The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Perhaps the most recent controversy involving a white man enjoying the pleasures of black female companionship erupted around the film Monster’s Ball, starring Halle Berry as a waitress who becomes involved with a racist sheriff—played by Billy Bob Thornton—who executes her convict husband on death row before falling in love with her. The film includes an extended and explicit sex scene where Thornton’s character makes love from behind to Berry’s waitress. Many blacks were torn when Berry won the Oscar for her powerful portrayal: they were rooting for her to be acknowledged for her superior skill, but reluctant to praise a part that even indirectly suggested that her character’s sexual liaison was a reward for hating black people and executing her husband, played by Sean “P. Diddy” Combs.

  A few weeks after the Oscars, actress Angela Bassett—whom Berry had graciously mentioned by name in her acceptance speech as one of “the women that stand beside me”—criticized the role Berry played even as she was careful to praise Berry for her performance. Bassett said, “I wasn’t going to be a prostitute on film,” and that “I couldn’t do that because it’s such a stereotype about black women and sexuality,” concluding that “Meryl Streep won Oscars without all that.” Bassett said that she loved Berry’s performance, and that she didn’t begrudge Berry her success, but that it “wasn’t the role for me.” Bassett said that she wanted an Oscar, but “for something I can sleep with at night.” The issue of stereotypes is extremely important, especially for black women in a powerful medium like film involved sexually with white men. But so is the freedom to choose roles that stretch the boundaries of sexual propriety and challenge the limitations imposed on black female sexuality.

  In her acceptance speech, Berry challenged the stereotypes of how a black woman who has been honored by the powers-that-be should behave. Instead of being safe, Berry was bravely political. She gave the millions who watched around the globe not only a sorely needed history lesson, but also a lesson in courageous identification with the masses. Berry tearfully declared that her award was for “every nameless, faceless woman of color” who now had a chance since “this door has been opened.” Berry’s remarkable courage and candor are depressingly rare among famed blacks with a lot on the line: money, prestige, reputation, and work. Many covet the limelight’s payoffs, but cower in light of its demands.

  Even fewer speak up about the experiences their ordinary brothers and sisters endure—and if they are honest, that they themselves too often confront—on a daily basis. To be sure, there is an unspoken tariff on black honesty among the privileged: if they dare cut against the grain, they may be curtailed or cut off from reward. Or they may endure stigma. What Berry did was brave and generous: on the night she was being singled out for greatness, she cast her lot with anonymous women of color who hungered for her spot, and who might be denied for no other reason than that they were yellow, brown, red, or black. Her achievement, she insisted, was now their hope. Her performance that night was a stereotype buster.

  No matter how you cut it, sex between the races is a complicated affair. Many black men honestly love white women, and many black women honestly love white men. But the history of traumatic interaction between the races shapes the patterns of love and sex across racial lines. As a social taboo that has been shattered, interracial sex is a healthy and edifying occurrence. As the symptom of the attempt to escape or avoid intimate contact with the women who have loved and nurtured our race, it can be a sign of utter self-hatred, and hatred of our group’s most powerful and loyal members. One of the most vicious legacies of white supremacy is the belief that our women are not beautiful, desirable, intelligent, and worthy of our love.

  The factors that rob black men and women of more love between us—imprisonment, early death, educational disparities, and self-destructive habits such as snobbishness, skin-color bias, the preference for “bad boys,” and worship of white standards of beauty—can be combated through conscientious response to our plight. There are millions of black women from every walk of life who simply want, like every other group of women alive, to be wanted and loved by the men who issued from their mothers’ wombs. To dishonor that wish is the seed of our destruction.

  Fourteen

  IN O.J.’S SHADOW: KOBE BRYANT’S PREDICAMENT

  On July 6, the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado made an announcement that shook the world: twenty-four-year-old basketball superstar Kobe Bryant had been arrested on suspicion of felony sexual assault and false imprisonment of a nineteen-year-old college student at an elite Edwards, Colorado, spa where she worked, and where Bryant had been staying in preparation for knee surgery. Bryant wasn’t formally charged until July 18, but by then the media circus and rumor mill had already spun wildly out of control. Later that day Bryant appeared highly emotional at a news conference in Los Angeles, with his wife Vanessa by his side, proclaiming his innocence of the charges while admitting he had had an adulterous—and, according to him, consensual—liaison with his accuser. And although major news outlets generally observe a policy of not revealing an (alleged) rape victim’s identity, her name and picture—as well as those of a falsely identified woman—had by then been plastered all over cyberspace. Bryant’s accuser, an attractive, white, blonde former cheerleader, was employed as a concierge at the Cordillera Lodge & Spa, which was where the fateful encounter took place, on June 30, just before midnight.

  It appears unavoidable that Bryant’s case would be compared to the Simpson criminal case, despite spectacular differences: Bryant’s is not a murder case; Simpson intimately knew one of the two victims in his alleged crime, whereas Bryant met his accuser that night; and Bryant is not a former star, but a widely celebrated athlete not yet at the height of his projected place as one of basketball’s best players of all time. Still, the elements of race and gender suggest striking parallels: a handsome black athlete pitted in court against a white woman, and polls that suggest a strong racial divide in the public’s belief in Bryant’s guilt or innocence. Whatever the outcome, the case will have permanently altered the lives of Bryant and his accuser and has already provided a glimpse into persistent stereotypes of white female identity and black sexuality, and the continuing difficulty of interracial relationships. This brief essay from my column in Savoy magazine is my take on these issues.

  IF KOBE BRYANT’S ATTORNEYS HAVE THEIR WAY, it will be several months, perhaps even a year, before the NBA superstar goes to court to defend himself against sexual assault charges. But within the court of black public opinion, there has already been a long and brooding deliberation, and a fair amount of dramatic signifying based on the fact that Bryant’s accuser is a nineteen-year-old white woman. “That’s what happens when you mess with a white girl,” goes the quiet chorus. It’s a harsh sentiment, but one buttressed by an even harsher history of sexual mistrust, suspicion, and fear between the races. Even without an assault charge, the sex between white women and black men has often been volatile. Sometimes it’s been downright fatal. If we’re to understand Kobe’s case, we’ve got to know that history, since it may determine his fate in the national imagination, and most important, in a Colorado courtroom.

  Interracial sex is haunted by entrenched beliefs about how black and white folk should live and treat one another. Until a few decades ago, we lived in stifling segregation that was supported by custom and law. Whites convinced themselves and many others that they were superior in every way. We were led to believe that the only way blacks could be saved was to accept white culture and to adopt their view of the world. But once we were baptized in the rivers of white life, sometimes to be drowned, at other times to be washed of our blackness, we saw the ironies that pollute the mainstream.

  No irony was clearer than how white women were at once celebrated and dismissed. White women have long been seen as pure and chaste. During slavery and beyond, white wives were for the most part spared the duty of recreational sex; that was the job of the whore or the slave. Instead, they were saved for what can only be
thought of as Darwinian sex: if not the origin, then at least the perpetuation of the species was at stake. White women were in truth “respected” into sexual confinement and robbed of erotic freedom. For white men, pleasure and social privilege came wrapped in one neat package: if they ran the world, they could enjoy it as they liked. For white women, these realms were strictly separated, and besides, they had less of both.

  That was even truer for slaves. Black women were victims of the erotic whims of white men who bedded them as they pleased. Black men, too, were sexually vulnerable. White culture harnessed the black penis to fertilize black wombs and to fortify white rule. But if black women were a thrill—typecast as the erotic equals of their insatiable men—black men were a threat. Black men’s legendary prowess made white men jealous and even erotically competitive. White men feared the free black phallus, and spread that fear to their wives and daughters. The idea of the potent black male was so scary that it drove D.W. Griffith in 1915 to unleash Birth of a Nation, a film that throbbed with conspiracy in warning that the social contract would unravel if black men were permitted to satisfy their lust for white women. It made little difference that such paranoia was fueled more by stereotype than by science. The point was to protect white women, control black men, and exploit black women.

  The history of sexual relations between black men and white women is part romance novel, part Greek tragedy, and part horror story. In slavery, interracial sex was plainly forbidden, even though such unions probably took place far more than ol’ Massa knew. Even in emancipation, the erotic ties between black men and white women were forged in secrecy. The assault on interracial sex in the name of white supremacy made such discretion necessary. Black men could be lynched for just looking at a white woman, or, equally as savage, they could, like Emmett Till, be beaten and tossed into a river and left for dead. White women sometimes cried rape to escape the stigma or alienation that dogged those who slept with black men. And even when black men and white women were brave enough to defy social convention and expose their love to ridicule, they still faced ugly comments, hateful stares and certain ostracism in the mainstream. Politics and history are never far away in the interracial bed.

  It is these politics and history that flare up in our consideration of Kobe’s case. On the face of it, the charge of sexual assault against Bryant is a bitter legal dispute between two young adults. And yet, right away, there are complicating factors. Bryant is a married man whereas his accuser is single. Bryant is a wealthy athlete whose skill and charisma have made him hugely popular around the globe. Although his gender and celebrity may tip the case in Bryant’s favor, race is a perennial wild card. Bryant is a big black man; his accuser, by all accounts, is a much smaller white blonde. The idea of a black man in a tryst with a white woman still spooks bigots who oppose interracial sex. And there may be hidden resentments and subtle resistance even among those who don’t view themselves as prejudiced. This may be as true for those blacks tired of our men tripping up with, and on, white women, as it is for whites with little experience of blacks, much like those in the Colorado town with a miniscule black population where Kobe may have sealed his fate.

  It might turn out that Kobe’s wealth and fame are trumped by his accuser’s race and gender. That comforts those who think that Bryant’s status dupes people into believing he couldn’t assault anyone. To others, it’s proof that the word of an anonymous white woman is enough to bring a brother down, even a brother of Kobe’s standing, which, in their view, would be tragic, as his flawless record, and more important, the law, says he deserves the benefit of the doubt. Of course, this is assuming that there is no clear evidence of Bryant’s or his accuser’s guilt forthcoming at trial. If no damning proof is presented, it’s her word against his. In such a case, race shapes our views of what looks like reasonable doubt or even the evidence of wrongdoing.

  Bryant finds himself in the deadly shadow of a racial catastrophe that was burned into the nation’s collective psyche: the O.J. Simpson case. The disappointments and frustrations of that twisted drama have set the stage for Bryant’s prosecution in the court of public opinion, and most likely in the legal arena as well. Black and white reactions to the Simpson case made it seem as if each group lived in bitterly opposed worlds of racial perception. Early polls in the Bryant case mirror this trend: blacks are much more likely than whites to think that the charge against Bryant is false. And although 40 percent of whites are “very” or “somewhat” sympathetic to Bryant, nearly two-thirds of blacks feel that way. One can hardly be blamed for spotting in some whites’ insistence on Bryant’s guilt a hunger for revenge of the Simpson verdict.

  When the mainstream embraced Bryant, it did so because of his athletic genius, his good looks, his magnetic smile, his clean image, his easy rapport with the public—and, as with Simpson, because of the widely shared belief that he has transcended race, or more to the point, that he has escaped the stigma of blackness. (Let’s not forget that Bryant has been hailed for being the Anti-Iverson, peeling away the thug image glued to the Philadelphia 76ers corn-rowed, tattooed, and hip-hop loving superstar. In addition, Bryant is considered a “Renaissance man” because he is fluent in Italian, even as the more impressive multilingual talent of athletes like Hakeem Olajuwon and Dikembe Mutombo is discounted because their roots, and the source of their mastery, are African). Like Michael Jordan before him, and Simpson before them both, Bryant made millions by making it safe for whites to consume blackness.

  It remains to be seen whether Bryant will fall from grace as wildly and sharply as Simpson did after his acquittal on murder charges. But the two are joined in grisly solidarity because a white woman screams from the heart of their crises. An alleged crime against a white woman also led them both to embrace blackness in a manner they either never knew or had long forgotten. One of the first things Simpson did after he found his freedom was to descend on a Los Angeles soul food eatery.

  Because his tribulation has just begun, Bryant is not yet desperate to deepen his ties to loyal blacks. But he is already “blacker” than he was before tragedy struck, in part because his problems reveal a racial cleavage in public opinion, and because, to many, he has proved to be no better than the athletes to whom he was once favorably compared—and indeed, he might now be seen as much worse. Perhaps most striking, Bryant has publicly identified with the greatest symbol of black struggle. At an awards show where he was named favorite male athlete of American teens, Bryant paraphrased Martin Luther King, Jr., while alluding to his troubles: “An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.” It is too soon to tell whether, in the spirit of the song that carried the civil rights movement, Bryant can overcome.

  PART SEVEN

  AFRO-BAPTIST RADICALISM AND RHETORIC

  A number of groups have compared their social activism to the valiant example of the black church to bolster the moral stature of their struggles, from those who protest legal abortion to conservatives who oppose affirmative action. Much of this comparison has been wretchedly ill-informed, driven more by political expediency than a genuine embrace of the spirit of resistance to injustice that, at its best, characterizes the black church. From before the nation’s founding until the present day, religious rhetoric has been heard in sacred and secular circles as leaders expressed the moral and political dimensions of black religious belief. Among the greatest voices for social change have been black Christian Baptists, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr., who have articulated to the nation the stirring themes of Afro-Baptist radicalism. Both the rhetoric, and the radical social thought, of black Baptists is worthy of greater study.

  Fifteen

  “GOD ALMIGHTY HAS SPOKEN FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.”: AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CHRISTIAN FAITH

  A version of this chapter was first presented at a conference entitled the First Amendment and Religion, held in 1991 at the DePaul University Law School, in response to a paper by the formidable theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas, named in 2001 by Time
magazine as “America’s best theologian,” was also praised by the magazine as “contemporary theology’s foremost intellectual provocateur.” Hauerwas is a brilliant thinker whose mind ranges across an impressively wide range of subjects from medical ethics to gossip, in supporting his insistence that the gospel prophetically preach to liberal society rather than tailor its demands to the political order. In the present chapter, I argue that the black religious tradition offers a powerful example of the redemptive relationship between religious belief and social transformation. Although, as this chapter makes clear, Hauerwas and I have some serious differences of belief about religion and the public square, I consider him one of the bravest voices in Christendom, and one of the greatest theological minds of the last half of the twentieth century.

  AS USUAL STANLEY HAUERWAS (this time with Michael Baxter) has, in “The Kingship of Christ: Why Freedom of ‘Belief’ Is Not Enough,” given us a great deal to think about in wrestling with the persistent problems growing out of the churchstate debate. Arguing that there are irresolvable tensions between American society and Christian faith, the authors deliver a tough rebuke to those theologians who “posit some kind of harmony between the two by means of a so-called churchstate theory.”1 The authors further maintain that most Christian theologians conspire to “privatize and subordinate Christianity,” especially when they assume that “Christianity consists of a set of beliefs (mere belief) that can be abstracted from practices and actions (conduct).”2 The danger, as the authors see it, is that Christian belief gets removed from its legitimate social context in the church and becomes conceived as a matter of individual freedom. The remedy that Hauerwas and Baxter propose is for Christians to reclaim their ecclesiastical and social identity as “the people who acknowledge the Kingship of Christ.”3