The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Of course, there are dangers to the notion of home in black life as well, especially when it comes to elevating one’s imagined geography of spirit, one’s own sense of home, as the sole source of authentic blackness. After all, roots are meant to nourish, not strangle, us. I’m thinking in particular of the vicious debates raging in many black communities about what is really black, how we define it, and how the spaces of black identity are linked increasingly to a narrow slice of black turf—the ghetto. Our kids are literally dying over a profound misunderstanding about our culture that links authenticity to geography, that makes one believe that if she is black, she must pledge ultimate allegiance to the ghetto as the sole black home of the black subject. The exclusive identification of the ghetto as the authentic black home is wholly destructive.

  Out of this grows the “keep it real” trope that punishes any departure from a lethally limited vision of black life, one that trades on stereotype and separation anxiety, since there is a great fear of being severed from the fertile ground of the true black self. But to subscribe to these beliefs is to be woefully misled. Sure, the beauty of the impulse to authenticity is altogether understandable: to protect a black identity that has been assaulted by white supremacy through the assertion of a uniquely guarded and qualified black self, rooted in a similarly protected view of the authentic black home. Plus, too many blacks who “made it” have surely forgotten “where they came from.” But the legitimate critique of blacks besieged by what may be termed Aframnesia—the almost systematic obliteration of the dangerous memory of black suffering and racial solidarity, a gesture that is usually rewarded by white elites—is different from imposing rigid views on black life of how and where blackness erupts or emerges. Thus we end up with vicious mythologies and punishing pieties: for instance, one cannot be gay and be authentically black in some circles, which means there’s no home, no place of grace in many black communities for black homosexuals. Or the black male assault on black female interests is justified as the necessary subordination of gender to race in the quest for liberation. Or the only real black is in the ghetto, a ghetto that in the social imagination of its romantic advocates rarely looks like the complex, complicated, contradictory place it is. As a former resident of the ghetto, I wholeheartedly concur with the notion that we can neither forget its people nor neglect its social redemption through strategic action. Further, I think it’s beautiful for folk who have survived the ghetto, who’ve gotten out, to carry the blessed image of its edifying dimensions in their hearts and imaginations, and to pledge to never leave the ghetto even as they travel millions of miles beyond its geographical boundaries. That means that they’ll never betray the wisdom, genius, and hope that floods the ghetto in ways that those outside its bounds rarely understand. It is, after all, a portable proposition, a mobile metaphor. But we must not seize on the most limited view possible of ghetto life and sanctify it as the be-all and end-all of black existence. That leads to kids killing each other in the name of an authentic ghetto masculinity that is little more than pathological self-hatred. The black ghetto working class, the working poor, and the permanently poor have always been more complex, and more resilient, than they have ever been given credit for. We’ve got to avoid the trap of existential puniness and racial infantilism and see our way to a robustly mature vision that shatters the paradigm of the authentic black self and, by extension, the acceptable black home.

  Given that analysis, I feel most at home in the intersection of all the energies provoked by my different roles, as preacher, teacher, public intellectual, political activist, agent provocateur, and paid pest. In one sense, I couldn’t rest all of my energy in one place doing one thing; the ability to do them all gives me the vocational patience to do any of them. And I feel a sense of transgression, a sense of irreverence (and to my mind, those are good qualities) in fulfilling all these roles that gives me, oddly enough, a feeling of being at home, because I feel I’m being truest to myself when I vigorously, and critically, engage my various communities of interest or, as the anthropologists say, my multiple kinship groups. For instance, I love to preach, and whenever I get the chance, I’m in a pulpit on Sunday morning “telling the story,” as black ministers elegantly phrase preaching the gospel. For all of its problems and limitations, the black pulpit, at its best, is still the freest, most powerful, most radically autonomous place on earth for black people to encourage each other in the job of critical self-reflection and the collective struggle for liberation. I think theologian Robert McAfee Brown put it best when he said the church is like Noah’s ark: if it wasn’t for the storm on the outside, we couldn’t stand the stink on the inside.

  But the stink in the black church is surely foul. There are still a lot of negative beliefs about gender and sexual orientation, and even class, that need to be addressed. There are big pockets of staunchly conservative sentiment that, I think, have to be opposed. I try not to avoid these subjects as I preach, and sometimes what I say goes over like a brick cloud! Still, I try to seduce people into seeing things differently, as I make arguments about why the opposition to gay and lesbian folk, for instance, reeks of the same biblical literalism that smashed the hopes of black slaves when white slave masters deployed it. But I try to win the folk over first, by preaching “in the tradition,” so to speak, warming them up first before I lower the boom. When I was a young preacher and pastor, one of my members told me you “gain more by honey than vinegar.” So I give honey before I give vinegar. I invite the folk to the progressive theological, ideological, and spiritual terrain I want them to occupy, but I try to issue that invitation in ways that won’t immediately alienate them. And once they’re there, they’re a captive audience.

  One gains his bona fides by preaching well, evoking “amens” by articulately referencing the black religious tradition, and this can be done with little fear of surrendering the politics I favor. The rhetorical forms are themselves neutral, so to speak, and thus the political uses to which they’re put is something that’s strictly TBD: to be determined by the rhetor, the prophet, the priest, the speaker, or the pastor. Then when I’ve got them where I want them, rhetorically speaking, in a velvet verbal vice, I squeeze hard, using the good feeling and theological credit I’ve gained from preaching well to assault the beliefs that are problematic, from homophobia, sexism, patriarchy, ageism, racism, and classism to environmental inequities. And sometimes, they’re giving assent against their wills, shouting amen to ideas that they may not have otherwise supported without being pushed or prodded—or seduced. They might even muse to themselves, “Well, he’s got a point,” or “I disagree, but I’ll at least think about it.” But as much as I love the black church, and see it as my home, it’s too narrow to be my only home. That’s why I claim the classroom, the lectern, and the academy as my home as well, a place I love immensely, but the inbred snobbishness and well-worn elitism of elements of this home mean that I can’t rest my entire self there either. I’m involved in both mainstream and radical politics, but elements of the latter are hostile to the spiritual traditions I cherish, which means my home in such circles is not one that accommodates my entire being. So I float among all of these stations of identification, so to speak. My home, while certainly not carved from a process of elimination—cutting away features I find unattractive, offensive, or burdensome in each “home”—is certainly the product of a stance of critical appreciation that allows me to derive benefit, pleasure, and sustenance from each space.

  So I conceive of home as a moveable feast of identity that I’m constantly feeding on. Because of the many communities in which I’m involved, I’m constantly rethinking who I am. In a way, I’m also constantly trying to get back home to Detroit, perhaps in a more spiritual than physical manner, since I go back fairly frequently to preach and visit my mother and brothers. There’s an elusive state of contentment that you nostalgically associate with home even when it was a turbulent and trying place. Detroit was, in many ways, such a place far me, but it
also provided so much joy and fulfillment, and it gave me a sense of the appropriate things to grasp hold of in life, beyond the material blessings one might seek. It was a great beginning, and as I heard Toni Morrison once say, beginnings are important because they must do so much more than start. While starting is crucial, beginnings also propel us along paths of influence whose real impact we may not be able to detect for years and years to come. That’s certainly the case with me.

  Detroit has become for me a metaphor of the complex convergence of fate and human volition. It’s a symbol for me of how destiny is at best partly determined by living one’s life in a meaningful, coherent fashion. That’s most acutely obvious to me in grappling with my brother’s imprisonment and my quest for improvement in every sphere of my life, including my professional life, my spiritual infrastructure, and my moral landscape. Home is a complicated place for me now, which is why nostalgia is inevitable, pleasurable, even desirable—and quite problematic, perhaps dangerous at points. Nostalgia, of course, is crucial to the project of black identity, largely as a defensive move against the brutal memories of suffering we endured at the hands of those outside our communities, and from within. Nostalgia, at least in that light, is an attempt to exercise sovereignty over memory, to force it into redemptive channels away from the tributaries of trauma that flood the collective black psyche. It is the attempt to rescue ethical agency and hence manage and control the perception of suffering—from the fateful forces of racial terror. One of the most bruising racial terrors is to have the dominant culture determine what memories are most important to the dominated minority.

  In that case, nostalgia is an attempt to take back the political utility of memory. After all, if you remember a horrible experience as something from which you can squeeze some good, then you’ve refused the hegemonic power the prerogative to define your fate. By remembering the same event with different accents, with different social purposes, through different eyes, one gives memory a racial and moral usefulness that can challenge dominant culture. I suspect that’s at stake when black folk wax nostalgic about segregation and the sort of relatively self-determining culture we were able to carve out of Jim Crow apartheid. You hear it as black folk say, “When we were forced to live together under segregation, we had more unity, we lived in the same neighborhoods, we helped each other more, economically and spiritually, and we did not depend on white patronage but promoted black self-reliance. Now under desegregation we’ve lost the power we had. Our colleges have suffered a brain drain to elite white schools. Our black businesses that catered to black needs suffered when we were able to buy white. And our neighborhoods were turned over to the poor and destitute when ‘white flight’ was mimicked by ‘black track’ to the suburbs.”

  The downside of such nostalgia is that it fails to explicitly engage the radical inequality of such segregated arrangements. It also tends to exaggerate the moral differences between generations, especially as the rose-colored tint of the black past is not used to cast an eye on the present or the future, for that matter. The net result is that one’s own generation is made golden, while those following are seen as tarnished by the surrender to urges, forces, and seductions that were heroically resisted in the past. Hence jazz was great and hip-hop is awful. People believe that even though earlier black generations thought jazz was terrible and preferred religious music. But there were problems there too, since many blacks felt that religious music too easily compromised its purity by integrating elements from secular blues. And it goes on and on. Then too, we’ve got to be careful not to ultimately justify or legitimate the oppression by nostalgically recalling its good effects. Nostalgic blacks end up reinforcing what may be termed subversive empathy from the dominant culture, which, after all, provided the conditions under which our race and culture could thrive under segregation, even if those conditions were harmful and oppressive.

  Subversive empathy is similar, I suppose, to anthropologist Renato Rosaldo’s notion of imperialist nostalgia, where hegemonic culture destroys an indigenous minority tradition and then has the gall to weep with those folk over the destruction of their culture. In subversive empathy, the dominant culture empathizes with our need to restore the conditions of our relative prospering under Jim Crow. While not explicitly invoking a return to the racist past, it nevertheless puts forth arguments and supports practices that have the same effect. That’s why black folk have to be especially cautious about supporting Bill Bennett’s partnership with C. Delores Tucker in combating hard-core hip-hop. They appeal to a golden age: nostalgic belief about the black family that is turned viciously against us in Bennett’s conservative cosmology. For that matter, we ought to be careful about uncritically celebrating Bill Clinton’s nostalgic appeal to black America to return to a bygone moral era. In a speech before a black religious audience in Memphis, Tennessee, Clinton invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s memory to chide black America about pockets of immorality in our communities and pathological family structure, ignoring the harmful social impact of many of his policies on the black family. He sounds like a friend, and in many ways he is, but he is also a foe to our best political interests. His political beliefs, in many ways, are emblematic of subversive empathy.

  If the impulse to nostalgia is not disciplined, it can be used to fashion moral judgments out of fantasies of the past that downplay our failures and project them more vehemently on someone, or something, else. A huge example is how older blacks nostalgically recall their idyllic lives in comparison to the ills of modern youth, assaulting their relative moral failures while extolling their own virtues.

  But to sum it all up, I suppose home conjures for me that Frankie Beverly anthem, “Joy and Pain.” But it remains the quintessential space of possibility, of hope, of unending yearning and unfulfilled expectation.

  I guess I’d like to hear you talk about that notion in relation to this generation you belong to, “the betweeners”—very late baby boomers and very early generation x or hip-hop. This also, in the academy, seems to stand right at that modern-postmodern divide. When I hear you talk about your relationship to home, I hear an important question about history and home, time and home. I’m the minister of music at my church, so you know that when I show up with the dread thing going on and I play for the senior choir, there is this odd sense of dissonance and I feel completely at home there even though there are some looking at me as if to say “What’s wrong with that brother?” But there’s this odd sort of thing that goes on because where you are is always where you feel most at home. I imagine that that’s what happens to you when you’re in the pulpit: that it’s the most natural home, but when you walk out into the classroom there is no rupture. But given our notions of race and culture and some of our stereotypes, it seems as if people would expect there to be a rupture, but there isn’t.

  No, no. In that sense it’s seamless for me, moving from one rhetorical situation to another, from the pulpit as the axis of convergence of history, spirituality, and morality, to the classroom, where there are other axes of convergence, including inquiry, skepticism, and excavation. The orbits of these rhetorical universes might be seen to be in collision with one another. But skillful black rhetoricians, speakers, teachers, intellectuals, and orators can, by virtue of an enchanted imagination, speak worlds of discourse into existence that cross disciplinary fault lines, that move among genres, and that navigate through discursive minefields, such as the question of what constitutes “real knowledge.” At its base, black culture has always been about migration and mobility. Its members, in one way or another, have been about the business of adapting ourselves to foreign spaces and creating home in the midst of them. We’ve constantly raised the question of Psalm 147, “How can we sing Zion’s songs in a strange land?” To borrow more biblical imagery, the book of Acts contains that famous passage about Paul and his mates being shipwrecked and making it to shore “on broken pieces.” Black people have always been able to take the fragments and shards of our lives, the pieces of
our existence broken by oppression, and rework them into a pattern of purposeful existence. That’s not simply about fragmentation as a trope of black existence in the postmodern moment. It’s also about the black modernist quest for a stable identity in the midst of flux and upheaval, often articulated, ironically enough, through a premodern religious worldview.