The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  No human being, including Michael Jordan, can successfully defy the law of gravity and achieve relatively sustained altitude without the benefit of machines. As Douglas Kirkpatrick points out, the equation for altitude is 1/2g x t2 = VO x t (“How Does Michael Fly?”). However, Jordan appears to hang by stylistically relativizing the fixed coordinates of space and time through the skillful management and manipulation of his body in midair. For basketball players, hang time is the velocity and speed with which a player takes off combined with the path the player’s center of gravity follows on the way up. At the peak of a player’s vertical jump, the velocity and speed is close to, or at, zero; hanging motionless in the air is the work of masterful skill and illusion (“How Does Michael Fly?”). Michael Jordan, through the consummate skill and style of his game, only appears to be hanging in space for more than the one second that human beings are capable of remaining airborne.

  But the African-American aspects of Jordan’s game are indissolubly linked to the culture of consumption and the commodification of black culture.1 Because of Jordan’s supreme mastery of basketball, his squeaky-clean image, and his youthful vigor in pursuit of the American Dream, he has become, along with Bill Cosby, the quintessential pitchman in American society. Even his highly publicized troubles with gambling, his refusal to visit the White House after the Bulls’ championship season, and a book that purports to expose the underside of his heroic myth have barely tarnished his All-American image.2 Jordan eats Wheaties, drives Chevrolet, wears Hanes, drinks Coca-Cola, consumes McDonald’s, guzzles Gatorade, and, of course, wears Nikes. He successfully produced, packaged, marketed, and distributed his image and commodified his symbolic worth, transforming cultural capital into cash, influence, prestige, status, and wealth. To that degree, at least, Jordan repudiates the sorry tradition of the black athlete as the naif who loses his money to piranhalike financial wizards, investors, and hangers-on. He represents the New Age athletic entrepreneur who understands that American sport is ensconced in the cultural practices associated with business, and that it demands particular forms of intelligence, perception, and representation to prevent abuse and maximize profit.

  From the very beginning of his professional career, Jordan was consciously marketed by his agency Pro-Serv as a peripatetic vehicle of American fantasies of capital accumulation and material consumption tied to Jordan’s personal modesty and moral probity. In so doing, they skillfully avoided attaching to Jordan the image of questionable ethics and lethal excess that plagued inside traders and corporate raiders on Wall Street during the mid ’80s, as Jordan began to emerge as a cultural icon. But Jordan is also the symbol of the spectacle-laden black athletic body as the site of commodified black cultural imagination. Ironically, the black male body, which has been historically viewed as threatening and inappropriate in American society (and remains so outside of sports and entertainment), is made an object of white desires to domesticate and dilute its more ominous and subversive uses, even symbolically reducing Jordan’s body to dead meat (McDonald’s McJordan hamburger), which can be consumed and expelled as waste.

  Jordan’s body is also the screen upon which is projected black desires to emulate his athletic excellence and replicate his entry into reaches of unimaginable wealth and fame. But there is more than vicarious substitution and the projection of fantasy onto Jordan’s body that is occurring in the circulation and reproduction of black cultural desire. There is also the creative use of desire and fantasy by young blacks to counter, and capitulate to, the forces of cultural dominance that attempt to reduce the black body to a commodity and text that is employed for entertainment, titillation, or financial gain. Simply said, there is no easy correlation between the commodification of black youth culture and the evidences of a completely dominated consciousness.

  Even within the dominant cultural practices that seek to turn the black body into pure profit, disruptions of capital are embodied, for instance, in messages circulated in black communities by public moralists who criticize the exploitation of black cultural creativity by casual footwear companies. In short, there are instances of both black complicity and resistance in the commodification of black cultural imagination, and the ideological criticism of exploitative cultural practices must always be linked to the language of possibility and agency in rendering a complex picture of the black cultural situation. As Henry Giroux observes:

  The power of complicity and the complicity of power are not exhausted simply by registering how people are positioned and located through the production of particular ideologies structured through particular discourses. . . . It is important to see that an overreliance on ideology critique has limited our ability to understand how people actively participate in the dominant culture through processes of accommodation, negotiation, and even resistance. (Giroux 1992, 194–195)

  In making judgments about the various uses of the black body, especially Jordan’s symbolic corporeality, we must specify how both consent and opposition to exploitation are often signaled in expressions of cultural creativity.

  In examining his reactions to the racial ordering of athletic and cultural life, the ominous specificity of the black body creates anxieties for Jordan. His encounters with the limits of culturally mediated symbols of race and racial identity have occasionally mocked his desire to live beyond race, to be “neither black nor white” (Patton 1986, 52), to be “viewed as a person” (Vancil 1992, 57). While Jordan chafes under indictment by black critics who claim that he is not “black enough,” he has perhaps not clearly understood the differences between enabling versions of human experience that transcend the exclusive gaze of race and disenabling visions of human community that seek race neutrality.

  The former is the attempt to expand the perimeters of human experience beyond racial determinism, to nuance and deepen our understanding of the constituent elements of racial identity, and to understand how race, along with class, gender, geography, and sexual preference, shape and constrain human experience. The latter is the belief in an intangible, amorphous, nonhistorical, and raceless category of “person,” existing in a zone beyond not simply the negative consequences of race, but beyond the specific patterns of cultural and racial identity that constitute and help shape human experience. Jordan’s unclarity is consequential, weighing heavily on his apolitical bearing and his refusal to acknowledge the public character of his private beliefs about American society and the responsibility of his role as a public pedagogue.

  Indeed it is the potency of black cultural expressions that not only have helped influence his style of play, but have also made the sneaker industry he lucratively participates in a multibillion dollar business. Michael Jordan has helped seize upon the commercial consequences of black cultural preoccupation with style and the commodification of the black juvenile imagination at the site of the sneaker. At the juncture of the sneaker, a host of cultural, political, and economic forces and meanings meet, collide, shatter, and are reassembled to symbolize the situation of contemporary black culture.

  The sneaker reflects at once the projection and stylization of black urban realities linked in our contemporary historical moment to rap culture and the underground political economy of crack, and reigns as the universal icon for the culture of consumption. The sneaker symbolizes the ingenious manner in which black cultural nuances of cool, hip, and chic have influenced the broader American cultural landscape. It was black street culture that influenced sneaker companies’ aggressive invasion of the black juvenile market in taking advantage of the increasing amounts of disposable income of young black men as a result of legitimate and illegitimate forms of work.

  Problematically, though, the sneaker also epitomizes the worst features of the social production of desire and represents the ways in which moral energies of social conscience about material values are drained by the messages of undisciplined acquisitiveness promoted by corporate dimensions of the culture of consumption. These messages, of rapacious consumerism supported by cultu
ral and personal narcissism, are articulated on Wall Street and are related to the expanding innercity juvenocracy, where young black men rule over black urban space in the culture of crack and illicit criminal activity, fed by desires to “live large” and to reproduce capitalism’s excesses on their own terrain. Also, sneaker companies make significant sums of money from the illicit gains of drug dealers.

  Moreover, while sneaker companies have exploited black cultural expressions of cool, hip, chic, and style, they rarely benefit the people who both consume the largest quantity of products and whose culture redefined the sneaker companies’ raison d’être. This situation is more severely compounded by the presence of spokespeople like Jordan, Spike Lee, and Bo Jackson, who are either ineffectual or defensive about or indifferent to the lethal consequences (especially in urban black-on-black violence over sneaker company products) of black juvenile acquisition of products that these figures have helped make culturally desirable and economically marketable.

  Basketball is the metaphoric center of black juvenile culture, a major means by which even temporary forms of cultural and personal transcendence of personal limits are experienced. Michael Jordan is at the center of this black athletic culture, the supreme symbol of black cultural creativity in a society of diminishing tolerance for the black youth whose fascination with Jordan has helped sustain him. But Jordan is also the iconic fixture of broader segments of American society, who see in him the ideal figure: a black man of extraordinary genius on the court and before the cameras, who by virtue of his magical skills and godlike talents symbolizes the meaning of human possibility, while refusing to root it in the specific forms of culture and race in which it must inevitably make sense or fade to ultimate irrelevance.

  Jordan also represents the contradictory impulses of the contemporary culture of consumption, where the black athletic body is deified, reified, and rearticulated within the narrow meanings of capital and commodity. But there is both resistance and consent to the exploitation of black bodies in Jordan’s explicit cultural symbolism, as he provides brilliant glimpses of black culture’s ingenuity of improvisation as a means of cultural expression and survival. It is also partially this element of black culture that has created in American society a desire to dream Jordan, to “be like Mike.”

  This pedagogy of desire that Jordan embodies, although at points immobilized by its depoliticized cultural contexts, is nevertheless a remarkable achievement in contemporary American culture: a six-foot-six American man of obvious African descent is the dominant presence and central cause of athletic fantasy in a sport that twenty years ago was denigrated as a black man’s game and hence deemed unworthy of wide attention or support. Jordan is therefore the bearer of meanings about black culture larger than his individual life, the symbol of a pedagogy of style, presence, and desire that is immediately communicated by the sight of his black body before it can be contravened by reflection.

  In the final analysis, his big black body—graceful and powerful, elegant and dark—symbolizes the possibilities of other black bodies to remain safe long enough to survive within the limited but significant sphere of sport, since Jordan’s achievements have furthered the cultural acceptance of at least the athletic black body. In that sense, Jordan’s powerful cultural capital has not been exhausted by narrow understandings of his symbolic absorption by the demands of capital and consumption. His body is still the symbolic carrier of racial and cultural desires to fly beyond limits and obstacles, a fluid metaphor of mobility and ascent to heights of excellence secured by genius and industry. It is this power to embody the often conflicting desires of so many that makes Michael Jordan a supremely instructive figure for our times.

  Thirty-Five

  IS POSTMODERNISM JUST MODERNISM IN DRAG?

  This interview, conducted by the gifted poet, scholar, and church pianist Jonathan Smith when he was a graduate student, is one of the best I have participated in. Smith’s questions are razor-sharp and knowing, smart without being smug, brilliant without being ostentatious. I had great fun in probing the complex dimensions of black culture and in exploring the modern and postmodern implications of black identity. We discuss music, literature, basketball, religion, literary and cultural theory, sexuality, slavery, boxing, masculinity, politics, television, civil rights and race, and a great deal more. It is a tribute to Smith’s preparedness that the interview went so well. One can feel the electricity of the lived, dialogic moment, as his enthusiasm for the subjects we discuss contagiously passes to me, allowing me to catch fire and blaze through our exchanges. If I had to point to a single piece of writing that best expresses my ideas about black culture and identity, this would be the one.

  The first thing I’d like to ask is: Who is Michael Eric Dyson? And I want you to take the liberty of answering this in a manner that is not strictly autobiographical. One reason I ask this is because your book jacket begins describing you as “welfare father, ordained Baptist minister, Princeton Ph.D.” Then in your chapter on the black public intellectual, you give yourself the shameless self-promotion award.

  One of the reasons I take postmodernism so seriously, even as I refuse to make a fetish of its insights, is a notion that has been championed by its theorists, especially in cultural and literary studies: an evolving, fluid identity. What I take from the postmodern conception of identity is captured in the terms beautifully phrased in black Christian circles, namely, “I don’t have to be what I once was.” That Christian conception of the evolution of character highlights the variability and flexibility of human identity, even if such a view clashes profoundly with postmodern arguments against a fixed human nature on which many Christian conceptions of identity rest. But for black Christians—who are arguably situated deep inside modernism with its impulse to dynamism and disruption, as well as its unyielding quest for the new—and secular postmodernists alike, identity is a process, a continual play of existential choices over a field of unfolding possibility. The self today can be radically different from the self of yesterday.

  Taking that seriously, Mike Dyson is an experiment in identity, a testament to a process of evolving self-awareness; some of the elements of my self are surely in conflict, while other fragments of my self are made coherent because they’ve been sewn together by the threads of history, culture, race, and memory. Who I was, say, ten years ago, was a scholar in the making, and eight or ten years before that, I was a welfare father, a hustler on Detroit’s streets, a divorcing husband, a young man who was trying to figure out what to do with his life. I was twenty-one, and I hadn’t gone to college or prepared myself academically to take up my vocation. So, who I am is constantly implicated in the themes I take up in my work. What does it mean to be young, black, and male in this country? What are the racial and economic forces that shape black life? How can we achieve racial justice and equality? What does it mean to be an intellectual in a world that prizes image more than substance? How should we treat the vulnerable and the destitute? How can we bridge the psychic and social gulfs between the generations? How can we speak about God in a world where religion has been hijacked by fundamentalists and fascists? How do we untangle the vicious knots of patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny in our nation? How do we affirm and protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people in our communities? All these questions, and many more, play out in my intellectual and political pursuits.

  Who I am, then, in many senses, is a bridge builder, a bridge figure. I want to span the streets and the academy, and the sacred and the secular. I also want to bridge traditions and the transformations of those traditions, including religious belief, intellectual engagement, scholarly investigation, racial solidarity, class struggle, resistance to economic oppression, and feminist insurgence. Of course, the parts of my identity that might obviously be in tension, say the academic and the activist, suffer pressure in both directions: the academy is suspicious of the streets, and vice versa. The tension is one of proximity and distance. To the academy, there is the th
reat of proximity to the chaotic, propulsive, unregulated, sometimes uncivil passions of the world beyond the university. To the denizens of the streets—including its natural constituency of grassroots activists, conspiracy managers, and on-the-ground, indigenous, concrete intellectuals—there is the fear that academics will remain aloof, indifferent to their suffering, and intellectually unavailable to supply strategies to resist their oppression. I want to do the best I can to answer the threat of proximity, not by less but by more interaction between academics and activists, hoping to prove that the interactions benefit the university. And I want to help heal fears of distance by bringing the resources of intelligence and compassion to bear on the hurts of the socially vulnerable. It is that desire to bridge gulfs that unifies my disparate selves, making me much more sympathetic to the prophetic mystic Howard Thurman, who once prayed to God, “make me unanimous in myself.”

  I’ll ask you then this question. Baldwin in Giovanni’s Room says: “Perhaps home is not a place but an irrevocable condition.” In South to a Very Old Place, Albert Murray begins with this thought: “But then, going back home has probably always had as much if not more to do with people as with landmarks and place names and locations on maps and mileage charts anyway. Not that home is not a place, for even in its most abstract implications it is precisely the very oldest place in the world. But even so, it is somewhere you are likely to find yourself remembering your way back to far more often than it is ever possible to go by conventional transportation.” Given that, in that context, where do you feel most at home?

  Yes. Yes. Good question, man. Well, as both of these writers make clear, home is about the geography of imagination. For me, it’s also about the architecture of identity through aspiration and yearning, since home is carved from hope and memory. It is both forward-looking and backward leaning. And that means that home is not simply a place forever anchored by concrete foundations. It is not simply a fixed point with tangible coordinates in space and time. Home is a metaphysical possibility that seeds the ground of experience and infuses our finite encounters in local spaces with meaning. That’s why Burt Bacharach’s writing partner, Hal David, could pen a lyric that makes the philosophical argument that “a house is not a home,” distinguishing the two by the quality of relations that turn the former into the latter. Like identity, home, to a large degree, is composed of an evolving awareness about how you can decrease the discomfort you have in the world as a result of your roots. That’s why our foreparents spoke of “a house not made with hands,” as it says in 1 Corinthians, casting biblical language in their own religious accents. And they suggested that this world “ain’t no friend to grace,” since it was alienated from God’s purpose. For a people who were often homeless—rootless and adrift in a sea of chattel slavery, and later, exploitative sharecropping—home assumed a high priority. That’s why many of our foreparents hoped for a day when they could, in the words of one slave, “read my title clear.” Home had intense metaphoric value for our foreparents in another way: as the imagined space of unlimited access to God in heaven, a place they hoped to go after they died, signified in songwriter Charles Tindley’s familiar refrain in black Christian circles, “I’ll make it home, someday.”