BLACK AND WHITE AND READ ALL OVER
Michael Eric Dyson Preaches the Gospel of Race in America

“What’s that trail of smoke that’s risin’ in the sky,” nine-year-old Michael Dyson asked his mom long ago. More questions piled one on top of the other with growing urgency: Why can’t I go outside to play? Why is the city on Äre? And why are people runnin’ up and down the street with televisions and stereos?

Last fall, Michael Eric Dyson, the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, came from DePaul University to join the religious studies department in SAS. He also holds an appointment in the Center for Africana Studies.

The city he watched burning as a little boy was Detroit. It was the hot summer of 1967. By the time the Äres were put out, 43 people were dead, over 7,000 had been arrested, and 14 square miles of city neighborhoods had been looted and burned. Less than a year later, Martin Luther King would be murdered. He remembers the visceral “Humpf!” his father let out when news of the killing was announced on TV.

Dyson grew up in a working-class, poor-black community, where the schools and churches endowed children with a “sense of somebodyness.” He recalls, “We took for granted that black folk could achieve and love each other without hating anyone else, including white brothers and sisters.” His father labored in an automobile factory, and when the kids were old enough, his mother went to work as an aide in the public schools. With Äve boys in a three-bedroom house, it was a struggling but intact family.

Up until the ‘67 riots, young Dyson had given almost no thought to matters of race. “But that’s when it all came crashing in on me,” he says. “I was just aghast at the destructive cycle that had ripped through our neighborhood. It was so
perplexing. Why is it that skin color should make that big a difference?” The questions have been coming hard ever since, and Dyson says he’s just trying, as the hip-hoppers say, “to represent.” (“Tell it like it is,” for older alumni.)

MANY SELVES, MANY KNOWLEDGES
Before becoming an Ivy League professor, Dyson had donned a number of identities: ghetto golden boy, prep-school expellee, knife-toting gang member, teenage welfare dad, factory worker and odd-job man, preacher, philosophy major in a white Southern Baptist college—he lived out of a car for a month—Ivy League Ph.D., proliÄc writer of popular books, public intellectual. He still preaches most Sundays and remains an ordained and committed Baptist minister, but he doesn’t have his own pulpit. He was booted out of a church for trying to ordain women deacons, and he likes to “rub against the feathers of [his] Baptist brethren” by advocating for gays and lesbians.

“ I view myself as a work in progress,” he says, “an improvised expression of identity that is constantly evolving.” The glint in his eye is part mischief and part take-all-comers militancy. As a professor and public intellectual, he revels in playing the “paid pest.” The record of his publications and appearances suggests it is money well spent. In print, his byline appears in journals of religious opinion, mainstream newspapers, scholarly publications, and mass-market magazines, not to mention eight mostly brisk-selling books. He is also sought after on the national lecture circuit and by TV anchors and radio talk-show hosts, and the press often looks him up for soundbites on hot-button issues of race.

Since his youth, Dyson has moved within a mix of “rival epistemologies,” taking up and putting down again the academic jargon of arcane theory, black-clergy cadences and Bible allusions, and the erudition of the street with its rap and rhythm of the “Motown curriculum.” This semester, he is teaching a popular course on murdered hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur, which uses the life and lyrics of the Åashy pop idol to take a deep look at racial identity, black masculinity, and the political and moral dimensions of race in America. “Shakur grappled with the questions of evil, suffering, and how one understands the complex claims of what’s good and what’s bad,” Dyson argues. The tradition-bound academy, he seems to suggest, pushing against the boundaries of multidisciplinary study, needs to link up the “world of the mind and the world of concrete outside the academy.” His course and his book, Holler if You Hear Me, on the black rapper do just that, teasing out social commentary from pop culture and earning Dyson the sobriquet “hip-hop intellectual.” “Different ways of knowing the world and trying to challenge what we think is knowledge,” he exhorts.

A more militant King
Dyson has written books about more palatable African American icons—Malcolm X and Martin Luther King —but, if they are more acceptable to mainstreamsensibilities, it is because their message has been robbed of its discomforting sting. Writes Dyson, “King’s true legacy has been lost to cultural amnesia.”

The civil rights leader began his activism as a liberal reformer who believed that racism could be overcome with appeals to the conscience of white society. By the time of his assassination—when the civil rights struggle had moved from the boldface racism of the South to confront a more subtle and implacable racism that held Northern ghettos in its grip—King’s views had darkened.

“ He later concluded that most Americans were unconscious racists,” Dyson contends, and that race, poverty, and war are intimately connected, thus challenging the deep-held belief that American capitalism and its overseas exploits were righteous undertakings. As one of the earliest critics of the war in Vietnam, “King shattered the prism through which America viewed itself as a world power, and he linked its global expansion to forces of oppression that made it a bully. . . . This is not the King we choose to remember.” Instead, we honor him with a national holiday that sentimentalizes the black orator’s oft-cited “dream” of a nation, where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

“ [W]e have frozen King in a timeless mood of optimism that later that very year he grew to question,” Dyson writes. We listen selectively to just 34 words of that speech and forget the nightmare of pain and betrayal, of segregation and deprivation that it also recounts. Conservatives have ingeniously taken over the “brilliantly disturbing rhetoric” of I Have a Dream, according to Dyson, twisting the meaning into something its author never said, and thereby repudiating the legacy of King.

California’s Proposition 209, which eliminated afÄrmative action in college admissions and job applications in 1996, “pilfered” the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: “…the state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity…” When each piece of legislation was written, Dyson points out, the “racial presumptions and practices were radically different.” In ’64, segregation reigned and the law was intended to counter the social heritage of slavery and Jim Crow. The universality written into the California law assumes that equal opportunity is no longer a “dream,” despite the poverty and disadvantage that afÅict great numbers of African Americans. “As a presumed achievement,” Dyson writes, “color-blindness reinforces the very racial misery it is meant to replace.”

King himself was critical of the self-help, “bootstraps” approach to achieving equal opportunity that conservatives favor and a strong advocate of afÄrmative action. The fundamental aim of race-conscious remedies is the correction of past and present inequities—the positioning of historically excluded minorities to better access opportunities that most have by virtue of being American citizens. “You have to take race into account,” Dyson maintains. “If race has been taken into account to hurt us, then it must be taken into account to help us.”

On the birthday of Martin Luther King earlier this year, President George Bush announced that his administration would Äle briefs with the Supreme Court challenging admission policies at the University of Michigan. Calling the university’s afÄrmative action practice a “quota system,” the president declared, “Our Constitution makes it clear that people of all races must be treated equally under the law.”

Comments Dyson, “The ingenuity of the right wing has been to appropriate the language of civil rights and turn it against the very people who fought for it to become real.” In choosing the birthday of the slain civil rights leader to make his proclamation, Bush acknowledged the power of King’s legacy while at the same time abjuring it, casting remedies as “quota systems that use race” to parcel out jobs, education, and other advantages. “This is the perverse genius of making King the patron saint of the movement to destroy afÄrmative action. In these circles, King is portrayed as a color-blind loyalist at all cost. Perhaps the most tragic price paid for viewing King in this manner is that racial justice is trumped under the baleful banner of ‘true equality’.”

Race and terror
We can’t pretend that race is not a signiÄcant factor in social relations, asserts Dyson, that we are so colorblind nobody even notices race anymore. As evidence he offers an incident from his own life, which demonstrates in living color how being black dogs his movements through society.

Unsure about why he had been stopped by police late one night, he protested, “Sir, I’m a Baptist minister and a Ph.D. student at Princeton.”

“ Yeah, and I’m the damn president. Now get out of that car and walk this line.”

Alarmed by the hostility in the ofÄcer’s voice and alert to the brutality visited upon black men at the hands of police, he exited the car with unease. No violence came of the incident, but Dyson was shaken by the intimidation.

“ Unless you experience that every day,” he explains, “you don’t really understand it—that kind of terror, that kind of not-knowing, that kind of arbitrary violence. If you’ve never had that experience, you don’t understand the Åinching that comes when the voice is raised. . . . That’s why 9-11 was so interesting to me. I think for the Ärst time many white Americans knew what it meant to be black. . . . Your life can be going swimmingly. You’re doing all the right things: getting your education, working very hard, living by the American creed. At any moment, the terror of race can impose itself on your life with lethal intensity, and it can just crush you. That’s what terror does, and that’s the experience of many black people for most of our history in this country.” He can recite a list of names from recent newspaper accounts of black men who’ve been viciously maltreated by police, and he adds, as far as equal opportunity goes, the higher echelons of American society remain disproportionately white.

“ I don’t think the president is an evil man,” Dyson stresses. “I think he’s probably a nice guy with good intentions,” but many whites “have consciences that have been spared strong scrutiny by a willful innocence.” The only blindness that
pervades American society, he contends, is a racial naiveté, an incurious and complacent ignorance of how white-skin privilege is deeply inscribed in the American contract. “[A] crucial function of whiteness is to blind itself to its worst tendencies, its most lethal consequences,” he writes in Open Mike, one of his latest books. “[E]ven if the intent to harm does not exist, the malevolent consequences of white supremacy are just as real.”

Americans’ failure to grasp why extremists from the Arab world should hate us and want to harm us is a version of this culpable blindness, he observes. “We have been doing some nefarious, exploitative stuff globally, and we have not paid the price for it on our own soil. . . . It just shows how strong we were—we didn’t even feel it necessary that we should understand why they didn’t like us because we didn’t have to deal with the consequences. Now we have to deal with the consequences. It’s similar to when white society Änally felt the reprisal of black
people in riots.”

A Big Difference
Dyson’s self-identiÄcation as a “paid pest” compels him to keep hammering away at issues of race in writing, in speaking, in teaching, and in the scattering of soundbites like seeds of hope. A preacher-professor, he thirsts for justice, and he seeks to make it happen by opening eyes and clarifying, for anyone who will listen, the structures of oppression. “Whiteness invests in its own ignorance and denial,” he declares. “It protects our conscience from being torn and shredded by the sharp edges of knowledge.”

Dyson remains clear-eyed about the dark history of race in this country, but he holds pessimism about the future in abeyance. Racial beliefs and behaviors are learned and therefore reversible. A lifetime of socialization and learning is a fragile thing, he notes, and can be wiped away—for good or for ill—by a single experience. “ I reserve a measure of unknowing [about the future], in deference to the fact that unexpected things can ambush you and give you a sense of a joie de vivre.” It could be just a little thing, like the time he walked into a soul-food restaurant with his wife and started kidding with a group of white people seated at a big table strewn with food.

“ I’m so hungry,” he said to them. “I want some of that chicken ya’ll got right there.”

“ Oh, sure. You can have some,” they laughed.

He sat down with the group, and two white women from another table, with more food than they could eat, contributed their leftover catÄsh, chicken wings, ribs, and greens to the spur-of-the-moment festivities. The diners talked about how rare it was to feel that kind of uninhibited generosity from white Americans and about how sad it was that such a small thing should feel so sweet and should seem to make such a big difference. “It indicates both the depth of the depravity in race relations,” he muses, “but also the thin cords on which it hangs.”

“ Right now my pastorate is what I’m doing,” says Brother Mike. He calls it a “secularized ministry,” and he preaches in tongues, mixing the idioms of the church, the academy, and the street. “My church is the world,” he expounds with a sweep of his arm, as if to take in the entire realm Between God and Gangsta Rap, the title of an earlier book, “and I want to bring the gospel to as broad an audience as possible.”