There are four things I want to talk about, then we can freestyle and flow. First, I want to talk about your personal experiences in Chapel Hill, and about your expectations and your life “here.” Second, I want to address your experiences and perceptions of blacks in the Triangle (Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh, North Carolina). Third, I want to address the issue of blacks in the “New South.” And finally, I want to discuss your impact on the culture. Do you know how bad you are?
You’re very kind. Well, to begin, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a very fascinating place. It provides a world-class fellowship of scholars where people who are doing some of the most cutting-edge work in numerous disciplines are gathered. That, of course, is very exciting, even though one doesn’t always have direct access to them because of busy schedules. In my case, I travel so much that it has prevented me from connecting with people like Joel Williamson, a renowned historian of the South. It has prevented me from spending as much time as I would have liked with say, Catherine Lutz, who is a well-regarded professor in anthropology, or with Reginald Hildebrand, a respected scholar of African American religious history. At the same time, being at Chapel Hill has afforded me the opportunity to meet people like Gerald Horne, a historian who is director of the Black Cultural Center, and D. Soyini Madison, who is a renowned scholar in performance studies and my best friend. In that sense, it’s given me a tremendous opportunity to be able to meet some of the most interesting, intelligent, and beautiful people I’ve met anywhere.
In terms of the larger academic culture, it’s also afforded me the opportunity to test ideas that I’ve had in an academic community among a forceful group of scholars. I’ve had the chance to ask questions like: What is multiculturalism? How do we think about racial tolerance? What about the complexity of racial identity? How does race intersect with class? How does the classroom provide one an opportunity to test out, pedagogically, one’s theories about how race should operate in the world? Chapel Hill has provided an expert laboratory for me to test out the limits of my own understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and class and provided me a space where I can dramatize the extraordinary complexity of identities. One of the things I’m obsessed with in my own work is how people come to a sense of who and what they are. Howard Thurman, the great African American mystic, preacher, and theologian, said there are three basic questions in life: (1) who am I? (2) what do I want? and (3) how do I propose to get it?
One of the most intellectually fascinating and pleasurable things I have the chance to do here is connect philosophical and religious debates about identity to questions of culture, especially black popular culture, extending the work I’d already begun before landing at Chapel Hill. I’d already written a book about black cultural criticism. It’s one of the books that helped integrate cultural studies with racial studies, and that tried to forge connections between disparate academic and disciplinary boundaries. Coming here allowed me to forge those connections even more aggressively. I wrote a book on Malcolm X and a book of journalistic essays about black identity and culture, Between God and Gangsta Rap. And my latest book, Race Rules, is a public intellectual perspective on a range of issues relating to race, especially within African American culture. And I’m working on a new book about the generational divide between older and younger blacks. Chapel Hill has given me an incredible and inestimable intellectual framework and environment within which to explore these questions. And then the best colleagues I’ve ever had in the world are here, in the Department of Communication Studies. That department, from the very beginning, made it known that they are proud to have me here, that I’m a worthwhile member of the department, that they see me as a crucial element in the larger puzzle of our discipline’s identity, and that they want me to be a central player in the role of redefining communication studies for the next century. So I’ve had nothing but great times and great experiences.
What got you here, Michael? What do you think they really saw—obviously you’d established a reputation—but what do you think they saw, or thought they saw, that made them go after you?
I think they thought my intellectual energy was great, and that I was in pursuit of the kinds of questions and the sorts of themes that they had been preoccupied with, such as: What is the relationship between culture and commodification? What is the relationship between African American identity and mainstream American culture? How do we interpret cultural studies through the lens of black cultural priorities? How do we understand the universal themes of African American culture that are evoked by artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals in relationship to American identity? How do we bring a religious perspective from an African American culture to bear on crucial themes of American democracy? And so on. Those sort of issues that I was interested in really made them believe that here’s a guy who’s been, hopefully, on the cutting-edge, who’s trying to redefine a number of disciplinary pursuits.
Okay, we understand, those are the issues—the correlation between “you’re doing it, they want it,” but did they understand the impact, the dynamics of the “man” and your method of bringing that to the front?
Well, yeah, they certainly brought me in to give a lecture beforehand, and to take stock and measure of what I could do in a classroom situation. Then the chairman of the department came to Brown University to recruit me personally. They were sufficiently interested in bringing me to Chapel Hill that when the chairman was on some business in Providence, he took my wife and me to dinner and made a strong pitch. He talked about what they could offer, talked about what he envisioned for me. So from the very beginning, they were strategic in their assessment of my capacity to bring a certain kind of visibility, a certain kind of prominence, but also a real cutting-edge intellectual fervor to the process of investigating questions they were concerned about. So they understood the intellectual wherewithal I could bring, but they also understood my personal energy, and what they hoped would be a contagious element in my own pedagogical style that would seduce my students into exploring some of the same kinds of questions I do. I hope some of that happened.
I was going to ask that . . . did it?
I hope so. I guess I’m a decent teacher . . .
Oh, come on, Michael . . .
Well, [laughing] I’ve had some strong supporters and, as we well know, some naysayers.
Yes, I want to talk about that.
We’ll definitely get to that! [Laughs] There’s no question that my coming here broadened my perspective, gave me a base from which to think about a certain set of issues and themes that I’ve been concerned about from a different disciplinary base. When I was at Brown, I was in African American studies and American studies, so I was linked to a different disciplinary foundation than communication studies. I don’t have a degree in communication studies—I don’t have a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate—but I had some overlapping interests, and some of the theoretical questions I was pursuing were deeply connected to the fabric of communication studies’ self-identity. Because of the elective affinities, if you will, that my work and the communication studies department’s work had, I was able to fuse with their interests and meld with their ambitions. I do cultural studies and, along with another hire of a very prominent academician, Lawrence Grossberg, I think overnight, UNC began to compete on a national level for some of the best and brightest students within cultural studies, and we began to forge a reputation for having some of the most powerful, insightful, cutting-edge intellectual work. With people like Grossberg and Soyini Madison, who does incredible work with performance studies, especially around the performance of black women’s literature, and in theorizing the intersections of gender, race, class, and notions of the body within both African American culture and in mainstream society, we had a powerful contingent of scholars. And we had the gifted Della Pollack, who does some of the same thing as Madison, only in terms of women’s narratives, and in probing the relationship between cultural studies and notions of birth, for instance. And we had the legendary Beverly Long, who’s done tremendous work in the performance of literature. There’s a wide range of scholars who are now collected at UNC that have really redefined their own bailiwick in regard to cultural studies. So there’s no question that they felt that I would bring energy, that I would bring enthusiasm, that I would bring national visibility . . .
And flavor!
Yeah, I hope so. Drop a little science, add a little flavor, and kick a little something from the homeboys. I don’t think they were disappointed in that. I try to be conscientious. My father told me if you’re going to do a job, do it right or don’t do it at all. So I brought enthusiasm, energy, hopefully intelligence, and I hope I had some impact upon my students and colleagues. My students seem to have felt that I did. My colleagues were extraordinarily supportive. Let me say this: Not only were they supportive in terms of my intellectual work here at the university, but they also gave me the kind of release from the immediate responsibilities of the academic environment to provide me greater latitude in going out into the world. Most departments don’t do that. When they have so-called superstars, a lot of people get resentful, mad, envious, jealous, or just outright ornery. This department has been nothing but exemplary. They have supported my work, and these are mostly white scholars. They have seen the vision, and they have seen that it’s necessary for me to be out there.
So they recognized and felt your impact?
I think some of them have. I think many of them say, “You’ve brought a different perspective here, you forced us to contend with some issues or invited us to explore more deeply, issues that we’d already been concerned about.” But we have vigorous debates in faculty meetings around issues of difference, around issues of marginality, around issues of race, and around issues of gender. We have tremendous debates within our department about the crucial questions of redefining American culture, multiculturalism, racial diversity, racial tolerance, gender difference, sexuality, gay and lesbian identity, and so on. Those debates are part and parcel of what we do as a community of scholars interested in not only bringing enlightenment intellectually but in forging solidarity with other figures who’ve been marginalized in the world. That’s what I like about this department. There’s a very passionate commitment to social justice while maintaining the highest levels of intellectual investigation. Head and heart are joined in an extraordinary balance. It doesn’t mean it’s a perfect place, or that we can’t stand room for improvement because we certainly can.
I think many of our students are well served by that process, and by scholars who are not only interested in pursuing questions of the head but are deeply interested and invested in trying to figure out what human beings do in the real world. How do we translate interesting discourses about difference, about marginality, about “otherness,” or theories about, as Foucault says, “the insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” into concrete action? How do you bring that to bear on what folk who are gay and lesbian do when they need to be supported by their partners who are being denied their claims for insurance? How do we deal with the fact that African American people don’t necessarily have to fit into a narrow vision of blackness? What does that mean in the face of the necessity for some form of social solidarity when white hostility is visited upon black communities? These are very difficult questions, and I think we’ve made a good attempt at answering them.
And that leads to me talking about my role as a public intellectual at Chapel Hill, which has been the basis for my further emergence as a public figure able to appear on Oprah, Charlie Rose, Nightline, Good Morning America, Today, to write for the Washington Post, the New York Times, to be quoted in USA Today, and to appear on National Public Radio. This has been a secure basis for me to expand my own repertoire of public interventions on behalf of the most sacred principles of, and the highest devotion to, intellectual life. Chapel Hill has afforded me an extraordinary opportunity to be able to live a life that many scholars only dream about and don’t have the luxury or leisure to pursue. So I know I’m a very fortunate person, to be able to make an impact, hopefully not simply on one’s own immediate environment but on the larger national environment. That takes a group of scholars who understand that certain people are assigned certain roles. I have enormous respect for my colleagues who take care of the business of the university’s department. That’s no less important, no less meaningful, no less significant, than the kind of work I do. It’s different, but it’s no less important. I’m appreciative of their ability to see that I can do both. I can pay attention to scrutinizing theoretical concepts with rigorous language and ideas, and on the other hand, I can translate some of that stuff about critical race theory, for instance, on Charlie Rose, where Jeffrey Rosen from the New Republic is making provocative statements about subjects about which I’m concerned. It has, however, created some controversy outside of my department. There are some other scholars at Chapel Hill who think I’m overpaid, overtalking, and overheated. I think they’re welcome to their opinion, but I think the role of an intellectual, especially a public intellectual, is to bring the most serious, rigorous talents one has to bear on issues of importance to people beyond the academy. We shouldn’t just be an ostrich sticking our head into the collective sand of our academic enterprise without paying attention to what the rest of the world is doing, and without reflecting on how what we do affects the larger world. I’m very appreciative of that role, and I’ll try to exercise it with some consciousness and some sense of responsibility, not only to my immediate community but also to the larger community that I feel myself to be a vital part of.
Let’s move into some of that “there’s a fly in the ointment” . . . last December. You gave a commencement address at the University of North Carolina’s fall graduation, and you were criticized harshly in the local media and throughout the community for what some felt was your inappropriate language and your criticism of Michael Jordan. How do you view that speech now?
That speech . . . let me tell you the truth. There’s no way in the world I anticipated that there would be that much of a firestorm of controversy. I’m not stupid. I knew as I was writing that speech that there would be some eyebrows raised, but quite frankly, I thought most of the eyebrows would be raised over my comment about Michael Jordan. The thing is, I did quote the “f-word” in the speech and, on second thought, I might not have done that because my point was not to offend people’s sensibilities around proprietary language, the most effective language one can deploy to make one’s point. I’m a communicator and hopefully, somewhere, I’ve been called an effective communicator. So I knew what to say and what not to say. I don’t mind being provocative, but I don’t want to shut people’s minds down to the point that they don’t hear what I’m saying. But, on the other hand, I have to be honest: I only said one word, the f-word, it’s not a word people haven’t heard before and the response to it was way out of proportion to the offense that it imposed. So I want to take responsibility by saying, yes if I had it to do over again, knowing that this is not only the Bible belt, but the very buckle of the Bible belt, and I’m a Baptist preacher, I understand it’s a difficult sell. On the other hand, these are the same people that go to see a Bruce Willis movie with the word being tossed around five and six times. Of course, I know there’s a difference between a film and a commencement service, so let me not be disingenuous.
At the same time, I didn’t think my speech merited the kind of vicious, vehement calumny that was heaped on me, from both the press and people who were pissed off and just mad. I think the real insult to many people, the real offense, was not the one f-word, which they might have forgiven. It was the fact that I was criticizing one of their demigods, Michael Jordan, an athletic genius on the court, an anesthetized, narcotized safe Negro off the court. Jordan is a black man who has incredible worth, value, and merit as long as he’s a highly paid Negro who keeps his mouth shut, his tongue wagging, and his mouth open only when he’s moving toward a basketball goal. Not when he’s moving toward the goal of racial reflection. Not when he’s pressing toward the goal of making sure that the races confront one another across the chasm of color. Not when he’s pressing toward the goal of forging black solidarity among despised black peoples. He is of little support to the political goals of African American people, and I think that’s a tragedy. Italian Americans support one another, many Polish Americans support one another, and many Jewish brothers and sisters support one another, so why can’t African American people support one another? There’s an enormous stigma attached to black solidarity. And I think that’s one of the most vicious effects of white supremacy, discouraging black people from openly, unapologetically embracing one another.
Let me ask about that. Do you think the reaction you got was because it was said here in North Carolina on, as you said, the buckle of the Bible belt? Or could you have made that comment and gotten the same reaction in and among many black neighborhoods? As a culture, are we able to critically think about somebody like Michael Jordan?
No. There’s no question about it, that’s a very good point. First, the black folk who are here are part of the South, so we can’t forget they are part of the buckle too. Most belts I know are black, so we got a black Bible belt going on here: the black folk have deeply conservative religious and moral values. And this is what a lot of people miss on the outside of our culture, that black folk are deeply conservative themselves. So when the Newt Gingrichs and Bill Bennetts are jumping on black folk for the loss of morals and values, they don’t know the black folk we know. Blacks have profoundly conservative cultural values, even if we are politically progressive. That’s one of the interesting paradoxes of black culture. We possess a Ten Commandments religion wedded to sometimes progressive, prophetic, even rebellious inclinations, politically speaking. There’s little question that the speech could have been given in several other places, among certain African American communities, and they would have been equally opposed to my ideas, or offended by them, because we don’t often have the ability to be critical of black figures who have “made it.” We think somehow we have to make them immune to criticism, and we end up being allergic to criticizing them or holding them responsible for their behavior.
I got many letters and calls after my speech from blacks who thought that I’d set the race back. But then I got a lot of supportive calls from black people who said, “Right on, it’s about time somebody called this man into question and was public about it.” So I think that even though there would have been similarities of response in many conservative African American communities, there wouldn’t have been the kind of vehement outrage, and unvarnished bigotry, that I glimpsed in the many calls and letters from whites, and, quite frankly, from the response of the predominantly white press. For instance, there was a cartoon that appeared in the Durham Herald, where they caricatured me in a bathroom pulling toilet paper down with expletives deleted scratched on the wall, and beneath are inscribed the words, “Professor Dyson is preparing his next commencement speech.” I have a sense of humor that is more ribald and probably more rowdy than most people’s. But we have to interpret these things in terms of their symbolic effect in the public space, and the symbolic effect of that cartoon was a rather crude, and I believe, a racist one. If they were trying to point to some problem they had with my speech, there were many ways to do that, as opposed to, I think, a quite coded attack upon me as a highly intelligent, articulate black man who’s very offense was the ability to speak the king’s English to the queen’s taste better than they were—at least, many who were gathered in the audience—and then defend black English practices among African American people, including some of the linguistic practices among the so-called lowest blacks who populate hip-hop culture, and then rise back to quoting respected figures from their own culture.
Yes, you did!
Part of that has to do with the ability to be a linguistic acrobat, to move among many communities of language, speech, discourse, and orality, and to bring all of that stuff together in a package that says, “I am an unadulterated black man, ain’t got no shame about it, I’m gon’ represent the African American interests while being critical of them. I’m going to speak to the larger, universal themes of black American culture while being critical of the ways that we fail to live up to our obligation to defend our own people—AND—I’m going to hit themes that the larger American culture can resonate with, because black folk are not orangutans living outside the arch of human experience. We are at the center of defining America.” My point is, I refuse to give up on America precisely because I’m able to be critical of the nation. I think what was missed by many is that I spent most of that commencement speech talking about white youth culture when I talked about popular culture. I talked about Alanis Morissette. I talked about Kurt Cobain. I talked about Jenny McCarthy, because I knew my audience. At the same time, I wanted to talk about how black popular culture had redefined American pop culture, and as a result of that, many white kids see their lives through the lens of Snoop Doggy Dogg or Biggie Smalls or Tupac Shakur. Their crossover effect is not gained by them surrendering the integrity of their African American identities, but by pressing them even more sharply in the faces of the mainstream American culture and press.
The real offense of my speech may be that a lot of the mostly white folk who gathered didn’t understand what I was saying. Some of the words were foreign to them. They saw that I was highly articulate and intelligent and, yes, willing to assail the fabled pieties of white bigotry, and to name it for what it is. But I also challenged them to listen to their own children. I defended so-called poor white trash. I defended so-called underclass niggas. I defended so-called Generation X. I defended the so-called lost generation. And I challenged all of those people who were graduating from college with degrees—whose mothers and fathers, black, white, or other, were thought by some of them to be of no account because they didn’t have college degrees—with a simple message: Don’t forget your parents, remember them. And I gently criticized an apolitical figure like Michael Jordan, who makes millions of dollars reproducing and commodifying black juvenile interest in sport, television, and clothing apparel (the same youth, by the way, spend enormous sums of capital on him and thus help support his lifestyle), and yet he doesn’t have the inclination to defend them by at least giving money to make sure that future scholars, future ballplayers, future athletes, future businesspeople, will be able to be supported through his own endeavors. And I think I would make that speech even more sharply today than I made it in December. Had I foreseen the firestorm of controversy that came, I wouldn’t have been as meek and mild in my criticism. I would have been even sharper.
You would have turned up the volume?
I would have turned that volume way up to ten and said: Let’s go for what we know.
I know this is far-fetched, but any response from him or anyone in his camp?
No direct response from Mr. Jordan. I think the huge controversy was enough of a chastisement of me in that sense. Here’s my point: I don’t have a problem with Michael Jordan giving money to the School of Social Work, but the implication was that if he had given the money to the Black Cultural Center, it would have been for only one group. But since he gave money to the School of Social Work, it’s for everybody. Last time I checked, the School of Social Work ain’t the School of Education, or the Law School, or the School of Arts and Sciences, or the division of Social Sciences, and on and on. Why is it that we believe if we give money to what we consider to be a white institution, or an academic discipline, that it’s for everyone, it’s universal, and when we give it to African American people it’s limited? That is an insult to African American people who have been some of the most broad-minded, universally committed people in this country. We have been among the most patriotic, the most deeply dedicated citizens of this country, and yet there remains a stigma to giving to, supporting, and loving black folk. And some of those who spread the stigma most painfully are other blacks. I don’t think Michael Jordan bears responsibility himself; we blacks bear responsibility for believing and allowing the notion to go forth that black interests are narrow and ghettoized, while other people’s ethnic and racial interests are automatically invisible, and therefore, universal.
I wonder if, speaking of the donation from Jordan, this was even from him. Everything he does is weighed, talked about, and strategized. I wonder if he was involved in the decision making?
Yeah, I hear you. But you must remember this: Michael Jordan’s mother was on the Black Cultural Center’s board, raising money for the completion of the center’s new building. So the fact that the money did not go to the Black Cultural Center cannot really be charged to anybody but Mr. Jordan or his mother. At that level, I’d have to say he knew what time it was. Not only that, we must recall Jordan’s response when he was asked, during the first Harvey Gantt campaign for the U.S. Senate, to contribute money to Mr. Gantt, a former Charlotte mayor, respected architect, and highly regarded member of the black community. Not wanting to offend the Republican candidate, the widely acknowledged racist Jesse Helms, or his supporters, Jordan retorted with the most offensive, self-serving, community-disregarding, and repulsive political insularity, “Well, Republicans buy gym shoes, too.” So I think we have to hold Mr. Jordan accountable for the vicious repercussions of not only his apolitical vision but also his deeply dehistoricized understanding of American culture that plays to the worst instincts of white bigotry and white supremacy. I don’t think we can let Mr. Jordan off the hook there. Here’s a man who’s too shrewd, too informed, too determined to control where his money goes, to be let off the hook when it comes to where that money went. He made the statement himself that it would be for everybody if it went to the School of Social Work and not, by implication, if it went to the Black Cultural Center. No, no, I can’t let Mr. Jordan off the hook on that. Besides, you are responsible for the people you have around you. When we look at Mr. Jordan’s enterprise, we notice that most of his business partners are white, the people who take care of his finances are white, the people who do major business with Mr. Jordan are white. To be sure, we should all be democratic and multicultural in our business dealings, which means we should interact with as many different races and genders as possible in our affairs. But, again, there is a huge stigma on hiring talented black folk, especially among well-placed, well-heeled black folk. So, for Mr. Jordan, I think it’s legitimate to ask: where are the black people? Show me the Negroes. Show me the black folk!
The Jerry McGuire thing, huh?
Yes. Show me the brothers! We don’t have to ask Joe Montana: Please do some business with some white folks. We don’t have to tell Brett Favre: Please do some business with some white folks. We don’t have to tell Larry Bird, please at least have some white folks involved in your enterprises. These folk, without punitive consequence, without compunction, mostly transact business with folk who look like them. It’s not beyond the pale of reason to expect that highly visible figures like me, public intellectuals like me or bell hooks or Skip Gates or whoever, or public figures who are athletes like Mr. Jordan, who is the most famous black person presently on the globe, to love your own people, to support them. I don’t think they should by any means adopt an uncritical allegiance to all things black. I don’t mean signing off with a blank check on everything that African American people do. I’m talking about having selective solidarity with black folk to give the impression, and more than the impression, to give rise to the truth, that black people are equally worthy as others of investment, equally worthy as others of entrepreneurial exploration, and equally worthy as others of being the bearers of the economic future and destiny of this country. We must trust black money to black people by circulating black dollars in black communities. I’m not a narrow, rigid nationalist when it comes to economics or culture.
To the contrary, I believe in a multicultural, deeply complex racial reality, but I don’t believe in that at the expense of black folk. I believe Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, ten days before he died, said that if black people are not careful, we’re going to integrate ourselves out of power. He said, therefore, we should practice “temporary segregation.” He suggested that we should keep some institutions black in order to maintain enough power to generate the requisite capital to support and fund our own institutions and community interests. I think Michael Jordan has lost a sense of what Muhammad Ali had, a sense of what Jim Brown, at his best had, a sense of what Hank Aaron had, a sense of what Wilma Rudolph had, a sense of what Althea Gibson had: a strong, unashamed commitment to black people. These figures believed that what you did as an individual athlete had racial ramifications. They showed a commitment to uplifting African American interests while fusing these interests to American goals. They believed that their performance as athletes could somehow broker acceptance for a wide range of black people outside of your particular sport. When Joe Louis was beating up on Max Schmeling, he was not only striking a blow for democracy and freedom from Nazism, but he was making a substitute argument for the game of American democracy to be played by one set of rules for all races.
Mr. Jordan lacks any sense of historical perspective about the struggles that made it possible for him to enjoy his incredible wealth and enormous opportunities. I don’t think, collectively speaking, we can afford to overlook his shortcomings, since they have such far reach in that they discourage others—even whites who might be influenced by his example—to speak up or reach out. I don’t think we should give up; we should love him, we should celebrate his genius, and we should hold him accountable for what he fails to grasp, because what he possesses by way of cultural and racial opportunity is not something he generated by himself. A whole lot of black folk paid the price, gave up their lives, shed blood, even sacrificed personal advancement and education, so that people like him—and me—could rise to the top. What he has to remember is that as he rose to the top, he stepped on some black folks’ backs. Don’t now step on their interests and in their faces or on their necks to maintain your connection to white folk. Stop loving white folk more than you love your own people. I’m not saying hate white folk, I’m saying love black folk as much as you love white folk and show the love you got for us by doing what you do to white folk: investing in their community and playing the tune to what they call. That’s what I’m saying . . . Umm-hmmm!
All right, so that’s all part of what came out of that speech. Now, your reaction to the criticism of that speech was, I believe, “I did what I did and I’m not responding to it, I’m not apologizing for it. I did what I did.” But in the meantime, the chancellor or some others tried to make excuses. Your position was “no, don’t apologize for me. I said what I said!”
Yes! That’s exactly right.
So how did that whole thing resolve itself? Did it die a natural death?
Yes, though I still have gotten calls recently from folk who must have been out of the country and who are having delayed responses. I think the chancellor was an extraordinary coward. I think he’s a reprehensible representative of the university. He subverts the highest principles of academic integrity by abdicating his role as an objective exponent of the freedom of thought that should characterize any university.
His name?
Michael Hooker. Chancellor Hooker has failed to live up to his responsibility to defend the principles of free speech in an academic environment where the pursuit, by the best and the brightest, of the ideas that have animated our culture, that have challenged our culture, should be protected. I think all this debate about political correctness usually is merely a code word for attacking black folk or Latinos or Native Americans or Asian Americans or women. But we see the fundamental funkiness of political correctness when so-called dominant American society fails to criticize its own practices. Dominant society fails to defend the principles of free speech by preventing dissident, politically incorrect black speech from being equally protected. Not only procedurally, that is by the logic of democracy, but substantively, that is by saying, “listen, I may disagree with this brother, but I defend his right to say it.” And I think the chancellor, both procedurally and substantively, failed to live up to his obligation to protect free speech as a hallmark of the modern university.
On a personal level, here’s a guy who got a lot of press when he came to Chapel Hill for being an exponent of black interests. Like very many white liberals, he’s unable to come to grips with the limitations of what is in truth a neoliberal ideology, which, as Martin Luther King Jr., used to say, is more problematic to black interests than outright Ku Kluxism. At least with the KKK you know where you stand. Many white liberals shift ground so quickly, and they redefine their interests so immediately, that one is never sure where, ultimately, they come down. What’s the bottom line for them?
I’m not gainsaying the effectiveness of white liberalism. I’m saying that some white liberals surrender their moral responsibility in deference to political opportunism. Because they are in a halfway house of racial liberation, they’re neither committed to the most powerful project of black liberation, which demands at times that they commit racial suicide, nor inclined to cast their fate with the outright bigots. So they end up in a mediating position preventing the flourishing of African American interests precisely because they’re on the inside bringing the house down like Samson on the heads of African American people.
So now we’re saying “bye-bye”?
I’m taking a year’s leave of absence. I was invited to go to Columbia University way before this happened, I’m proud to say, because of the character and nature of my work. It wasn’t anything political, insofar as my viewpoints or ideology are concerned. It was based on my work and the impact my work had on a national community of scholars and others outside the academy who are concerned about issues of African American culture, especially those involving race, gender, sexuality, and class. As a result of that, I was invited to spend a year at Columbia University to help strengthen the Institute of African American Research. I will be joining scholars like Manning Marable, Mary Patillo, Gina Dent, Lee Baker, and other supremely gifted scholars. Marable will be leading the charge for a model of black studies that, in one sense, takes the best of the Harvard model—where you gather strong, intelligent people together to think about critical issues— joined to the best of the Temple model—where you take seriously the interests of everyday people and join them to the scholarly pursuits of the best and the brightest. We want to embrace the best of those traditions while avoiding their worst elements, and come up with something that’s equally powerful and yet, we want to navigate a different path.
Let’s talk about blacks in North Carolina. As I mentioned, I’m writing about blacks in Chapel Hill. As I speak with people, a couple of themes keep cropping up. The whole issue of integration, that it was bad for us, as well as the notion of blacks still having a plantation mentality, that it’s very much a part of our present culture. That we haven’t learned how to get on with the business of being black in America. I found the notion of us having those perspectives very interesting.
That’s very powerful and self-critical, which is wonderful because the best of these black southern traditions have always negotiated between explicit articulation of rage against the system, and white supremacy, and a more moderating political influence geared to black survival. The logic of black moderation is that you’ve got to survive long enough to rebel; if you’re dead, you can’t rebel. Still, I think there’s a resistance to the more disabling features of moderate belief that show up in the disdain among many blacks for plantation Negro syndrome, PNS if you will, a peculiar affliction among black folk who are unduly enamored of white culture. They are deferential to white culture and afraid to speak up for African American interests in fear of offending their patrons. Such behavior suggests that these blacks will always be on a plantation, whether a literal or a metaphoric one. It’s a kind of psychic plantation from which they can never quite evict themselves, and to which they can never stop paying rent or homage. We are constantly paying the wages of a psychic captivity to white culture, and that’s a situation perpetuated by plantation Negro syndrome. Malcolm X used to say there were house niggers and field niggers, even though I think he was sometimes rather narrow and rigid in his interpretation. But I think we understand that he was fundamentally getting at a power point: the house niggers were those who were invested in oppressive white culture, helping the house of white exploitation remain stable and secure and beyond social challenge, especially from black quarters. When a fire came along, so to speak, they said, “Oh, let’s help massa put the fire out with water.” Whereas Malcolm said, the field niggers were the ones who, when the fire came along, were trying to blow with the wind to make sure that house burned down. Blow that damn thing down! Burn it down. You know the chant: “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire/ We don’t need no water, let the *!*! burn.”
We can’t be rigid in the interpretation of black culture through such symbolism because some house Negroes were informing field Negroes about what the master was doing, telling the field niggers what time it was and when they should strike and when they should move. At the same time, there’s little doubt there’s some wisdom contained in these typologies, in these blunt archetypes of black behavior. I think plantation Negro syndrome symbolizes the truth that some black folk are still afraid of white folk, still afraid of offending white folk by telling the truth about race, about identity, about culture, about politics, and about history. There are many white folk who just want black folk to tell them the truth, but then there are many more who don’t want to hear the truth. Many blacks know this and are afraid to speak out. They figure the best way to forge relations with white brothers and sisters is to resort to clichés such as “go along to get along,” and “fit in where you get in.” Many blacks believe that from such a vantage point, inside the graces and gazes of white culture, they will be able to rework the structure of society, or at least bend it to their advantage. There’s some wisdom to preserving your survival long enough to subvert negative influences from the inside, to get educated enough, to look respectable enough, to be able to change things from within the dominant culture. But the problem is that many African Americans who end up getting inside resort to bleaching themselves in an ocean of white oblivion to black culture. They induct themselves into the United States of Amnesia and they forget black interests; they divert the psychic and social funds that should be underwriting black liberation to a more palatable, ameliorative relationship with oppressive, hegemonic culture. I think that’s deeply destructive. I’m not speaking here of genuinely embracing whites and others as friends, allies, colleagues, and costrugglers with blacks around issues of racial justice and radical democracy. I’m speaking of an unprincipled capitulation to oppressive white culture that ends up destroying the psychic and moral drive among blacks for genuine freedom and true equality.
On the other hand, I think there’s some legitimacy to the criticism that aspects and modes of integration have been bad for blacks. Think about our schools. If legally mandated integrated schools are not being sufficiently supported, many well-to-do whites (and some blacks) can bail out of the public schools into which blacks have been integrated to protect their own educational and economic interests. Such public institutions are left to fight on their own, with critically overstrapped budgets. As a result, black interests suffer because many white Americans have the leisure to take their money elsewhere and to support their own schools or institutions where very few minorities, especially African Americans and Latinos, are able to secure entree. I’m sympathetic to some arguments against integration which hold that efforts to desegregate our society have failed to deliver the promise of African American liberation. The only problem is there are even greater failures of certain black nationalist ideas and institutions that do not deliver on their word and promise. Ethnitopia, or the utopic vision of black ethnicity, has been equally problematic in delivering on the goods. So we’ve got to find a way to circulate and pool resources among African American people that embraces the important dimensions of integration while also taking a measured account of the need for black institutions to regulate and govern themselves.
As I listen to you, Michael, much of what you’re saying is applicable nationally. So, while I’ve been thinking of “PNS” as a southern thing, it’s very broad.
Oh, the plantation ain’t got no geographical location. The plantation is a state of mind. You ain’t living on Georgia soil, the Georgia soil is living in your mind. The plantation is a traveling archetype of black deference to white supremacy, of the deference of black rationality to white irrationality. A major problem with this plantation Negro syndrome is that it makes black folk, whether they are dealing with overt or subtle forms of racial domination in the North or South, East or West, ignore the virtue and vitality of black life while uncritically embracing the ideal—and the ideals of— white life. And those black folk who bitterly oppose any acknowledgment of the historic legacy of white supremacy, or the need of blacks to actively confront white hostility or indifference to black self-determination, are, I believe, deeply ensconced in plantation Negro syndrome. I think we’ve got to be quite explicitly critical of such mind-sets and behaviors. It’s not located simply in the South, but all over this country.
Okay, but is there something that you’ve become aware of, or more in tune with, that is more particularly southern with black folks?
Well, yes. Speaking in the most general terms, and there is always a risk in doing so, there is a powerful moral bearing of black southerners that is quite remarkable. There’s a sense of dealing with the civil rituals of southern culture among black southerners that their northern counterparts are hostile to, indifferent to, or rather impatient to master or learn. Many of the rites of civility in the South are transracial: black and white southerners both respect and revere them, while many other southerners of both races rebel against them. But there is little question that, in many respects, black and white southern culture has been taken from the same fabric. To shift metaphors, they’ve been created out of the same cauldron, formed in the same crucible, even though it often brimmed with racial conflict. That explains how black and white southerners can have similar points of cultural reference—they both eat black-eyed peas and collard greens, and cornbread, too—but at times hold radically different viewpoints about what it will take to improve race relations. That’s also why Martin Luther King Jr. was able to appeal to a common moral worldview in the South. King effectively appealed to the southern “white conscience” because he had been reared in the same psychic space, with its attendant social rituals, where the mores and folkways of southern culture were faithfully observed. In other words, besides the obvious conflicts, there’d always been a fusion of certain elements of black and white southern cultures that gave real heft and resonance to the ethical claims of the civil rights movement in white southern society.
At some level, the civil rights movement appealed to many enlightened whites—or enlightened them in the first place—convincing them that they could overcome their negative debts to a racist world of white supremacy and become more deeply attuned to the common humanity of the black people with whom they shared culture. In some instances, they shared kith and kin, and even when it wasn’t a matter of formal kinship, they shared moral and psychological ties. Ironically enough, the world that made even provisional transracial solidarity possible was also the source of its undoing. I think pockets of black southern culture breed an unprincipled deference to white belief and culture. That’s why many black folk were enormously defensive of the southern way of doing things, which often meant resisting outright black freedom struggles. Many blacks felt a bond to white southerners that transcended race, sharing in the circumstance of their birth an almost genetic predisposition to defend their mythologized terrain from ideological interlopers—including liberal white students and black militants from the North—or political traitors, such as King and a host of other black southern dissidents. They were almost like the Mob, these white and black southerners, who, despite internal fissures and fights, plaintively proclaimed the virtues of “this thing of ours.”
Many southern black folk opposed Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement because they got along with their white folk: “We are getting along here,” they seemed to say, “so don’t come messing things up.” That explains the incredible gentility and civility that prevails here, and it may shed light on the speed and style of black response to white supremacy and hence the suspicious function of black dissidents within a southern worldview. Southern black resistance is often masked, ritualized, and performed at a different pace than varieties of northern black rebellion. My commencement speech was probably an offense to many southerners, black and white, because I didn’t observe the requisite form of civilized behavior and language that signified, that inferred, that implied. The long implication is the strong suit of southern rhetoric. In my commencement address, I didn’t kowtow to ritualized speech and signifying rhetorical practice. I’ve been preaching in southern culture for nearly twenty years, and I’ve pastored three churches in the South, so perhaps I should have known better.
A sidebar to that is the recent tour of the Henrietta Marie, the slave ship that was recovered and restored by black divers. There was an outcry by blacks who said, “this is part of the past, leave it there,” and there were those who broke out in tears, terribly moved, feeling compelled to deal with it, saying “it’s part of my history.” Any words on that?
Well, I think denying the Henrietta Marie’s importance in black life is a powerful metaphor for the tragic amnesia that clogs the arteries of blacks inAmerican culture. It’s lamentable that black people don’t realize that the past is so crucial to our present and our future. We need to know everything about the past that we can learn. The Henrietta Marie is one of the crucial artifacts of our black past that we need to investigate in order to understand the magnitude of the tragedy we confronted in slavery. Many black folk believe that because they’re black, they will know as a measure of their birthright black history, life, and culture. But that belief is simply not true and symbolizes, in many ways, an internalized form of white supremacy that discourages blacks from believing their history is worthy of study, or that its rigors are sufficiently established as to demand critical scrutiny. One cannot by means of osmosis absorb from black environments the collective memory of the race, since it is not passed on through the membranes, or through the nucleus or mitochondria of cells of racial experience. One must critically interrogate the contexts and substance of black history through serious study.
And even as we acknowledge the need for deliberate, dangerous memory—the sort of racial knowledge that contradicts the distorting fantasies and twisted memories of dominant society—such memory should rest on a sustained engagement with the facts at hand, even if one bitterly debates “the facts” and whose interpretation of those facts is most persuasive. The Henrietta Marie is potentially a very fertile occasion in the interpretation of black cultural memory and history. We should greet the opportunity to excavate our past with great enthusiasm. Our Jewish brothers and sisters won’t be caught saying, “The Holocaust is part of the past; we’ve got to forget it.” No, they say, “Never again! We will never forget.” They link memory to survival—as do Mary Frances Berry and John Blassingame in the title of their wonderful survey of African American history, Long Memory. We must insist that historical investigation and cultural remembrance are critical agents of witness against the oppressive amnesia of dominant society, which would just as easily forget the painful passages of black struggle and the thrilling triumphs of black history.
But collective memory is also a weapon against self-hatred, a bitter fruit that grows on the vine of racial ignorance and amnesia. We must acknowledge, and fight against, the stigma associated with collective black memory, since black folk are creatively punished in dominant culture for recalling the past as a predicate for contemporary resistance. One of the reasons that quarters of dominant society disparage black collective memory is the fight over apologies and material resources. Thus many whites resent the demand for an apology, tendered, symbolically speaking, by American society for the pain of the black past and present. But the demand for white apology without a radical adjustment in the distribution of social goods like education, employment and economic support for our neediest members is rather hollow. Of course, someone who is severely harmed would like to hear an apology from the perpetrator, accompanied by efforts to reconstitute relations and redress the wrong inflicted. That’s a crucial plank in any conception of restorative justice. But if that’s a sticking point, I say skip the apologies and get down to justice.
Of course, there have been apologies, such as the one offered by the Southern Baptist Convention for its role in theologically and morally defending slavery. At this rate, we’ll get an apology for segregation well into the next century, an apology for Jim Crow a century after that, and maybe by A.D. 4000, we’ll get an apology for racist practices of our own day! I say address the material misery that resulted from slavery by restructuring social relations and redistributing financial assets. Still, black collective memory is crucial to this process. Without vigilance on the part of the black elite and grassroots, including intellectuals, politicians, lawyers, community activists, artists, and ordinary citizens, the dangerous memories of black struggle will be lost. If black folk are reluctant to wage this battle, shame on us. The stigma attached to what may be termed memory warfare must be lessened by our relentless pursuit of truth, justice, and honest history. Because so many blacks are concerned with how our efforts appear to the mainstream, we fail to devote the energy and attention we should to our own freedom. We are often fearful of engaging in memory warfare because we know it outrages the white society to which too many of us pay unwarranted homage and unearned deference. When black folk stop obsessing about what our white brothers and sisters think—and start concentrating on what is just and righteous—we will not only love ourselves better, but we may discover that we’ve got far more allies among other races than we ever imagined.
Interview by Lana Williams
Durham, North Carolina, 1997