The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Lee’s decision to provoke discussion about racism is heroic. He exposes a crucial American failure of nerve, a stunning loss of conscience about race. But beyond this accomplishment, how much light does he shed by raising the question of racism in the manner that he does? Lee’s perspective portrays a view of race and racism that, while it manages to avoid a facile Manichaeanism, nevertheless slides dangerously close to a vision of “us” and “them,” in which race is seen solely through the lens of biological determinism.

  The problem with such biological determinism is that it construes racial identity as a unidimensional, monocausal reality that can be reduced to physically inheritable characteristics. Racial identity is an ever-evolving, continually transforming process that is never fully or finally exhausted by genetics and physiology. It is constantly structured and restructured, perennially created and recreated, in a web of social practices, economic conditions, gendered relations, material realities, and historical situations that are themselves shaped and reshaped. As the feminist critique of Freud asserts, anatomy is not destiny; likewise, biology is not identity.

  Black cultural neonationalism obscures the role of elements such as gender, class, and geography in the construction of racial identity, and by so doing limits its resources for combating racial oppression. Consider the film’s end, in which Lee juxtaposes quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X that posit the harm versus the help of violence in aid of black liberation. Lee has not stumbled serendipitously toward an interpretive framework that summarizes the two options open to black folk in fighting racism: Lee’s neonationalist perspective has regulated his presentation of the problem of racism in the movie all along.

  Furthermore, Lee’s neonationalism determines which quotes he uses. As Lee knows, it can be argued that, before their deaths, King and X were converging in their understanding of race and racism. Both of them were developing understandings of racial identity and racism that were much more complex, openended, ecumenical, and international than the views they had previously held. King was changing because of his more radical comprehension of the relationship between race and class, and thus began to promote a more aggressive version of nonviolent resistance. X was changing, too, because of his visit to Mecca and his expanding conception of the possibilities of interracial solidarity. Each man also borrowed elements of analysis from the other, appropriating those lessons in ways that had the potential to chart a much different path for resistance to oppression in the ’70s and on. By using these quotes from King and X, free of context, Lee gives an anachronistic and historical reading of the two figures. Presenting these quotes as a basis of present options may provide some conceptual and emotive resources for debate, but does little to enlighten. Lee freezes the meanings of these two men, instead of utilizing their mature thought as a basis for reconceiving the problem of racism to address our particular set of historical circumstances.

  Lee’s neonationalist leanings also affect his characters, who become mere archetypes. Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) is the local radical, a caricature of deep commitment, who is more rabblerouser than thoughtful insurgent. Smiley (Roger Gueneveur Smith) is the stuttering conscience, first seen in front of the Yes Jesus Can Baptist Church. He hawks photographs of the famous meeting between King and X to reluctant passersby. Ossie Davis plays Da Mayor, the neighborhood drunk, who represents older black men who were scathed by economic desperation and personal failure, and whose modus vivendi is shaped by the bottle. Ruby Dee (Davis’s real-life wife) is Mother Sister, a lonely black woman who represents the neighborhood’s omniscient eye. She is a possible victim of desertion by a man like Da Mayor, or a woman who was determined and independent before her time (or perhaps both). Joie Lee, Spike’s real-life sister, plays Mookie’s sister Jade, and represents the responsible and stable black woman. She must support and suffer Mookie, her affectionately irascible brother, whom she chides for not taking care of his son. Mookie’s son’s mother, Tina (Rosie Perez), is the Latin firebrand who extemporizes in colorful neologism about Mookie’s domestic shortcomings. And a trio of middle-aged black men, Sweet Dick Willie, ML, and Coconut Sid (Robin Harris, Paul Benjamin, and Frankie Faison), represent the often humorous folk philosophy of a generation of black males who have witnessed the opening of socioeconomic opportunity for others, but who must cope with a more limited horizon for themselves.

  In one respect, Lee’s use of archetypal black figures is salutary, as it expands the register of black characters in contemporary cinema. But the larger effect is harmful, and is a measure both of Hollywood’s deeply entrenched racism and of the limitation of Lee’s neonationalist worldview. Lee follows a tradition of sorts, as the attempt to decenter prevalent conceptions of racial behavior began in earnest in the ’20s in Oscar Micheaux’s films. A much later attempt to shift from stereotype to archetype in black film was crudely rendered in Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). Although Lee is light-years ahead of Van Peebles in most respects, he still adopts a crucial element of Van Peebles’s work: the representative archetype.

  Lee is unable to meld his two ambitions—to present the breadth of black humanity while proclaiming a black neonationalist aesthetic. His attempt to present a black universe is admirable, but that universe must be one in which people genuinely act and do not simply respond as mere archetypal constructions. Because the characters carry such weighty symbolic significance (resonant though it might be), they must act like symbols, not like humans. As a result, their story seems predetermined, a byproduct of a complicated configuration of social, personal, and political situations.

  The archetypal model accounts for the manner in which Lee portrays the white characters, particularly Sal and sons. Pino is the vicious ethnic chauvinist who clings tightly to his Italian identity and heritage for fear of finding himself awash in the tide of “nigger” loving that seems to soak his other family members. Vito is the ethnic pluralist, an easygoing and impressionable young man whose main distinction is that he has no major beef with the blacks and Puerto Ricans. Only Sal, who splits the difference between his two sons, manages to rise in some complexity. He is a proud businessman whose long-standing relationship with the community has endeared him to most of the neighborhood’s residents. But when provoked, he is not above hurling the incendiary racial epithet, which on one fateful occasion seals his destiny by beginning the riot that destroys his store.

  This Saturday night Sal keeps the store open late to accommodate a group of neighborhood kids. That is when Radio Raheem (boom box in tow and pumping loud) and Buggin’ Out shout a final request to place photos of blacks on the wall. After Radio Raheem refuses to lower the volume of his box, Sal, driven to an understandable frenzy, crushes the radio with his baseball bat. Radio Raheem also behaves understandably. He grabs Sal, pulls him over the counter, and the two men struggle from the store into the street. The police arrive and attempt to restrain Radio Raheem using the infamous New York Police “chokehold,” a potentially lethal technique, especially when applied to black male necks. The police let Radio Raheem drop dead to the ground, kick him, and drag him into a police car. Meanwhile, they have handcuffed Buggin’ Out and carted him away. The crowd is horror-stricken. Mookie, until now the mediator of disputes between Sal and the community, takes sides with his neighbors and throws a trash can through Sal’s window, catalyzing the riot. The crowd destroys the pizzeria, overturning tables and equipment and taking money from the cash register. But it is stuttering Smiley who starts the fire. In African-American religious tradition, the Holy Spirit appears before believers in the form of fire. Smiley’s torch is the articulation of his religious passion.

  Lee’s portrayal of police brutality, which has claimed the lives of too many black people, is disturbingly honest. The encounter between Radio Raheem and Sal is poignant and instructive. It shows that a black person’s death may be provoked by incidents of racial antagonism gone amok, and that it is easy for precious young black life to
be sacrificed in the gritty interstices between anger and abandonment. Thus, we can understand the neighborhood’s consuming desire to destroy property—avenging the murder of a son whose punishment does not fit his crime.

  It is also understandable that the crowd destroys Sal’s place, the pizzeria being the nearest representative of destructive white presence, a white presence that has just denied Radio Raheem his future. But Sal certainly doesn’t represent the “powers” that Public Enemy rapped about so fearlessly on Radio Raheem’s box. As Lee knows, the character of racism has changed profoundly in the last few decades, and even though there are still too many ugly reassertions of overt racism, it is often the more subtle variety that needs to be identified and fought.

  For instance, after viewing Lee’s film many people may leave the theater smugly self-confident that they are not racists because they are not petit bourgeois Italian businessmen, because they don’t call people “niggers,” and because they are not policemen who chokehold black men to death. But contemporary racism is often the teacher who cannot take a black student seriously, who subtly dismisses her remarks in class because they are “not really central,” or because he has presumed, often unconsciously, a limit to her abstract reasoning. (The double whammy of race and gender operates here.) Contemporary racism is often middle-class black managers hitting a career ceiling that is ostensibly due to their lack of high-level management skills, which, of course, are missing not because of lack of intelligence but because they have not acquired the right kinds of experience. Contemporary racism is not about being kept out of a clothes store, but rather about not being taken seriously because the store clerk presumes you won’t spend your money or that you have none to spend.

  To assert that racism is most virulent at Sal’s level misses the complex ways in which everyday racism is structured, produced, and sustained in multifarious social practices, cultural traditions, and intellectual justifications. Sal is as much a victim of his racist worldview as he is its perpetrator. By refusing to probe the shift in the modus operandi of American racism, Lee misses the opportunity to expose what the British cultural critic Stuart Hall calls inferential racism, the “apparently naturalized representation of events and situations relating to race, whether factual or ‘fictional,’ which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions.”

  Those who strive to resist the new-style racism must dedicate themselves to pointing out slippery attitudes and ambiguous actions that signal the presence of racism without appearing to do so. This strategy must include drawing attention to unintended racist statements, actions, and thoughts, which nevertheless do harm. These strategies must be accompanied by sophisticated, high-powered intellectual dialogue about how the nature of particular forms of Western discourse provide the expression, reproduction, and maintenance of racist ideology and practices. People must form interracial, international lines of solidarity and develop analyses of racism in tandem with similar analyses of sexism, classism, antiSemitism, anti-Arabism, homophobia, ecological terrorism, and a host of other progressive concerns.

  Perhaps nothing does more to symbolize the shadowed brilliance of Lee’s project, the troubled symbiosis of his black neonationalist vision and his desire to represent black humanity, than a scene in which Mookie is completing an argument with Jade. After they depart, the camera fixes on the graffiti on the wall: “Tawana told the truth!” It is understandable, given Lee’s perspective, that he chooses to retrieve this fresh and tortured signifier from the iconographical reservoir of black neonationalists, some of whom believe Tawana transcends her infamous circumstances and embodies the reality of racial violence in our times. Racial violence on every level is vicious now, but Tawana is not its best or most powerful symbol. Lee’s invocation of Tawana captures the way in which many positive aspects of neonationalist thought are damaged by close association with ideas and symbols that hurt more than help. Yes, it is important to urge racial self-esteem, a vision for racial progress, the honoring of historical figures, and the creation of powerful culture, but not if the result is a new kind of bigotry. For this reason we must criticize Lee’s proximity to Louis Farrakhan’s ideological stances. Real transformation of our condition will come only as we explore the resources of progressive thought, social action, and cultural expression that were provided by figures like King, X, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, Pauli Murray, and Ida B. Wells. But we can’t wallow in unimaginative mimesis. These people’s crucial insights, cultural expressions, and transformative activities must inspire us to think critically and imaginatively about our condition and help us generate profound and sophisticated responses to our own crises. Only then will we be able to do the right thing.

  Twenty-Four

  BETWEEN APOCALYPSE AND REDEMPTION: JOHN SINGLETON’S BOYZ N THE HOOD

  When I saw this film in the summer of 1991 with my thirteen-year-old son—and I took him to see it at least seven times—I cried each time. The film spoke to so many issues that are critical to black male life: father and son bonding, the difficulty of rearing boys in poor and working-class communities, the vicious self-hatred that threads through gang violence, the devastating costs of social policies that overlook the economic and social needs of black males, and the magical power of black love. Like the lead character Furious Styles, played with incredible sensitivity and maturity by Laurence Fishburne, I got custody of my son when he ran into trouble while living with his mother. Singleton’s film gave me and my son a common point of reference in discussing important issues between black fathers and sons. In this chapter, I discuss the predicament of black American men while reflecting on Singleton’s mature-beyond-his-twenty-three-years vision of the social situation of black masculinity, and the equally intelligent writing of his screenplay. I don’t fail to notice the film’s troubling gender politics—that only black men can rear black men, a fact rebutted by the wise, brave black women who do it every day. Still, I applaud Singleton’s cautionary tale of the disappearing black father, a disappearance often supported by the culture and underwritten by the state. This film remains the high-water mark of Singleton’s career.

  BY NOW THE DRAMATIC DECLINE IN BLACK male life has become an unmistakable feature of our cultural landscape, although of course the causes behind the desperate condition of black men date much further back than its recent popular discovery. Every few months, new reports and conferences attempt to explain the poverty, disease, despair, and death that shove black men toward social apocalypse.

  If these words appear too severe or hyperbolic, the statistics testify to the trauma. For black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, suicide is the leading cause of death. Between 1980 and 1985, the life expectancy for white males increased from 63 to 74.6 years, but only from 59 to 65 years for black males. Between 1973 and 1986, the real earnings of black males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine fell 31 percent, as the percentage of young black males in the workforce plummeted 20 percent. The number of black men who dropped out of the workforce altogether doubled from 13 percent to 25 percent.

  By 1989, almost 32 percent of black men between sixteen and nineteen were unemployed, compared with 16 percent of white men. And while blacks constitute only 12 percent of the nation’s population, they make up 48 percent of the prison population, with men accounting for 89 percent of the black prison population. Only 14 percent of the white males who live in large metropolitan areas have been arrested, but the percentage for black males is 51 percent. And while 3 percent of white men have served time in prison, 18 percent of black men have been behind bars.1

  Most chilling, black-on-black homicide is the leading cause of death for black males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four. Or, to put it another way, “One out of every twenty-one black American males will be murdered in their lifetime. Most will die at the hands of another black male.” These words appear in stark white print on the dark screen that opens John Singleton’s masterf
ul new film, Boyz N the Hood. These words are both summary and opening salvo in Singleton’s battle to reinterpret and redeem the black male experience. With Boyz N the Hood we have the most brilliantly executed and fully realized portrait of the coming-of-age odyssey that black boys must undertake in the suffocating conditions of urban decay and civic chaos.

  Singleton adds color and depth to Michael Schultz’s groundbreaking Cooley High, extends the narrative scope of the Hudlin Brothers’ important and humorous House Party, and creates a stunning complement to Gordon Parks’s pioneering Learning Tree, which traced the painful pilgrimage to maturity of a rural black male. Singleton’s treatment of the various elements of contemporary black urban experience—gang violence, drug addiction, black male–female relationships, domestic joys and pains, friendships—is subtle and complex. He layers narrative textures over gritty and compelling visual slices of black culture that show us what it means to come to maturity, or die trying, as a black male.

  Singleton’s noteworthy attempt to present a richly hued, skillfully nuanced portrait of black male life is rare in the history of American film. Along with the seminal work of Spike Lee, and the recently expanded body of black film created by Charles Burnett, Robert Townsend, Keenan Wayans, Euzhan Palcy, Matty Rich, Mario Van Peebles, Ernest Dickerson, Bill Duke, Charles Lane, Reginald and Warrington Hudlin, Doug McHenry, George Jackson, and Julie Dash, Singleton symbolizes a new generation of black filmmakers whose artistic visions of African-American and American life may influence understandings of black worldviews, shape crucial perceptions of the sheer diversity of black communities, and address substantive racial, social, and political issues.