improvements over present efforts.

  Not to be forgotten, either, are forms of cultural resistance that are developed and sustained within black life and are alternatives to the crack gangs. An example that springs immediately to mind is rap music. Rap music provides space for cultural resistance to the criminal-ridden ethos that pervades segments of many underclass communities. Rap was initially a form of musical play that directed the creative urges of its producers into placing often humorous lyrics over the music of well-known black hits.

  As it evolved, however, rap became a more critical and conscientious forum for visiting social criticism upon various forms of social injustice, especially racial and class oppression. For instance, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five pioneered the social awakening of rap with two rap records, “The Message” and “New York, New York.” These rap records combined poignant descriptions of social misery and trenchant criticism of social problems as they remarked upon the condition of black urban America. They compared the postmodern city of crime, deception, political corruption, economic hardship, and cultural malaise to a “jungle.” These young savants portrayed a chilling vision of life that placed them beyond the parameters of traditional African-American cultural resources of support: religious faith, communal strength, and familial roots. Thus, they were creating their own aesthetic of survival, generated from the raw material of their immediate reality, the black ghetto. This began the vocation of the rap artist, in part, as urban griot dispensing social and cultural critique.

  Although rap music has been saddled with a reputation for creating violent outbursts by young blacks, especially at rap concerts, most of rap’s participants have repeatedly spurned violence and all forms of criminal behavior as useless alternatives for black youth. Indeed rap has provided an alternative to patterns of identity formation provided by gang activity and has created musical vehicles for personal and cultural agency. A strong sense of self-confidence permeates the entire rap genre, providing healthy outlets for young blacks to assert, boast, and luxuriate in a rich self-conception based on the achievement that their talents afford them. For those reasons alone, it deserves support. Even more, rap music, although its increasing expansion means being influenced by the music industry’s corporate tastes and decisions, presents an economic alternative to the underground economy of crack gangs and the illegal activity associated with them.

  However, part of the enormous difficulty in discouraging illegal activity among young black men has to do, ironically, with their often correct perception of the racism and classism still rampant in employment and educational opportunities open to upwardly mobile blacks. The subtle but lethal limits continually imposed upon young black professionals, for instance, as a result of the persistence of racist ideologies operating in multifarious institutional patterns and personal configurations, send powerful signals to young black occupants of the underclass that education and skill do not ward off racist, classist forms of oppression.

  This point was reiterated to me upon my son’s recent visit with me at Princeton near Christmas. Excited about the prospect of spending time together catching up on new movies, playing video games, reading, and the like, we dropped by my bank to get a cash advance on my MasterCard. I presented my card to the young service representative, expecting no trouble since I had just paid my bill a couple of weeks before. When he returned, he informed me that not only could I not get any money, but that he would have to keep my card. When I asked for an explanation, all he could say was that he was following the instructions of my card’s bank, since my MasterCard was issued by a different bank.

  After we went back and forth a few times about the matter, I asked to see the manager. “He’ll just tell you the same thing that I’ve been telling you,” he insisted. But my persistent demand prevailed, as he huffed away to the manager’s office, resentfully carrying my request to his boss. My son, sitting next to me the whole time, asked what the problem was, and I told him that there must be a mistake, and that it would all be cleared up shortly. He gave me that confident look that says, “My dad can handle it.” After waiting for about seven or eight minutes, I caught the manager’s figure peripherally, and just as I turned, I saw him heading with the representative to an empty desk, opening the drawer and pulling out a pair of scissors. I could feel the blood begin to boil in my veins as I beseeched the manager, “Sir, if you’re about to do what I fear you will, can we please talk first?” Of course, my request was to no avail, as he sliced my card in two before what had now become a considerable crowd. I immediately jumped up and followed him into his office, my son trailing close behind, crying now, tearfully pumping me with “Daddy, what’s going on?”

  I rushed into the manager’s office and asked for the privacy of a closed door, to which he responded, “Don’t let him close the door,” as he beckoned three other employees into his office. I angrily grabbed the remnants of my card from his hands and proceeded to tell him that I was a reputable member of the community and a good customer of the bank and that if I had been wearing a three-piece suit (instead of the black running suit I was garbed in) and if I had been a white male (and not a black man) I would have been at least accorded the respect of a conversation, prior to a private negotiation of an embarrassing situation, which furthermore was the apparent result of a mistake on the bank’s part.

  His face flustered, the manager then prominently positioned his index finger beneath his desk drawer, and pushed a button, while declaring, “I’m calling the police on you.” My anger now piqued, I was tempted to vent my rage on his defiant countenance, arrested only by the vision terrible that flashed before my eyes as a chilling premonition of destruction: I would assault the manager’s neck; his coworkers would join the fracas, as my son stood by horrified by his helplessness to aid me; the police would come, and abuse me even further, possibly harming my son in the process. I retreated under the power of this proleptic vision, grabbing my son’s hand as I marched out of the bank. Just as we walked through the doors, the policemen were pulling up.

  Although after extensive protests, phone calls, and the like, I eventually received an apology from the bank’s board and a MasterCard from their branch, this incident seared an indelible impression onto my mind, reminding me that regardless of how much education, moral authority, or personal integrity a black man possesses, he is still a “nigger,” still powerless in many ways to affect his destiny.

  The tragedy in all of this, of course, is that even when articulate, intelligent black men manage to rise above the temptations and traps o
f “the ghetto,” they are often subject to continuing forms of social fear, sexual jealousy, and obnoxious racism. More pointedly, in the 1960s, during a crucial stage in the development of black pride and self-esteem, highly educated, deeply conscientious black men were gunned down in cold blood. This phenomenon finds paradigmatic expression in the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. These events of public death are structured deep in the psyches of surviving black men, and the ways in which these horrible spectacles of racial catastrophe represent and implicitly sanction lesser forms of social evil against black men remains hurtful to black America.

  I will never forget the effect of King’s death on me as a nine-year-old boy in Detroit. For weeks I could not be alone at night before an open door or window without fearing that someone would kill me, too. I thought that if they killed this man who taught justice, peace, forgiveness, and love, then they would kill all black men. For me, Martin’s death meant that no black man in America was safe, that no black man could afford the gift of vision, that no black man could possess an intelligent fire that would sear the fierce edges of ignorance and wither to ashes the propositions of hate without being extinguished. Ultimately Martin’s death meant that all black men, in some way, are perennially exposed to the threat of annihilation.