As any student of professor Michael Eric Dyson’s will tell you, it’s not easy taking notes in his class. A Visiting Distinguished Professor at Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies, Dyson talks a mile a minute and drops more pearls of wisdom than a school of oysters racing to get their Ph.D. In the course of an hour-long interview at his Union Square hotel before a recent appearance at Modern Times Bookstore, Dyson discussed themes central to his latest book, Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line.
Gently rocking in his chair like a kabbalic mystic, stroking his thick goatee in the professorial tradition, Dyson held forth on the responsibility of African American athletes to be political, comedian Chris Rock’s latest challenges to a reluctantly self-critical black community, the commercial viability of intellectual rap, the Million Man March, and his own legacy as a public intellectual. An ordained Baptist minister, theologian, music critic, and New York Times opinion page regular, Michael Eric Dyson is an academic who, as fellow scholars have noted, is equally comfortable discussing the theories of Martin Heidegger or trends in hip-hop music.
He peppers his disquisitions with convincing renditions of stand-up routines and gangsta rap samples, and ought to be seen in person to be fully appreciated, but if grad school is not in your cards, this interview will hopefully suffice.
Let’s start with your book, Race Rules, and the chapter that I had the most fun with, on the black public intellectuals. In it you take some risks and air some dirty laundry, though I thought that the fake awards you make up for yourself and other public scholars were pretty funny . . .
I’m glad you thought they were funny because I meant the awards to be tongue-in-cheek. That chapter is my attempt to come to grips with the burgeoning fame and celebrity of a group of intellectuals that had up until now been largely denied broad public recognition. That’s both amazing and lamentable, especially when you consider that in the past the group has included figures like Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver Cox, C. L. R. James, Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, E. Franklin Frazier, and the like. These intellectuals made their living combating black oppression with wit and word, bringing their academic expertise to bear on social problems to enhance the public good. My essay on black intellectuals was an attempt to say, “Look, we’ve had enormous progress in terms of public recognition of black intellectuals and scholars, but let’s turn the powerful criticism that we train on a range of issues on ourselves. Let’s not uncritically celebrate and valorize this process of celebrity-making within the academy; there are some downsides.” As one of the fortunate few to be included in the contemporary group, I wanted to highlight its good effects, and to profess and clarify my role while refusing to be silent about its negative consequences.
How have people taken the criticism? Intellectuals are sensitive people too.
We certainly are. We’re all for criticism except when it’s aimed at us! I was by no means attempting to be mean-spirited. This is not, after all, the Adolph Reed/Eric Lott School of ad hominem critique. Mine is a kind of tongue-incheek, sardonic, satirical attempt to poke fun at what some people take so seriously and are so self-righteous about. A lot of people think my essay is funny, but they’re not the people who were described in the piece. For starters, I lampoon myself in my essay, so I figured that most folk would understand that I had no harm in mind. I think that some feathers were ruffled. So be it. Some sensibilities were offended and so be it. I think the point of the essay was to say: “We vaunt our credentials as critical and analytical intellectuals; we give criticism on a range of subjects because our job as paid pests is to raise issues that people want to sweep under the carpet. So let’s not except ourselves from scrutiny.” Others have not appreciated my sense of humor in formulating these awards. Some even believe that I have unwittingly played into negative portrayals of black intellectuals. For that I am truly sorry because that wasn’t my intent. But I think we have to run the risk of being perceived that way in order to make a more fundamental point: as intellectuals and critics we have to criticize intellectuals and critics.
You mentioned the lineage of those African Americans who lived by their “wit and word” and it, like your chapter on black intellectuals, reminds me of the thesis put forward by Henry Louis Gates Jr. that slave narratives were an attempt for African Americans to write themselves into existence. Do you—as someone who is frequently asked by people like Charlie Rose, “What do blacks think about this?” and “What do blacks think about that?”—see yourself a connection between that tradition and what you do?
I think what I do is an extension of the African American tradition of writing the self into being, and of articulating the self through narrative means. I think that the lyrical, ethically intentional black narrative highlights some of the most heinous and offensive elements of American culture that black people have had to overcome. In that sense, yes, I certainly agree that the powerful antecedent oral and literary tradition is very much in my mind and on my pad as I scribe and scribble about the nature of contemporary black intellectual life. At the same time I think that it is vital to constantly rethink that tradition, and in so doing, to renew it. Beyond generating new inquiries, paradigms, and interests, the participants in that tradition should also be looking for new outlets to reframe persistent intellectual questions, like, What does it mean to be a marginal person in American life? What does it mean to be a black intellectual in a culture where literacy was literally outlawed and prohibited?
That’s why I was so interested in that debate about Ebonics, or Black English, that went on right here in Oakland. The brouhaha occasioned by Ebonics was an index of our black obsession with white America and what it thinks and feels about black folk. Because of that obsession, I think that we failed to critically understand the most edifying features of that debate—the ongoing relevance of black language practices for American society and the denial of their importance among the white elite and bourgeois blacks, even as these practices are exploited for commercial benefit in the billion dollar rap music industry and by network television, where comedies on WB and UPN reap big bucks by featuring Ebonics users.
As we rethink antecedent oral and literary traditions, we must also make space for new issues that ought to be broached. In the main, new issues are brought into existence because of the progress and evolution in black cultures. For instance, as part of that progress we’ve got to figure out the relationship between the cyberscape and new forms of cultural consciousness. In relationship to black communities, we must ask, Is it true that interactions in cyberspace are more akin to oral traditions than writing? And if so, how does that shape our reflections on the process of constructing narratives to represent and symbolize black identity? One of the jobs of any serious critic is to discern the relationship between settled and evolving intellectual traditions and to identify and address new problems and possibilities in black life.
Another thing that struck me is that in that chapter on black public intellectuals you give yourself the Spike Lee/Terry McMillan Award For Shameless Self-Promotion and it’s apt, because you seem to be everywhere. You’re on the radio, on TV; every time I turn around you’ve got another book . . . and yet your more recent writing is frequently infused with topics from your personal life. You seem more comfortable talking about your own sexual temptations in the church, your relationship with your brother who’s serving a life sentence for murder—you included a letter to him in Between God and Gangsta Rap—and I wanted to ask you where the line exists between Michael Eric Dyson the public intellectual and you as a private citizen.
It’s a good question, man. The turn toward the personal in my writing is an attempt to make sense of existential crises that inevitably arise in any person’s life, and in my case, as an intellectual, I wrestle with these crises in full public view. I feel a certain obligation to be open and honest about these problems, but with the necessary discretion and respect for others whose lives are unavoidably implicated. So I don’t advocate a pornographic domesticity, where one reveals every peccadillo and temptation to which one has been subject. I think we must sharply criticize a species of confessionalism that seeks to commodify and commercialize prurient details in order to sell books and make money. My activity is a more political one. The political utility of confession, and of personal narrative more generally, is to humanize intellectuals who are concerned with momentous public issues. Such a process of humanization suggests that there is a person behind these words that needs to be reckoned with.
Another purpose of the confessional mode is to try to show readers through the example of the writer’s life a plausible response to the sorts of crises that they might confront. Often people think that we’re abstracted from the material effects of the writings that we commit to paper or the computer screen. What I want to say is, “No, we’re caught and implicated in bloody and sensuous ways in the interstices of our sentences, and in our gerunds and pronouns and participles,” and that there is in the midst of all that a real person grappling for space to think, write, and reflect. Finally, I think that the turn to the personal in my writing is also about engaging in grassroots ethnography, as I turn the critical gaze away from the external world I am committed to examining onto myself. The author is often both the object and the subject of his or her writing, implicitly if not explicitly, and that’s not necessarily narcissistic or vainly self-preoccupied; it’s about the inevitability of the “I” showing up in the “they” or the “we.”
For me, personal writing, especially about my sexual ethics, my marital life, and coming to grips with my brother’s imprisonment for murder, is about charting a course for honest self-reflection in the midst of the celebration of the intellectual life. In a sense, it’s a way for me to be honest about my roots, about where I came from, and about the forces that produced me. Although it is by now a cliché, it’s still worth noting that I could have ended up in prison just like my brother. In my writing, the turn to the personal is also a way of grappling with the forces that have lifted me above my brother’s predicament. It is also about me being as intellectually self-reflective and self-critical as I can be in defining the responsibilities that attend my privilege.
It’s Michael Eric Dyson picking up where John Edgar Wideman leaves off . . .
In some sense, it is an extension of the narrative that Wideman and a few others have had to engage in as a result of that cruel bifurcation between professor and prisoner, a narrative that is unfortunately becoming nearly a sub-genre within African American literary tradition.
Let’s talk about something you write about at the beginning of Race Rules: the legacy of O.J. Simpson. You say that for a long time he managed to outrun his race and that he managed to have a successful career because of his “teflon racelessness.” This morning I heard Chuck D on the radio, and he was talking about the “the deafening silence” of African American athletes, who also seem to forget, or play down, their racial identity—Chuck takes them to task for it. You can criticize O.J. in retrospect, but do you hold people like Jerry Rice or Michael Jordan at fault for not being as political and race conscious as Muhammad Ali?
We have to be critically conscious of these athletes who are largely O.J. in the making, O.J. before the crime. Deeply depoliticized, racially denuded, conscienceless figures when it comes to race, who for the most part take the money and the acclaim, whose definition of sacrifice is putting up with signing more autographs or being mobbed as they emerge from stadiums. Jerry Rice and Michael Jordan are perhaps the greatest figures to play their sports in the history of the games they so ingeniously embody, but each is more than a little troubling on this score. I gave a graduation speech last December at the University of North Carolina, where I taught for three years and where Jordan attended school. I criticized Jordan very gently, but my speech caused a firestorm of controversy in the news media for more than thirty consecutive days. Alumni demanded my firing and some pledged to withhold money until I was dismissed.
The day after my speech, the chancellor of the university came out in the press against me. A local newspaper printed a critical caricature of me, primarily because I quoted a Notorious B.I.G. lyric that contained the word “fuck,” and in the South that didn’t go over well at all. But to thousands, the most heinous offense by far was the Michael Jordan criticism. Jordan, you see, had given a million dollars to the University of North Carolina’s School of Social Work, which was great. But when he was pressed about why he didn’t give the gift to the Sonja Haynes Black Culture Center (where his mother serves on the governing board), he said that he didn’t want to give it to one group but to all groups. The problem with that logic, of course, is that the School of Social Work is not the School of Education; it’s one group, one school, one institution, just as the Black Culture Center is.
In my speech, I suggested that Jordan was an undeniable genius, that he was wonderful in many ways; but I criticized him for his failure to recognize—a recognition I invited the graduating seniors to claim—that one can love and embrace black people who love and embrace you before you become, like Jordan, a kind of Hegelian, world-historical figure. And it was mayhem; there was hell to pay. I recount this as a way of suggesting that we must honestly engage in dialogue about the moral responsibility of athletes who have enormous influence, visibility, and sums of cash but lack a serious understanding of the political consequences of their public profile. Think about it: Kevin Garnett signed a contract worth $121 million at age twentyone; Rasheed Wallace signed a contract for something like $80 million. They are young people of enormous talent, sometimes genius, rightly being compensated for their gifts, and both of them, I think, are relatively conscious of the history of sacrifice that produced their economic windfall. But often many black athletes have no appreciation for the struggles and sacrifices that got them where they are today.
For instance, yesterday I ate at Nate “The Great” Thurmond’s restaurant. As I ordered my food, I was thinking, “Here is a basketball player selected as one of the fifty greatest NBA players of all time, and were he playing today, he’d be making a ton of money.” But athletes during his era had to work in the off-season to support their families, since they didn’t make enough money from sports to support themselves. So the pioneer figures in the game have been doubly marginalized: their sacrifices have been largely overlooked by the younger athletes, and the political stands some of them took to elevate the standard of living for other athletes, and to defend black freedom struggles, have been undervalued and certainly not duplicated in this Age of the Amnesiac Black Athlete. I have in mind figures like Muhammad Ali, who was a doubly marginalized person—marginalized in mainstream society because of his African American identity, and within African American society because of his Nation of Islam beliefs; Henry Aaron, who was demonized because he was closing in on Babe Ruth’s record all-time homerun record, but also because he took a stand against racism in baseball; and even Jim Brown, that “uppity-in-your-face-buck-nigger” who always insisted on telling the truth about race.
O.J. Simpson, until his murder trial, had no apparent concern for the significant sacrifices made by these pioneering figures. And Jordan surely gives no indication that he has any idea of, or appreciation for, the values these figures stood for, values that made his career possible, both as a basketball superstar and as a spokesman for corporate capitalism. In my mind, we have to be critical of figures like Rice and Jordan, who are socially anesthetized and whose depoliticized, deracialized bearing comports well with the demands of the marketplace in selling goods to white consumers. We have to engage athletes like Rice, Jordan, and many others, helping them understand that black folk—including themselves, even though they have huge buffers—continue to live in a white supremacist context. We’ve got to get them to see that even athletic superstars bear historic traces and the contemporary residue of race in their bodies. They have big, black, masculine, athleticized, and eroticized bodies. The culture collectively dreams Michael Jordan; millions of its inhabitants want to “be like Mike,” as Jordan transforms black cultural aesthetic preoccupations with style, cool, and hipness into a financial juggernaut for corporations like Nike. Nike, of course, commodifies black cultural interests, skills, and identities, and then sells them back to black folk in the guise of a $120 pair of Air Jordan gym shoes. Talk about completing the vicious cycle of the commodification of black youth culture by pillaging and plundering their aesthetic imaginations and stylistic innovations; it’s certainly obscene!
For instance, I was once in Portland and white men who work for Nike were going out and scouting black neighborhoods, “the ’hood,” engaging in what they termed “bro-ing,” as in looking for, interviewing, and investigating “the brothers,” or black males. They were transporting to the postindustrial urban landscape the African safari hunt for wild animals, except in this case it was mixed with a damaging ethnographic and economic intent: it pursues the populace for its hides, its skin, while absorbing information about the cultural habits of the targeted group to better exploit its styles and tastes for white commercial interests. They were “bro-ing,” hanging out with the brothers, to corral yet another black meaning, to surround yet another black signifier, to colonize yet another black cultural space. Many of these black athletes—including Jordan and Jerry Rice—are the iconic figures who justify such practices by giving them a black face. In other words, these black athletes who are reaping social and economic benefits are said to be on the cutting edge of the capitalist structure that dominates American sports, and yet we know that the owners of corporations like Nike, and of basketball and football teams, continue to be the overwhelming beneficiaries of such unequal distribution of wealth. It’s a very ugly and problematic situation.
Chris Rock is caught in the unique position of being a tremendously popular figure who is acknowledging the political dimension to what he does, but I’m not sure it’s for the best purposes. He’s on the cover of Rolling Stone, his album is selling like a crazy, but his routines are controversial. One in particular is centered around the refrain “I love black people, but I hate niggers.” If it was Rush Limbaugh who was criticizing blacks who were stupid, who were ignorant, who were dependent on government welfare, it would have a different resonance. So how does Chris get away with it?
Chris Rock is a very complex figure. During a recent Oprah appearance he explained to a white member of the audience why the use of the “N” word is problematic to people outside of African American communities, but acceptable within at least certain quarters of black life. The standard argument goes that white America has intended such lethal meanings by deploying the word that it’s off-limits to whites, whereas black folk use it among themselves as a term of endearment, often wearing it as a badge of honor. I think there is a historic argument to be made for such usage among blacks. Chris Rock is a brilliant comedian who lampoons and satirizes some of the weaknesses he finds in black communities. Although one may never totally agree with him, I think he has successfully compelled many blacks to come to grips with the necessity of certain forms of internal criticism. He does it in a way that doesn’t play into the hands, at least not completely, of those critics of black culture who claim that we are victim mongering, and that we are deploying reverse discrimination to justify our failure to gain access to social goods like education and employment on our own merits.
Chris Rock, in his instant classic HBO comedy special, Bring the Pain, and in his comedic audio recordings, is a genius in figuring out a middle ground between the vicious assault on black culture and the self-critical practices that are demanded of any serious social commentator. The comic-as-cultural-critic- and-social-commentator does not merely celebrate or valorize the culture from which he or she emerges. Such comics also enable us to understand our culture as they honestly explore it and thus help explain black culture’s internal contradictions, stress its positive features, and acknowledge its detrimental characteristics. That distinction he makes between “blacks” and “niggas” (and by the way, he had in mind a specific conception of “nigga,” one that in black communities signifies negatively, where other meanings of “nigga” are decidedly more positive) is one that refers to codes of belief in black life, something you’ve got to understand for the distinction to make sense. That distinction means something altogether different beyond the boundaries of black life.
What’s the difference, though, when he does his routine, on the record, for an audience in D.C. that is predominantly African American, and yet he is on the cover of Rolling Stone—which caters to a different demographic? Certain things one says inside the house, one would not go around saying outside; the meanings of words shift based on the contexts in which they’re spoken . . .
They do, they do. What we are evoking through our discussion of Chris Rock is a problem within literary and cultural theory about intention and reception, where the following questions emerge: Is an author or a speaker morally responsible for the interpretation of her words? Is one ethically culpable for understanding the context into which one’s words will be read? To a certain degree, of course we are. We can’t pretend that College Park, Maryland, is the same as Harlem, USA—they’re different social and intellectual contexts, whatever similarities they might share. One of the ingenious things that Chris Rock is doing is making white America aware of these contradictions and conflicts within black culture of which they may have been oblivious. The question asked by some whites, Why can black folk call themselves nigger, and we can’t? falls into that category. In one sense, Rock is a cultural translator, an arbiter of contested black meanings in a safe public space of comedy where he’s able to broach controversial issues. For instance, Rock educated his multiracial television audience beyond the largely black Washington, D.C., setting of Bring the Pain, when he referred to black complaints about stereotypical representations of black people in the media as sometimes overblown. “When I go to the money machine tonight, a’ight, I ain’t looking over my back for the media,” Rock said to uproarious laughter. “I’m looking for niggas. Ted Koppel ain’t never took shit from me. Niggas have.” I was howling, man, because in some ways, he’s absolutely right. But then we must acknowledge that meanings shift according to contexts in which people understand what they hear.
At the same time, I think both blacks and whites and many other groups are being enlightened and prodded to a level of discomfort to interrogate their practices and their cherished beliefs. As black critics, we encourage our people to take it to the next step, the next level—and to have enough maturity as black people to be willing to risk misunderstanding among white Americans about the nature of our selfcriticism. Refusing to air dirty laundry has been the reason for not admitting cultural contradictions, which does two things. First, it gives credence to those critics who say, “If you blacks were willing to be a little more self-critical about your shortcomings, then you could have a little more social progress.” Even though I know that at some level that argument is legitimate, I also know that it can be a convenient excuse for people who want to continue their old bigotry in new forms by calling it an assault on political correctness. Number two, when we aired our laundry in our own community . . . well, ain’t nobody invited me to those meetings. They haven’t invited a whole lot of black folk I know to those meetings—and the “they” here is a nonspecific, arbitrary, ambiguous “they,” signifying the inability to pin down who is responsible for the meetings and who should take the heat for those who are invited or, as it turns out, uninvited. It’s not like there was a notice posted in Harlem on a streetlight pole that read: “There’s a closed-door meeting of the black community tonight. Be on the corner of 125th and Lennox Avenue at 7:00 P.M.”
Often the presumption of such closed-door meetings is that they would occur among black leaders, however defined. But even that gathering of political, cultural, and intellectual elites, if it occurred, might well be antidemocratic, too. At least when criticism is public, a wider range of black people get a chance to participate in cultural and political debates. Even if we are turned off by what Chris Rock says, it is healthier to have open rather than closed cultural conversations—I suppose it’s where Chris Rock meets Karl Popper. In that sense, I celebrate Chris Rock’s transgressive notions of blackness. I also applaud the seepage of his discourse beyond the boundaries of ethnic and racial communities. But your point is well taken. We can’t pretend that we don’t live in a political context in which white Americans say, “See, what we told you about those black folks must be true, since there’s a black man on television saying the same thing.” I think we have to run that risk to get to the “truth” as we see it, as we’re willing to argue for its existence in given cultural and social contexts.
I think it’s crucial, even if it is hurtful and controversial, for Chris Rock to go on television—including his appearance on Oprah, a show watched by 20 million people, most of whom are white—and talk with devastating accuracy, as well as some measure of pitiless self-examination, of our culture. Talk about how when black folk get out of prison, other black folk give them much “dap,” or respect. But if they’ve just garnered a master’s degree, “niggas” look down on them with contempt. Say that brother, and say it again! It’s hard to hear; it’s painful, but it’s often true. Many black people who have been fortunate enough to go to school have paid an extra price, a black tariff on educational success. I got called “braniac” and “professor” in junior high school. To be sure, a lot of black people dug me, who said, “Hey, watch out for the brother, ’cuz he’s down, and he’s cool.” At the same time, a lot of people were angry, even jealous, and tried to be creatively subversive of my success—one that they often failed to achieve, were prevented from achieving, or were discouraged from believing that they could achieve. So I later understood the complexity of their assaults, but at the time, some of their jabs hurt.
What Rock is really speaking to, at least implicitly, is what educational theorists call “rival epistemologies,” that is, competing ways of knowing the world or competing schemas of existing in the world, as either smart or cool, as if they were mutually exclusive, that to be one rules out being the other. And of course, in many black communities, especially in inner cities, there is a high premium on being “cool,” which sometimes means placing a stigma on formal education and erudition. Chris Rock is speaking as well to the problem of literacy in black communities and, by implication, to the multiple forms of literacy that are either privileged or assailed, depending on which segment of black communities we engage. All in all, I think Rock’s kind of relentless self-investigation is important for a black comedic social commentator. That’s why I think he’s one of the most important African American comedians and critics. His Bring the Pain ranks right up there with classic black stand-up comedic performances caught on tape, including Richard Pryor’s Richard Pryor: Live and Smokin’ and Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, Bill Cosby’s Bill Cosby: Himself, and Eddie Murphy’s Delirious and Raw. Whether we agree with him at every turn or not, Chris Rock is a crucial cultural presence, a valuable gadfly, and above all, a great comedian, which I’m sure is his ultimate goal. After all, if he weren’t funny, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
How do you feel about the fact that it seems like a lot of the intellectual rappers sell less than the so-called gangsta acts? How do you feel about the fact that as intellectual a rapper as Busta Rhymes is, it’s his party songs, like “Wu-ha,” that are the ones that make money?
Well, to phrase it oxymoronically, it’s the almost inevitable result of being involved in the culture industry driven by the machinery of capital in corporate America, where you have to dummy down to a certain degree to get to the lowest common cultural denominator. There’s no question that American culture doesn’t have space, patience, or time for tasks, products, and processes that demand rigor, that demand a degree of critical intelligence for ideas that can’t be understood very quickly. Still, I defend popular culture at a certain level in certain modes for its ability to reproduce images, styles, ideas, visions, and even challenges to stereotypes that make partial use of these stereotypes, that people might not otherwise have any democratic access to. It’s a double-edged sword. Take Nas’s debut, Illmatic (1994), one of the greatest rap albums of all time, which featured many brilliant songs, including “New York State of Mind,” which contains a verse that provides a bracing raison d’être of the rap vocation: “It’s only right that I was born to use mics, and the stuff that I write, it’s even tougher than dice.”
On the equally powerful “Life’s a Bitch . . .” Nas references Shakespeare when he declares, “I never sleep ’cause sleep’s the cousin of death.” Now we got the great Bard integrated into the lyrical cosmos of a New York rapper! Given the fact that Nas’s father is a respected trumpet player, we have this rich, straight-ahead hard-bop jazz tradition being brought to bear on the soundscape of an extremely gifted lyricist. Still, for all its aesthetic punch, its exceeding high rhetorical and musical values, it took a long time for that album to go gold and sell 500,000 copies. Its eventual success was driven by word of mouth. Some would say that his second album, It Was Written, while very, very sharp, isn’t up to the standards of that first classic album: it doesn’t have that underground aesthetic and lyric-driven genius of Illmatic. Then again, Nas’s persona went from “Nasty Nas” to “Nas Escobar.” So one must account for his aesthetic and lyrical shift by underscoring his transformed artistic identity, from ghetto projects denizen whose hardcore themes were wed to high concept if idiosyncratic articulations of an urban weltanschauung, to a more traditionally identified hustler/gangster whose aspirations to the high life are filtered through conventional if compelling narratives of upward mobility linked to spiritual and moral aims fueled by racial romanticism and altruism. We’ve got to grant Nas the right to change, even if we prefer one persona to the other.
Few artists and groups can sustain a uniform expression of excellence over several projects, especially with the rush of commercial success. First, although it’s surely a cliché, artists are hungrier when they’re poorer, when they are undistracted by the demands that celebrity imposes on them. Therefore compromises and concessions—to the marketplace, to hegemonic elements within one’s fan base, and to the ubiquitous lure of crossover success—appear nearly unavoidable, especially for ambitious hip-hoppers. Of course, a few groups get wider and deeper and broader as they mature. Think, for example, about Wu-Tang Clan and how they’re pushing the borders and expanding the boundaries of rap, so that their alternative, basement, or underground hip-hop has found a commercial niche while remaining intellectually vibrant. Of course, their case is unique because Wu-Tang is composed of individually gifted rappers and producers who disperse to make their own projects—often with other members of their group, say, rapper Raekwan hooking up with fellow member Ghostface Killah, or they pair with other talented rappers outside their fold, say, group member Method Man joining forces with Biggie Smalls—and then come back together for their group efforts.
But Wu-Tang’s is an unusual case. It is more likely that the intellectual and aesthetic vitality of hip-hop is compromised and subordinated to the imperatives of commerce, finance, and the market: how many units one can push and sell. Even the more intelligent, self-reflective, self-critical gangsta and hardcore hip-hop is taking a back seat to crassly materialistic and crudely misogynistic rap—and bowing to the mere groove, the mere rhythm. Hip-hop has always been about the pulsating polyrhythmic structures of African American musical traditions. Remember the words of legendary wordsmith Rakim, who said: “My mind starts to activate, rhymes collaborate ’cause when I heard the beat, I just had to make somethin’ from the top of my head. . . .” Of course, within hip-hop culture, an aggressively intellectual vision has to be sustained against the odds. For instance, Chicago-based rapper Common Sense is a self-critical and brilliant lyricist whose craft has been unfairly overlooked, for the most part, except by the genre’s cognoscenti, its insightful “heads.”
In hip-hop, it used to be that geography drove vocational destiny. Hence the East Coast was cerebral, articulate, and reflective, but after a while, they didn’t sell as many records as their West Coast brethren, who didn’t have intense intellectual presence—with the exception of figures like Ice Cube and the great Tupac Shakur, who was really a product of both coasts. But they knew how to make you shake your behind, and they had rappers like Snoop who had great flow. So the imperatives of the market were segmented according to regional practices. The West Coast got more deeply mired in the “keep it real” movement in hip-hop. Such posturing makes me think immediately of the 1969 jazz crossover song, “Compared to What?” recorded by gifted jazz veterans Eddie Harris and Les McCann. In applying that song to hip-hop, I suppose the question is, What are rappers claiming to keep real, and what is the unreal or inauthentic experience to which it is compared? Some rappers, especially on the East Coast underground scene, claim they exist in a pure sphere of artistic engagement apart from the crassly commodified marketplace. Well, the moment you put your voice on a tape and sell it out of the trunk of your car—just like Too $hort did when he started right here in Oaktown a decade ago—you’re involved in commodity culture. Now that’s keeping it real.
Your writing touches on a wide range of topics, yet there are some constant familiars. You write about the plight of black women, and in sermons of yours I’ve heard you talk frankly about homophobia. But from the opening of Making Malcolm to the closing of Race Rules, your principal audience, or perhaps concern, seems to be the education, fate, and roles of black men. If for some reason you never wrote another essay, would your focus on educating the world about the lives of black men in America, and conversely, speaking to black men about the world they’re inhabiting, be a satisfying legacy?
It would be a satisfying legacy if I could be perceived as a brother who spoke to black men in order to speak against the pain and bias we both confront and perpetuate. It would be satisfying if I could challenge us from within the temples of our familiar bigotries—to join Alice Walker and Sampson from the Bible—to take down the pillars of machismo that sustain the structures of our masculine identity. Hopefully, unlike Sampson, we won’t have to go eyeless in Gaza and bring the house down on ourselves, murdering our hope and possibility in the process. I want to think and write more critically about issues of gender, especially the relationships between men and women. It is true that even as I and others try to create discursive space within black criticism to address homophobia, machismo, and gender discrimination, it would be a fair criticism of my work that the obsession about the lives and limits of black men in my writing is the constant familiar, or as Baraka beautifully phrases it, “the changing same.” So I think that if I can invite black men to think more critically about our condition and unmask some of the more detrimental patriarchal moments that not only stigmatize women but also hamper us from realizing our best goals and our most edifying interests, then I could be satisfied. When I went to the Million Man March over the objections of many of my feminist sisters and brothers, I did so because I knew, as I discuss in Race Rules, that the desperation in our communities is so profound that abstract theorizing and academic interrogation ain’t gonna fix what’s broke. In fact, remaining distant from the pain and the pathos of these black men may be part of the problem. I think that progressive intellectuals and activists need more, not less, contact with ordinary black men.
That’s why I continue to slug it out with black men, and others, in the trenches of black communities. For instance, one night in Seattle, after spending a great day giving a few lectures and signing quite a few books in local colleges and universities, where the audiences were largely white, I spoke at a black church. I was assailed for nearly three hours by what I term hypersensitive black nationalists who were speaking about Africa in an utterly romantic fashion and referencing the “white man” in a way that was painfully anachronistic, as if the “white man” were actually the “bogeyman.” In one sense the mixture of half-truths—the Fanonian self-critical consciousness mixed with crude applications of Malcom X’s beliefs about internalized self-hatred and neocolonial occupation of our brains with whitewashed political ideology—was intriguing, even if it was personally painful to endure the brunt of such discourse when it was turned on me. I don’t say that for self-pity, because these folk have a right to be critical of me. But the reason I stayed long past my appointed time with them was to have the opportunity to fight some of the sharper bigotries within black masculine communities. Many of these communities don’t enjoy the leisure needed to think critically about some of the issues I broach. Many of them are sharp and reflective, very intelligent, but they are also hurt by the traumas of white supremacy, economic inequality, and social injustice. If I become their temporary target as they cathartically express their own rage, then so be it.
I hope I’m not being unfair to such audiences in describing their activity in this way. I’m simply trying to suggest that in an already difficult world for many black people, black nationalist patriarchal insularity—truth be told, it’s fascism in a certain way—is counterproductive to our very survival. If I can invite black men to unmask our patriarchy and undo, or at least unlearn, our homophobia and to challenge our detrimental views of masculinity, I believe our communities will be immeasurably strengthened. Women will not be harmed as frequently; children will not be routinely abused and abandoned; and fewer black men will die at the hands of other black men. That’s why I think Chris Rock is a very important comedic flash point along the larger trajectory of black selfcriticism within masculine community. You know, when Chris Rock says that at the Million Man March, with Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry on hand, it means that at our highest moment, black men have a crack head on stage as one of our symbols, that’s part of the tough but necessary exercise of self-critique.
Again, we don’t have to agree with the substance of his critique, but I think we have to embrace the substantial contribution of moral and social critique to our communities. True, white America can take Rock’s words and run with them in the attempt to prove our self-defeating habits and our visible pathologies. But hopefully black ethical maturity will convince us to look beyond this inevitable consequence of our critical self-examination in a majority white society. We can’t let what white folk might say or do keep us from what we should say and do. In that sense, I would hope that my legacy in examining black masculinity would be one of relentless self-critique, even as I embrace the virtues of black masculine culture while refusing to ignore how black men have been demonized in a still unjust society.
Interview by Marc Vogl and Tonelius Oliver
San Francisco, California, 1997