The Michael Eric Dyson Reader
Page 42
Right, right, right. That is a very interesting point. You’ve touched on one of the great contentions in black life, especially with the rise of hip-hop culture. Some critics, however, would disagree with you; they would say that there were dumb, ignorant people to whom we could point all along in black history. They would tell you that there have always been people who could justify the stereotype. But they will also tell you that “nigger” as an epithet never represented the complexity of black identity, and that to isolate a minor personality type—the so-called nigger—within the behavioral norms of blackness to justify the demonization of all black people was patently unjust. As a result, blacks questioned the legitimacy of the claim that the epithet was deployed by whites to define the behavior of people who fell outside the norm of good behavior. That’s because every black person in the eyes of most whites was a nigger.
In that light, we might be able to concede the racial daring and subversive attempt among some blacks to appropriate the linguistic negativity of “nigger” and to recirculate, recontextualize, recode, refigure, refashion, and rearticulate the term for their purposes. At least now when it came to that word, the “niggas”—the term as it is baptized in black linguistic subversion—were in control, challenging whites and bourgeois blacks who could never consider using the term in any incarnation. In the eyes of the contemporary “niggas,” bourgeois blacks do not exercise the same level of discretion over their rhetorical and linguistic selfrepresentation as do the folk, say, in hip-hop.
So the argument could be made that there is indeed a flip, that the people who were supposed to be dumb are not dumb at all. Instead, they are playing the culture to the hilt. They are reinforcing certain stereotypes while challenging others. They’re reaping economic remuneration from trying to parody and stigmatize what “nigger” is or saying, “Yeah, if you call me a nigger, I’m going to live up to that, I’m going to be a larger-than-life nigger, and I’ll show you what that might mean.” Or they might say, “I dare you to keep calling me ‘nigger’ in the face of my embracing this term in such a fashion as to not only reinforce the negative behaviors that you think characterize the term, but to deploy it as a rhetorical weapon against the white supremacy that seeks to deny black people the opportunity to choose their own destinies.” So I think the use of “nigga” is much more complex than the either/or absolutism that bewitches too many black critics in their discussion of the term.
I understand your point in terms of queer. But your perception that “queers” are engaging in their linguistic subversion in an intelligent way has to do with the fact that gay and lesbian people have not been subject to the same stereotype of being unintelligent that blacks have been saddled with. For centuries now, blackness has signified stupidity and ignorance in the West. But gays and lesbians have not been perceived as intellectually inferior to heterosexuals. In fact, the opposite is true: gays have been tied, at least in the West, to the Greeks, who were viewed as exceedingly intelligent. So what you face as a queer minority is the improbable complexity of black gay identities because you’re dealing with both stereotypes collapsing on your head: dumb nigger and smart queer. Although I’m sure an exception is made for black queers, whose race may cancel out their sexual orientation, at least in the intelligence sweepstakes. How much more degraded and contradictory can one get in one body? So I think that black gays and lesbians would certainly be much more sensitive to the nomenclature of self-disclosure and self-description than even most white gays and lesbians might ever imagine.
One last topic: class issues. By most people’s account, we would be considered bourgie. I think, like W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “the talented tenth,” we’re leading the masses. Don’t you feel that as such we should set an example . . .
Set an example for whom?
In general for the masses of African Americans, since we’re going to be leaders. Say for instance, earlier you mentioned bourgie blacks, and it was kind of in a derogatory sense. In fact, I think most “bourgie blacks” are doing positive things.
Sure, sure. What I mean by “bourgie”—which is a pejorative term shortened from bourgeois—is not simply middle class. I mean by bourgie the construction of a selfdetermined persona that is hostile to, and scornful of, ordinary black people. You can be rich and not be bourgie. Class in black America has been less about how much money you make or how many stocks you have than the politics of style. Still, your overall point is well taken. I think that those of us who are privileged—and that includes gays and lesbians who have high levels of education—have an absolute obligation to “give back” to the less fortunate. I think we are bound by blood, history, and destiny to our brothers and sisters, especially to those who will never know the privilege or positive visibility that many in the middle class enjoy. And we should cross all lines—sexual, economic, religious, gender, geographical, generational—in speaking for the oppressed. For instance, that’s why I think it’s incumbent on me as a heterosexual black man to speak against the bigotry and injustice faced by my black brothers and sisters who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other-sexed. And it’s equally important for educated, upwardly mobile blacks to not forget those who have been entombed in permanent poverty and miseducation.
It is part of the hidden courage of black gays and lesbians that despite the stigma they have endured, they continue to work within the arc of black identity and community in fulfillment of their sense of personal and political destiny. I think that’s a beautiful thing. Being “queer” or “gay” is a tremendous struggle, but even before the enemies of black people see a fey snap of the wrist or the “butch” dress of lesbian women, they see black pigment. So pigment may trump sexual orientation in a manner that many black gays and lesbians intuitively understand in their bodies, even though deeply inscribed in their bodies at the same time is the recognition of their unalterable sexual identities that need to be sustained, affirmed, and prized. To the degree that black gays and lesbians struggle with the complex convergence of racial, sexual, gender, and class issues, they already represent courageous role models of negotiating differences in one body at one site. They represent to us what blackness will look like well into the twenty-first century.
What a beautiful ending.
Thanks, brother.
Interview by Kheven LaGrone
Chicago, Illinois, 2002
PART NINE
BIOCRITICISM AND BLACK ICONS
Over the last decade, I have occasionally embraced a genre of writing I term “biocriticism,” a critical examination of a figure’s career and cultural impact through the prism of biographical details and life episodes. With biocriticism I hope to open an intellectual window onto the cultural and intellectual landscape that shapes a figure’s life, using biography as a means to social and cultural criticism. I have used a biocritical approach to probe the lives and times of black icons like black nationalist revolutionary Malcolm X, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and hip-hop immortal Tupac Shakur. The virtue of biocriticism is a wide-ranging exploration of the forces and figures that define a particular movement or era through the lens of a single figure, combining the best of biography, cultural analysis, historical examination, and social criticism. I am presently at work on a biocritical analysis of Marvin Gaye, the legendary artist whose work altered the American musical and cultural landscape.
Twenty
X MARKS THE PLOTS: A CRITICAL READING OF MALCOLM’S READERS
This critical analysis of how Malcolm X has been conceived and interpreted by scholars and writers was initially written for the late Joe Wood’s fine 1992 anthology, Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. I had written several drafts of the essay and had sharpened my arguments, honed my analysis, and deepened my engagement with the vast body of literature on Malcolm that fit under the four categories of interpretation I developed. Wood was quite pleased, but suddenly, at the end of this arduous process, he told me that he wouldn’t be using my essay. I was quite disappointed. Wood offered l
ittle explanation except to ask if I hadn’t been involved in other projects where my work, having been assigned, was not ultimately used. It was only later, a few years before Wood’s tragic death in 1999 on a solo hiking expedition in the Longmire area of Mount Rainier—a real loss for black letters—that I discovered that he had been heavily influenced in his decision by a mentor from his Yale days whose essay did appear in Wood’s collection—Adolf Reed Jr. Reed’s great disdain for me and my work, and that of other black scholars, would be later aired in an infamous Village Voice diatribe against black public intellectuals.
Fortunately, what began badly proved to be a boon. A “popular” version of this chapter, under the mighty advocacy and pen of editor Rosemary Bray, appeared in November 1992, as a 5,000-word lead essay for the New York Times Book Review. Further, my rejection led me to write my own book on Malcolm, a decision that resulted in two auspicious events: the publication ofMaking Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X, which was named a Notable Book of 1994 by the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, and one of the “outstanding black books of the twentieth century” by Black Issues Book Review. My partnership with Liz Maguire as my editor and intellectual compatriot, a professional relationship that blossomed into a friendship, has lasted over eight books and four publishing houses! This chapter is the first section of Making Malcolm, and is one of the scholarly efforts of which I am most proud.
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I think all of us should be critics of each other. Whenever you can’t stand criticism you can never grow. I don’t think that it serves any purpose for the leaders of our people to waste their time fighting each other needlessly. I think that we accomplish more when we sit down in private and iron out whatever differences that may exist and try and then do something constructive for the benefit of our people. But on the other hand, I don’t think that we should be above criticism. I don’t think that anyone should be above criticismMalcolm X.
—MALCOLM X: THE LAST SPEECHES
THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF MALCOLM X have traced a curious path to black cultural authority and social acceptance since his assassination in 1965. At the time of his martyrdom—achieved through a murder that rivaled in its fumbling but lethal execution the treacherous twists of a Shakespearean tragedy—Malcolm was experiencing a radical shift in the personal and political understandings that governed his life and thought.1 Malcolm’s death heightened the confusion that had already seized his inner circle because of his last religious conversion. His death also engendered bitter disagreement among fellow travelers about his evolving political direction, conflicts that often traded on polemic, diatribe, and intolerance. Thus Malcolm’s legacy was severely fragmented, his contributions shredded in ideological disputes even as ignorance and fear ensured his further denigration as the symbol of black hatred and violence.
Although broader cultural investigation of his importance has sometimes flagged, Malcolm has never disappeared among racial and political subcultures that proclaim his heroic stature because he embodied ideals of black rebellion and revolutionary social action.2 The contemporary revival of black nationalism, in particular, has focused renewed attention on him. Indeed, he has risen to a black cultural stratosphere that was once exclusively occupied by Martin Luther King Jr. The icons of success that mark Malcolm’s ascent—ranging from posters, clothing, speeches, and endless sampling of his voice on rap recordings—attest to his achieving the pinnacle of his popularity more than a quarter century after his death.
Malcolm, however, has received nothing like the intellectual attention devoted to Martin Luther King Jr., at least nothing equal to his cultural significance. Competing waves of uncritical celebration and vicious criticism—which settle easily into myth and caricature—have undermined appreciation of Malcolm’s greatest accomplishments. The peculiar needs that idolizing or demonizing Malcolm fulfill mean that intellectuals who study him are faced with the difficult task of describing and explaining a controversial black leader and the forces that produced him.3 Such critical studies must achieve the “thickest description” possible of Malcolm’s career while avoiding explanations that either obscure or reduce the complex nature of his achievements and failures.4
Judging by these standards, the literature on Malcolm X has often missed the mark. Even the classic Autobiography of Malcolm X reflects both Malcolm’s need to shape his personal history for public racial edification while bringing coherence to a radically conflicting set of life experiences and coauthor Alex Haley’s political biases and ideological purposes.5 Much writing about Malcolm has either lost its way in the murky waters of psychology dissolved from history or simply substituted—given racial politics in the United States—defensive praise for critical appraisal. At times, insights on Malcolm have been tarnished by insular ideological arguments that neither illuminate nor surprise. Malcolm X was too formidable a historic figure—the movements he led too variable and contradictory, the passion and intelligence he summoned too extraordinary and disconcerting—to be viewed through a narrow cultural prism.
My intent in this chapter is to provide a critical path through the quagmire of conflicting views of Malcolm X. I have identified at least four Malcolms who emerge in the intellectual investigations of his life and career: Malcolm as hero and saint, Malcolm as public moralist, Malcolm as victim and vehicle of psychohistorical forces, and Malcolm as revolutionary figure judged by his career trajectory from nationalist to alleged socialist. Of course, many treatments of Malcolm’s life and thought transgress rigid boundaries of interpretation. The Malcolms I have identified, and especially the categories of interpretation to which they give rise, should be viewed as handles on broader issues of ideological warfare over who Malcolm is, and to whom he rightfully belongs. In short, they help us answer: Whose Malcolm is it?
I am not providing an exhaustive review of the literature, but a critical reading of the dominant tendencies in the writings on Malcolm X.6 The writings make up an intellectual universe riddled with philosophical blindnesses and ideological constraints, filled with problematic interpretations, and sometimes brimming with brilliant insights. They reveal as much about the possibilities of understanding and explaining the life of a great black man as they do about Malcolm’s life and thought.
HERO WORSHIP AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A BLACK REVOLUTIONARY
In the tense and confused aftermath of Malcolm’s death, several groups claiming to be his ideological heirs competed in a warfare of interpretation over Malcolm’s torn legacy. The most prominent of these included black nationalist and revolutionary groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, under the leadership of James Farmer and especially Floyd McKissick), the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.7 They appealed to his vision and spirit in developing styles of moral criticism and social action aimed at the destruction of white supremacy. These groups also advocated versions of Black Power, racial self-determination, black pride, cultural autonomy, cooperative socialism, and black capitalism.8
Malcolm’s death also caused often bitter debate between custodians of his legacy and his detractors, either side arguing his genius or evil in a potpourri of journals, books, magazines, and newspapers. For many of Malcolm’s keepers, the embrace of his legacy by integrationists or Marxists out to re-create Malcolm in their distorted image was more destructive than his critics characterizing him in exclusively pejorative terms.
For all his nationalist followers, Malcolm is largely viewed as a saintly figure defending the cause of black unity while fighting racist oppression. Admittedly, the development of stories that posit black heroes and saints serves a crucial cultural and political function. Such stories may be used to combat historical amnesia and to challenge the deification of black heroes—especially those deemed capable of betraying the best interests of African-Americans—by forces outside black communiti
es. Furthermore, such stories reveal that the creation of (black) heroes is neither accidental nor value neutral, and often serves political ends that are not defined or controlled by black communities. Even heroes proclaimed worthy of broad black support are often subject to cultural manipulation and distortion.
The most striking example of this involves Martin Luther King, Jr. Like Malcolm X, King was a complex historic figure whose moral vision and social thought evolved over time.9 When King was alive, his efforts to affect a beloved community of racial equality were widely viewed as a threat to a stable social order. His advocacy of nonviolent civil disobedience was also viewed as a detrimental detour from the proper role that religious leaders should play in public. Of course, the rise of black radicalism during the late 1960s softened King’s perception among many whites and blacks. But King’s power to excite the social imagination of Americans only increased after his assassination.
The conflicting uses to which King’s memory can be put—and the obscene manner in which his radical legacy can be deliberately forgotten—are displayed in aspects of the public commemoration of his birthday. To a significant degree, perceptions of King’s public aims have been shaped by the corporate sector and (sometimes hostile) governmental forces. These forces may be glimpsed in CocaCola commercials celebrating King’s birthday, and in Ronald Reagan’s unseemly hints of King’s personal and political defects at the signing of legislation to establish King’s birthday as a national holiday.