1. My argument here is based on the important work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant in Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
2. Cornel West, “A Genealogy of Modern Racism,” in Prophesy Deliverance! An AfroAmerican Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), pp. 47–68; West, Prophetic Fragments (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1988).
1. Michael Bradley, The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man ’s Racism, Sexism, and Aggression (New York: Kayode, 1978).
2. Richard King, African Origin of Biological Psychiatry (Germantown, Tenn.: Seymour-Smith, 1990).
3. See Frances Cress-Welsing, “The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy),” in Cress-Welsing, The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors (Chicago: Third World Press, 1991), pp. 1–16.
4. Ibid., p. 4.
5. Ibid., p. 5.
6. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
7. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (Knoxville, Tenn.: Whittle Communications, 1991).
1. There is a growing literature on the socially constructed meanings of whiteness. For some of the best of this literature, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control (New York: Verso, 1994); Fred Pfeil, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (New York: Verso, 1995); Jessie Daniels, White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1997); Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and L. Mun Wong, eds., Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society (New York: Routledge, 1997).
2. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1983, 1993), pp. 68–87.
3. For a small sample of such criticism, see Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995); Michael Tomasky, Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York: Free Press, 1996); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (Whittle Direct Books, 1991); and Richard Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America ’s Future (New York: Knopf, 1994).
4. See Michael Eric Dyson, Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996).
5. Tomasky, Left for Dead, pp. 10, 15–17.
6. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.
1. For a look at the contemporary plight of black men, especially black juvenile males, see Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species, ed. Jewelle Taylor Gibbs (Dover, Mass.: Auburn House, 1988).
2. See William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
3. See Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged. For Charles Murray’s views on poverty, welfare, and the ghetto underclass, see his influential book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic, 1984).
4. This section on gangs is informed by the work of Mike Davis in City of Quartz (New York: Verso, 1991).
1. Stanley Hauerwas and Michael Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ: Why Freedom of Belief Is Not Enough,” DePaul Law Review 42 (1992).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. For a sampling of Hauerwas’s criticism of Christian ethical defenses of democracy, see “A Christian Critique of Christian America,” in Community in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart, eds. Charles H. Reynolds and Ralph V. Norman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 250–265. See also The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 12–13, 111. For claims about prophetic black Christianity’s contention that democracy is a fundamental norm of prophetic black Christianity, see Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), pp. 18–19.
5. George Will, “Scalia Missed Point but Made Right Argument on Separation of Religion,” Durham Morning Herald, Apr. 22, 1990, p. 5. I am not suggesting that Hauerwas’s treatment of the First Amendment is limited to this essay, or that the tension between church and state, and religion and politics, is a new subject for him, or one exclusively pursued in this essay. Anyone familiar with Hauerwas’s work will know of his long-standing views on such matters. See in particular Hauerwas’s books, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Ethic (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Minneapolis: WinstonSeabury, 1985); and Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World and Living In-Between (Durham, N.C.: Lambrinth, 1987). I am treating, however, the specific context of Hauerwas’s (and Baxter’s) remarks as they relate to points they make about Will’s interpretation of the First Amendment.
6. Hauerwas and Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ.”
7. See Walter Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, ed. Robert H. Horwitz (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), p. 208.
8. See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967), p. 260. Also see Martin Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (New York: Penguin, 1984), pp. 162–163.
9. James Madison, quoted in Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, p. 260.
10. Ibid.
11. See Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” p. 220.
12. Ibid.
13. Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” pp. 219–225. For an exposition on Locke’s views of Christianity, see Michael P. Zuckert, “Locke and the Problem of Civil Religion,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), pp. 181–203.
14. For Madison on religion as opinion, see Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land, p. 163.
15. Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Hauerwas and Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ,” p. 4.
16. As Robert Bellah defines it in “The Idea of Practices in Habits: A Response,” in Community in America, eds. Reynolds and Norman, Constantinianism is the danger that “Christianity will be used instrumentally for the sake of creating political community but to the detriment of its own authenticity” (p. 277). As Hauerwas understands the term (building on the work of John Howard Yoder), which is drawn from Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, it is the assumption that “Christians should or do have social and political power so they can determine the ethos of society. . . . Constantine is the symbol of the decisive shift in the logic of moral argument when Christians ceased being a minority and accepted Caesar as a member of the church.” See Hauerwas, “A Christian Critique of Christian America,” in Community i n America, eds. Reynolds and Norman, p. 260.
17. See Hauerwas’s works cited in notes 15 and 16.
18. For the pressure these groups brought to bear upon the colonies for freedom of religion, see Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, pp. 257–258.
19. Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” p. 206.
20. Interestingly, Hauerwas raises the possibility of challenging the ideals that underlay the Jonestown community, but only through intellectual or religious debate or criticism of the community; even in light of the atrocities committed there, he doesn’t entertain the possibility of state intervention, or active Christian intervention, to protect the exploited victims of Jim Jones’s practices. He says in “On Taking Religion Seriously: The Challenge of Jonestown,” in Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 103: “Our tragedy is that there was no one internal or external to that community able to challenge the false presuppositions of Jones’s false ideals. Our continuing tragedy is that our reactions to and our interpretations of the deaths of Jonestown reveal accurately how we lack the convictions to counter the powers that reigned there.” On the other hand, John Bennett sees Jonestown as an indication that freedom of religion is not absolute and as an example of the difficulty of determining when and if state intervention into religious practices should occur. Unlike Hauerwas, however, he concedes the possibility that state intervention is a plausible course of action under admittedly difficult-to-define circumstances. In “Church and State in the United States,” in Reformed Faith and Politics, ed. Ronald H. Stone (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983), p. 122, Bennett says: “That . . . religious freedom from any limitation by the state is not absolute is well illustrated by the terrible events in Jonestown. After those events it is easy to see there should have been protection of people against such exploitation and even lethal abuse by a religious leader, but it is not easy to say exactly at what point and by what method the state should have entered the picture.”
21. This view among the Founders is characterized in Martin Marty’s summary of Benjamin Franklin’s views on established religion in Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land, p. 158: “Yet [Franklin] attacked churchly establishment: when a religion was good, it would support itself. If a religion could not support itself and God did not care to come to its aid, it was a bad sign if then the members had to call on government for help.”
22. Bennett, “Church and State in the United States,” pp. 121–122.
23. It must be admitted that religion under the First Amendment becomes a matter of private choice versus public coercion, but that meaning of privacy is not in question here. Rather, it is whether religion under the First Amendment is rendered necessarily and exclusively private without the possibility of its public expression.
24. Of course, Hauerwas and Baxter might argue that the Founders viewed religion primarily as an aid, and not a critic, of the government. That may be the case, but as they point out in regard to the freedom of religion in their discussion of Will earlier in their essay, the intent of the Founders is not as important as what has occurred in practice. Similarly, what has occurred in practice is that persons and groups have appealed to their religious beliefs to challenge American government, ranging from the civil rights movement to antinuclear activists.
25. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land, pp. 155–156.
26. Ibid., p. 157.
27. Ibid., p. 158.
28. George Washington, quoted in Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” p. 213.
29. Jefferson, quoted in Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” pp. 217–218.
30. Ibid., p. 213.
31. Admittedly this distinction between functional and moral subordination doesn’t completely resolve the tensions created by conflicts of conscience over legally established political practices. In such cases, of course, it is clear that moral insubordination takes precedence; but the violation of the law in the name of conscience results in the Christian acknowledging the conflict created by her religious beliefs by accepting the penalty of breaking the law until the law is changed, either as a result of civil disobedience or through shifted public consensus, or reconstructed public practice, later reflected in law. The examples of Christian participation in the civil rights movement, feminist movements, and antinuclear war movements stand out.
32. For instance, Ronald Thiemann has argued that Hauerwas represents one of two unacceptable options in developing an effective public Christian response to the crises of North American civilization. In characterizing the first option, represented in the thinking of theologian Paul Lehmann, Thiemann, in Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1991), summarizes Lehmann’s position, expressed by Lehmann in an essay entitled “Praying and Doing Justice”: “Arguing out of the Reformed tradition’s close association of faith with obedience, Lehmann asserts that proper worship always has as its goal the accomplishment of justice in the world. The righteousness of faith must result in transformative justice within the public realm. Thus Christian worship is essentially political, and the lietourgia of the church extends naturally and directly into political action” (p. 114). The second option is represented by Hauerwas in his book, A Community of Character. According to Thiemann, Hauerwas contends that “by being faithful to the narratives that shape Christian character, the church will witness to a way of life that stands apart from and in criticism of our liberal secular culture. Christian worship, then, must be an end in itself directed solely toward the cultivation of those peculiar theological virtues that mark the church as a distinctive community” (p. 114). But Thiemann concludes that neither of these options “provides us with the theological resources we need to face the distinctive challenge presented to North American Christians” (p. 114). He continues: “Neither the politicization of worship nor its sectarian separation from public life will suffice in our current situation. . . . We must find a middle way between the reduction of the Christian gospel to a program of political action and the isolation of that gospel from all political engagement” (p. 114). And in an essay, “Justice as Participation: Public Moral Discourse and the U. S. Economy,” in Community i n America, in which he clarifies the position of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in their pastoral letter on the economy, David Hollenbach juxtaposes their belief that “the church has a responsibility to help shape the life of society as a whole” to Hauerwas’s position on such matters (p. 220). Hollenbach says: “Hauerwas concludes that the church should cease and desist from the attempt to articulate universal moral norms persuasive to all members of a pluralistic society. . . . [The letter’s] disagreement with Hauerwas is with his exclusive concern with the quality of the witness of the Christian community’s own life. In the traditional categories of Ernest Troeltsch, the bishops refuse to take the ‘sectarian’ option of exclusive reliance on the witness of the Christian community that Hauerwas recommends” (p. 220).
33. Hauerwas and Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ,” p. 11.
34. Ibid., p. 14.
35. Stanley Fish, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too,” in Debating P. C., ed. Paul Berman (New York: Dell, 1992), p. 241.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., pp. 241–242.
38. Quoted in Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology, p. 24.
39. Fish, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too,” p. 242.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., p. 243.
43. Ibid.
44. Hauerwas and Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ,” p. 10.
45. Ibid., p. 17.
46. Ibid., pp. 17–18.
47. This is not to deny universal dimensions of Christian faith. It is to challenge essentialist notions of Christian identity fostered by references to church without spelling out the church’s social location, who its members are, under what conditions they practice their belief, what historical factors have shaped their faith, and so on.
48. I understand “black church” as shorthand to symbolize the views of black Christianity. The black church is certainly not homogeneous, and I shall be focusing on the prophetic dimensions of black religious faith. Hauerwas and Baxter’s failure to take the black church seriously is part of a larger pattern that has rendered the black church invisible for most of its history. Even investigations of American religion have usually, until quite recently, excluded black religion as a central force in American life. As C. Eric Lincoln, in Race, Religion and the Continuing American Dilemma (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), says, the “religious situation is structured in such a way that any investigation of religion in America has usually meant the religion of white Americans, unless ‘Negro,’ ‘folk,’ or ‘black’ religion was specifically mentioned” (p. 123). And as Charles Long says in Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986): “In short, a great many of the writings and discussions on the topic of American religion have been consciously or unconsciously ideological, serving to enhance, justify, and render sacred the history of European immigrants in this land. Indeed this approach to American religion has rendered the religious reality of non-Europeans to a state of invisibility, and thus the invisibility of the non-European in America arises as a fundamental issue of American history at this juncture” (p. 149).
49. I have in mind here the large number of black ministers among current members of Congress, continuing a tradition in this century established by leaders such as Adam Clayton Powell; the activity of black church leaders in the civil rights movement and the political movements it gave rise to, especially the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson; and the large number of black churchpersons affiliated with historically black institutions of higher education. In each area, the black church has supplied many of these persons the principles they have appealed to in making the claims of black equality, justice, and freedom to the larger American public. For two examples, see Charles Hamilton’s biography of Adam Clayton Powell, Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991), and Roger Hatch, Beyond Opportunity: Jesse Jackson ’s Vision for America (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988).
50. Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1988), pp. 22–23.
51. See Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988; original ed., 1979), and James Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986).
52. Sobel, Trabelin’ On, p. 85.
53. Ibid., p. 85; and Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, pp. 261–262.
54. I do not mean by any measure to romanticize the religious dissenters. Although they fought against slavery, they fought more effectively, desperately, and consistently for their own religious freedom, largely out of self-interest.
55. For instance, John Allen pointed out the hypocrisy of his fellow countrymen making claims to colonial freedom while simultaneously denying liberty to slaves, employing religious terms like “sacred,” “praying,” and “fasting” to drive home his point. He said: “Blush ye pretended votaries for freedom! ye trifling patriots! who are making a vain parade of being advocates for the liberties of mankind, who are thus making a mockery of your profession by trampling on the sacred natural rights and privilege of Africans; for while you are fasting, praying, nonimporting, nonexporting, remonstrating, resolving, and pleading for a restoration of your charter rights, you at the same time are continuing this lawless, cruel, inhuman, and abominable practice of enslaving your fellow creatures” (quoted in Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, p. 240). And Isaac Backus pressed arguments for the religious dissenters to be released from the bondage of the Church of England, asserting that civil and religious liberty were one. Backus tirelessly proclaimed that the church of Massachusetts “has declared the Baptists to be irregular, therefore the secular power still force them to support the worship which they conscientiously dissent from,” and that “many who are filling the nation with cry Of LIBERTY and against oppressors are at the same time themselves violating that dearest of all rights, LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE” (quoted in Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, p. 263).
56. Robert Wuthnow makes helpful distinctions between conservative and liberal versions of civil religion in The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). About conservative civil religion, Wuthnow says: “On the conservative side, America’s legitimacy seems to depend heavily on a distinct ‘myth of origin’ that relates the nation’s founding to divine purposes. According to this interpretation of American history, the American form of government enjoys lasting legitimacy because it was created by Founding Fathers who were deeply influenced by Judeo-Christian values” (pp. 244–245). Wuthnow also states that conservative civil religion “generally grants America a special place in the divine order” and that the idea of “evangelizing the world is in fact a much-emphasized theme in conservative civil religion” (p. 247). He contends that despite “formal separation between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man, the ‘two kingdoms’ doctrine in conservative civil religion also confers a strong degree of divine authority on the existing mode of government” (p. 248). Conservative civil religion also grants “capitalism a high degree of legitimacy by drawing certain parallels between capitalist economic principles and biblical teachings” (p. 248).
Liberal civil religion, however, makes little “reference to the religious views of the Founding Fathers” and doesn’t “suggest that America is God’s chosen nation” (p. 250). Liberal civil religion “focuses less on the nation as such, and more on humanity in general” (p. 250). Wuthnow says that rather than “drawing specific attention to the distinctiveness of the Judeo-Christian tradition, liberal civil religion is much more likely to include arguments about basic human rights and common human problems” (p. 250). Liberal civil religionists also “appeal to broader values that transcend American culture and, indeed, challenge some of the nationalistic assumptions it incorporates” (p. 253). The liberal “version of American civil religion taps into a relatively deep reservoir of sentiment in the popular culture about the desirability of peace and justice” (p. 253). As a result, Wuthnow mentions, “religious leaders who champion these causes may detract from the legitimacy of the current U.S. system rather than contribute to it” (p. 254).
It would be good for Hauerwas and Baxter to keep the distinctions between the two versions of civil religion in mind when making claims about its “counterfeit” religious status. Although it probably wouldn’t persuade them to change their views, it would nonetheless help them make crucial distinctions about the varying functions of civil religion as it is employed and exercised by different spheres of the citizenry, and even by different branches of Christianity.
57. Long, Significations, p. 152.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., pp. 152–153.
61. Of course, King’s later beliefs about the necessity for radical social, economic, and moral transformation of American democracy presented a serious challenge to extant political arrangements. See James Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991), especially pp. 213–243.
62. Michael Eric Dyson, “Martin Luther King Jr., The Evil of Racism, and the Recovery of Moral Vision,” in Union Seminary Quarterly Review 44 (1990): 88–91.
63. Gen. 50:20 (Revised Standard Version).
64. Quoted in Martin Luther King Jr., Stride toward Freedom (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 160.
65. See William Safire’s comments on the attempts by both Democrats and Republicans to use God’s name “as a symbol for the other side’s immorality, much as the American flag was used in previous campaigns as a symbol for the other side’s lack of patriotism,” in “God Bless Us,” New York Times, Aug. 27, 1992, p. A23.
66. Fish, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too,” p. 243.
67. See, for instance, Martin Luther King’s discussion of his disappointment with the white church in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 345–346.
68. See King’s response to white clergymen who deemed his actions in Birmingham, Alabama, as “unwise and untimely,” in his famous “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 289–302.
69. Ernest T. Campbell, Locked in a Room with Open Doors.
70. Hauerwas and Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ,” p. 18.
71. Ibid., p. 19.
72. Ibid., p. 21.
73. Ibid., p. 22.
74. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 161.
75. James Hastings Nichols, Democracy and the Churches (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1951), p. 186.
76. Nichols, Democracy and the Churches, p. 182; and Smith, Mussolini, p. 65.
77. Nichols, Democracy and the Churches, p. 183.
78. Smith, Mussolini, pp. 159, 163.
79. Ibid., pp. 159–161.
80. Smith, Mussolini, p. 163; and Nichols, Democracy and the Churches, p. 189.
81. Smith, Democracy and the Churches, p. 162.
82. I have in mind here liberation theologians who link notions of Christian salvation with sharp forms of social analysis that get at the economic, political, and social forces that mask liberation in concrete form. For just one recent example, see the important work by Franz J. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of Capitalism, trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1986).
Also, it seems that Hauerwas’s desire to make the church more socially relevant is better served by citing the work of black, feminist, and liberation theologians. Especially in regard to liberation theology, Paul Lauritzen argues that Hauerwas has a great deal in common with Latin American theologian Johannes Metz, particularly regarding each author’s use of narrative in their work. In “Is ‘Narrative’ Really a Panacea? The Use of ‘Narrative’ in the Work of Metz and Hauerwas,” in Journal of Religion (1987): 322–339, Lauritzen writes: “Although these writers represent different religious traditions, both rely in significant ways on the category of narrative in their work. . . . Both Metz and Hauerwas are concerned to revitalize Christian faith, both want to make it once again socially relevant, and both are adamant that it retain its distinctiveness. That both should also place such a heavy emphasis on the concept of narrative . . . is not coincidental” (p. 323).
83. I am not suggesting that all of Pius XI’s views about the social order are captured in the “Kingship of Christ.” His encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, issued in 1931, remains one of Catholicism’s most impressive statements containing the social teachings of the church, including government’s role in society and in the economy, the belief in a just wage, laborers’ right to organize, and strong Christian criticism of both capitalism and socialism. But this document must be juxtaposed to Pius XI’s antidemocratic actions and statements during the reign of Mussolini. Neither am I suggesting personal perfection as a criterion to determine the acceptability of an intellectual position; in that case, my example of King would be immediately nullified. I am suggesting, however, that these characteristics of Pope Pius XI that I have sketched have direct bearing on the principles and proposals under discussion; there is an organic link, I would argue, between Pope Pius XI’s views and practices regarding democracy, Fascism, and the morally subordinate status of the Catholic Church and his recommendations about the Kingship of Christ. His views are suspect precisely because they have to do with his moral and theological failures in his office as pope, the official head of the Catholic Church.
The words “somewhere I read of the freedom of speech ” are from King, “ I See the Promised Land, ” in King, A Testament, p. 282.
1. Dyson, “The Cruellest,” p. 33.
2. Dyson, Race Rules, p. 81.
3. Barth, Christ and Adam and The Word of God and the Word of Man.
4. Pipes, Say Amen Brother! Mitchell, Black Preaching; Davis, I Got the Word in Me; Pitts, The Old Ship of Zion; Boulware, The Oratory of Negro Leaders; Thomas, They Always; Rosenberg, Can These Bones Live? Raboteau, Fire in the Bones, pp. 141–151; Hamilton, The Black Preacher, Spencer, Sacred Symphony.
5. Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 1990, pp. A1, 6; New York Times, Nov. 10, 1990, p. A10; Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Nov. 11, 1990, p. A8; USA Today, Nov. 13, 1990, p. A11; Bloomington [Indiana] Herald-Times, Nov. 16, 1990, p. A6; Chicago Tribune, Nov. 18, 1990, p. V2; Washington Post, Nov. 18, 1990, p. C5; San Jose Mercury-News, Nov. 19, 1990, p. A1; Newsweek, Nov. 19, 1990, p. 61; Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 21, 1990, p. A8; New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 1, 1990, p. 24; Time, Dec. 3, 1990, p. 126; Los Angeles Times, Dec. 11, 1990, p. E1; New Republic, Jan. 28, 1991, pp. 9–11; Journal of American History, June 1991, pp. 11–123.
6. Higham, “Habits of the Cloth,” p. 109.
7. Miller, Voice of Deliverance.
8. Ibid., esp. pp. 1–28, 41–141.
9. Ibid., esp. pp. 142–158.
10. Lischer, The Preacher King.
11. Ibid., esp. pp. 8, 93–118.
12. Ibid., p. 63.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., pp. 106–111.
15. Miller, Voice of Deliverance, pp. 67–85, 186–197.
16. Lischer, The Preacher King, esp. p. 14.
17. Miller, Voice of Deliverance, pp. 169–197. Also see Miller, “Composing Martin Luther King Jr.,” pp. 70–82.
18. Lischer, The Preacher King, pp. 112–113.
19. The phrase is in Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 45.
20. Lewis, “Failing to Know Martin Luther King Jr.,” p. 82; Genovese, The Southern Front, p. 174.
21. Coretta King claims that her husband, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, “intended to echo some of the Lincolnian language,” speaking of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, to which King made early reference in his oration (C. King, My Life, p. 236). The same speech famously extends Jefferson’s majestic words by giving them moral immediacy in the nation’s racial drama. King implored America to “live out the true meaning of its creed, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” (King, “I Have a Dream,” in King, A Testament, p. 219). King claims to have been profoundly influenced by Gandhi in his beliefs about nonviolence (“Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in Washington, ed., A Testament, pp. 38–39). Keith Miller, however, argues that “Gandhi exerted very little direct influence on King,” since King had “learned nonviolence almost entirely from American sources” (Miller, Voice of Deliverance, p. 88). But however he got hold of Gandhi’s ideas, there is little doubt that they profoundly influenced King’s beliefs and behavior. Finally, King paid homage to Du Bois’s greatness, and the influence on him of some of Du Bois’s ideas, in King, “Honoring Dr. Du Bois,” Freedom Ways 8, Spring 1968, reprinted in WE.B. Du Bois Speaks, Vol. 1, Speeches and Addresses, 1890–1919 (Foner, ed.).
22. Prathia Hall was the student whose prayer in Albany at a service King attended included the phrase “I have a dream” (Lischer, The Preacher King, p. 93). As Lischer notes, her inspired prayer was charged by a resonant notion in black communities of a dream or vision animating civil rights activists. King, moved by her prayer, seized its central metaphor and enlarged its yearning into a prophetic vision of hope for racial justice. Archibald Carey was the Chicago preacher, jurist, banker, and politician whose speech to the Republican National Convention gave King a galvanizing image for his “I Have a Dream” speech (Miller, Voice of Deliverance, p. 146). After quoting from “America the Beautiful,” Carey rose to oratorical splendor: “That’s exactly what we mean—from every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States, but for. . . the disinherited of all the earth—may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside, LET FREEDOM RING!” (cited in Miller, Voice of Deliverance, p. 146). King snatched this passage nearly word for word from Carey to cap his most famous oration.
23. Miller, Voice of Deliverance, pp. 192–193.
24. King, Strength to Love.
25. Lischer, The Preacher King, pp. 4–5.
26. Ibid.
27. In truth, however, the case of Milli Vanilli, the multimillion record selling pop duo who won 1990’s Grammy Award for best new artist, is not as simple as it seems. The duo, composed of black Europeans Rob and Fab, went down in infamy after it was revealed that they hadn’t sung a note on their award-winning album, and they were subsequently forced to return their Grammy. Rob and Fab were talented and handsome performers. Desperate to land a record deal, they agreed to be the faces for a studio-produced album of songs engineered by a manipulative white European producer. Neither the duo nor their producer had any idea that the album would do so well and that it would garner Milli Vanilli international fame and fortune. Disagreements between the duo and their “producer”—especially over Rob and Fab’s desire to represent their own work on wax—led to a falling out that forced the duo to confess their mendacity publicly. Despite their extreme embarrassment and shame, Rob and Fab eventually were able to make an album featuring their own work, proving that they had genuine talent. By then, however, their downfall had eclipsed widespread interest in their work. Later, they split up, and in 1998, Rob committed suicide after several unsuccessful attempts. Their story is not simply one of the massive attempt to defraud the public while capitulating to the seductions of fame, fortune, and women. It is as well a bitter and tragic update of an old phenomenon: a white music executive exploiting vulnerable black artists for commercial gain. The tragedy is that Rob and Fab’s authentic artistry was buried beneath the scandal of their misdeed. See “Behind the Music,” VHl, March 28, 1999.
28. Carson et al., eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., Volume 1: Called to Serve, January 1929–June 1951, and Volume 2: Rediscovering Precious Values, July 1951–November 1955; Genovese, The Southern Front, p. 162.
29. Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 66. Branch says that King borrowed his first sermon from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “Life Is What You Make It.”
30. Martin Luther King Jr., Papers Project, “The Student Papers of Martin Luther King Jr.,” pp. 28–29; Lewis, King, pp. 37–38; Branch, Parting the Waters, pp. 72, 76; Garrow, “King’s Plagiarism,” p. 90.
31. Martin Luther King Jr., Papers Project; Genovese, The Southern Front, p. 162.
32. Genovese, The Southern Front, pp. 164–168, 173.
33. Martin Luther King Jr., Papers Project, pp. 23–31.
34. Ibid., p. 27.
35. Genovese, The Southern Front, pp. 157–191, esp. p. 173; Martin Luther King Jr., Papers Project, p. 24. Also see Carson, Holloran, Luker, and Russell, “Martin Luther King Jr., as Scholar.”
36. Genovese, The Southern Front, p. 173. It is also interesting to note that during his second fall in Boston as a graduate student, King received a D+ on a philosophy paper, which had scribbled over it caustic comments from his professor. King subsequently earned three straight A’s on papers about Descartes, William James, and Mahayana Buddhism (Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 96). As with many other students, the awful embarrassment and ego deflation of a poor grade perhaps drove King to redouble his efforts, or perhaps it reinforced his habit of borrowing others’ work to express his ideas.
37. Martin Luther King Jr., Papers Project, p. 29; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 41.
38. Pappas, ed., Martin Luther King Plagiarism Story.
39. Lewis, “Failing to Know Martin Luther King Jr.,” p. 81.
40. Ibid., p. 83.
41. Ibid., p. 85.
42. Ibid., p. 82.
43. Garrow, “King’s Plagiarism,” p. 86.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Cone, “Martin Luther King Jr., Black Theology-Black Church,” pp. 409–420; Cone, “The Theology of Martin Luther King Jr.,” pp. 21–39; Cone, Martin and America and Risks of Faith; Baldwin, “Understanding Martin Luther King Jr., Within the Context of Southern Black Religious History,” pp. 1–26; Baldwin, “Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Church, and the Black Messianic Vision,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 12, Fall 1984–Spring 1985, pp. 93–108; Baldwin, There Is a Balm and To Make the Wounded Whole; Branch, Parting the Waters, esp. pp. 1–26; Miller, Voice of Deliverance, esp. pp. 13–40, 169–185; Lischer, The Preacher King.
47. Lewis, “Failing to Know Martin Luther King Jr.,” pp. 84–85; Genovese, The Southern Front, p. 175. The second reader of King’s dissertation, S. Paul Schilling, denied that there was “favoritism toward black students and therefore a lowering of standards for them,” and in response to a question about whether King “was given a free ride because of reverse racism,” responded “I would reject that completely” (Thelen, “Conversation Between S. Paul Schilling and David Thelen,” pp. 65, 77). It may be true that King’s thesis adviser, L. Harold DeWolf, was in King’s case a “lax mentor who did not demand of King the analytical precision that might have prepared him for a career of scholarly writing” (Carson, Holloran, Luker, and Russel, “Martin Luther King Jr.,” p. 101). But that contradicts what other students knew about DeWolf. “Once he took them under his wing. . . he really worked with them,” Cornish Rogers says. “He saw to it that all of them lived up to a certain quality that he demanded. And he kept after them until they did.” Furthermore, Rogers rejects the reverse racism argument, saying of DeWolf and Schilling, “I knew how tough they were on me. I had taken courses from both of them.” Therefore, it would be both unfair and inaccurate to overlook the plausible reason for DeWolf’s strict inattention to King: DeWolf was overburdened as one of the few Boston University professors who was willing to work with black students. Rogers says that DeWolf “took on a lot of dissertations from, especially, black students or others whom other professors would not take on. If you were willing to be guided by him, he would take on students whose topics were not in his field. I got the impression that he helped a lot of folks who had difficulty getting someone to be their readers” (Thelen, “Conversation Between Cornish Rogers and David Thelen,” pp. 53–55). Thus, the greater threat to black students was not racial paternalism, as bad as that might have been, but racist neglect, a far more harmful factor in the intellectual lives of black graduate students.
48. Lischer, The Preacher King, p. 58.
49. Garrow, “King’s Plagiarism,” p. 90.
50. “ Moreover, although many black scholars had passed through Boston University’s doctoral program in religion, one peculiar and tragic legacy of racism involved the pernicious self-doubts that could have plagued any developing black scholar. Qualities of self-worth, competence, talent, and skill are not developed in a vacuum, but are in part socially constructed and reproduced. In the mid-fifties it is certainly conceivable that a young talented black doctoral student who was uncertain of his real worth, despite the encouragement of his professors and colleagues. . . could be tempted to rely on work that had already been accepted and viewed as competent” (Dyson, Reflecting Black, p. 242). Also see Jerry Watt’s brief but powerful discussion of the sometimes crippling self-doubt and insecurity that can smother even the most able budding scholar. Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual, p. xii.
51. Garrow, “King’s Plagiarism,” p. 90.
52. Hegel, The Philosophy of History and Phenomenology of Spirit. Also see King, Stride Toward Freedom, pp. 95, 100–101.
53. Thelen, “Conversation Between Cornish Rogers and David Thelen,” p. 50.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., pp. 50–51.
56. John Williams captures the significance of the degree for those times when he writes: “And if a young man could take graduate studies in the white universities of the North, his status was increased manyfold. Morehouse College has sent countless numbers of its graduates north where an overwhelming majority of them have made good in professional and academic circles. The A.B. soon enough became almost nothing in terms of status; the M.A. became the target, and finally, the Ph.D. How grand to roll around on the tongue the word ‘doctor’! How marvelous to be addressed as ‘doctor’!” (Williams, The King God Didn’t Save, p. 152).
57. Thelen, “Conversation Between S. Paul Schilling and David Thelen,” pp. 76–77.
58. Reagon, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See,” pp. 113–117. Reagon says that in black culture, those who straddle “are born in one place, and we are sent to achieve in the larger culture, and in order to survive we work out a way to be who we are in both places or all places we move. . . . King was a straddler; he was who he was wherever he was—in the African-American church, on the march, in a rally, in jail, at the great and small universities, in Stockholm. We, his people, could look at him and feel him and know that he was one of us. He succeeded in embracing the sound of our forefathers, and he never left that sound ; no matter where he was, he was in the pulpit” (Ibid., pp. 114, 116).
59. Lischer, The Preacher King, p. 58. Lischer says that in “the fifteen years from 1942 to 1957 only five Boston students completed doctoral dissertations on race-related topics. King was not among them.”
60. Genovese, The Southern Front, p. 173. It should be noted that King is not now known for his facility with Plato, Hegel, formal logic, or modern philosophy—all of which proved to be in his hands little more than rhetorical fodder for Sunday sermons and inspired speeches. As David Lewis writes, King “was not an original philosopher, although, after Morehouse, it was perhaps the thing he most desired to be. There are legions of audiences that spent Sunday mornings, convocation periods, and evenings in auditoriums listening to him rhapsodically enumerate the principal ideas of Western philosophy from Thales to Miletus to Camus. . . . Such displays of encyclopedic knowledge sprang partly from a Baptist preacher’s love of showmanship, and Mike [Martin] was a super actor. Partly, too, this was the venial intellectual arrogance of a young man who held a doctorate from one of the nation’s better universities. But there was, undeniably, also an element of self-deception and self-mystification as to his philosophical acumen” (Lewis, King, pp. 44–45). King is known, however, for his brilliant abilities to translate the meanings of grand thinkers into the stuff of human action, thus enfleshing ideas with a genius that few others have possessed. It might have done King some good to have wrestled intellectually within the province of ideas that would motivate him to take to the streets out of disgust with merely thinking about the world. Some courses on Gandhi and race relations might have given him even deeper insight into the nature of the beast he was to confront when he left graduate school. As Marx famously said, many philosophers have thought about the world. The point was to change it. King took that imperative seriously and thus became a derivative philosopher but a world-class activist and a pioneer in social democracy.
61. Cone, Martin and Malcolm, p. 30.
62. Ibid., p. 31.
63. Thelen, “Conversation Between Cornish Rogers and David Thelen,” pp. 46–49. Also see Garrow, Bearing, p. 48; Branch, Parting the Waters, pp. 93–94. Apparently, however, these issues were not strongly enough debated for students like George Thomas, who was “one of a tiny minority of Negro students who lost interest in the Dialectical Society precisely because Jim Crow and other political matters were relegated to the joke period [held after the formal meeting]” (Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 93).
64. Cone, Martin and Malcolm, p. 31.
65. Thelen, “Conversation Between Cornish Rogers and David Thelen,” p. 50.
66. Lewis, “Failing to Know Martin Luther King Jr.,” p. 85. More exactly Lewis states of King and his professors that “neither he nor they knew who Martin Luther King was then.” On that basis, it is easy enough to see that in not knowing who King was then, they had no knowledge of who he would become.
67. “Thin Ice: ‘Stereotype Threat’ and Black College Students,” Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1999, pp. 44–54.
68. Ibid., p. 44.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., p. 45.
71. Ibid., p. 46.
72. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 24.
73. New York Times, Nov. 13, 1990, p. A30.
74. Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America, pp. 149–193; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, p. 157; Hine, Hine Sight, pp. 37–47.
1. These personal and political understandings can be described as paradigms, or theories that explain evidence or account for behavior, that shift over space and time. For a discussion about paradigm shifts in the history of science, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). According to Kuhn, revolutions in science occur when a given paradigm fails to account for an increasing degree of disconfirming evidence, called anomalies. Failure of the paradigm creates a crisis, and can be resolved only with the emergence of a new scientific paradigm. For an application of Kuhn’s work to moral philosophy and religious experience, see Jon Gunnemann, The Moral Meaning of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
2. The lack of a significant body of scholarly literature about Malcolm reveals more about the priorities, interests, and limitations of contemporary scholarship than about his importance as a revolutionary social figure. There is no dearth of interest in Malcolm, however, in the popular press, and though cultural curiosity about him is now undoubtedly at a peak, he has unfailingly provoked popular reflection about his life and career among journalists, activists, and organic intellectuals since his death in 1965. This is made abundantly clear in two book-length bibliographies on Malcolm: Lenwood G. Davis, with the assistance of Marsha L. Moore, comps., Malcolm X: A Selected Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984), and Timothy V. Johnson, comp., Malcolm X: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1986).
3. For an illuminating discussion of the philosophical issues and problems involved in understanding and explanation in the humanities, see Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 25–71.
4. For the notion of thick description, see Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973).
5. Michael Eric Dyson, “Probing a Divided Metaphor,” in Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 115–128. For discussion of Malcolm’s motivations for his autobiography, and Alex Haley’s role in shaping the narrative of Malcolm’s life, see also Arnold Rampersad, “The Color of His Eyes: Bruce Perry’s Malcolm and Malcolm’s Malcolm,” and Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and Black Cultural Politics During World War II,” both in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), pp. 117–134, 155–175, respectively.
6. For more of my comment on other books about Malcolm, see Dyson, “Probing a Divided Metaphor,” pp. 115–128.
7. For a good overview and discussion of these groups, see Raymond Hall, Black Separatism in the United States (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1978).
8. For an excellent discussion of the links between Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, of which he was a precursor, with discussions of SNCC, CORE, and the Black Panthers, see Robert Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 21–88. For a discussion of the economic programs and comparisons of the social visions of each group, see Hall, Black Separatism in the United States, especially pp. 139–196.
9. See especially John Ansbro, Martin Luther King Jr.: The Making of a Mind (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1982); Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); and David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1955–196 8 (New York: Morrow, 1986).
10. John Henrik Clarke, ed., Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (1969; Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990).
11. Charles Wilson, “Leadership Triumph in Leadership Tragedy,” in Malcolm X, ed. Clarke, pp. 36–37.
12. James Boggs, “The Influence of Malcolm X on the Political Consciousness of Black Americans,” and Wyatt Tee Walker, “Nothing but a Man,” in Malcolm X, ed. Clarke, pp. 52, 67. 13. Albert Cleage, “Myths About Malcolm X,” in ed. Clarke, p. 15.
13. Albert Cleage, “Myths About Malcolm X,” in Malcolm X, ed. Clarke, p. 15.
14. Oba T’shaka, The Political Legacy of Malcolm X (Richmond, Calif.: Pan Afrikan, 1983); Malcolm X, The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X, ed. Benjamin Karim [Goodman] (New York: Arcade, 1971).
15. T’shaka, Political Legacy of Malcolm X, pp. 244–245.
16. Ibid., pp. 57, 118.
17. Karim, Introduction to Malcolm X, End of White World Supremacy, pp. 21–22.
18. Gordon Parks, “Malcolm X: The Minutes of Our Last Meeting,” in Malcolm X, ed. Clark, p. 120.
19. On his repudiation of the white devil theory, see Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 362–363. For Malcolm’s desire to meet Robeson a month before his death, see Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 528.
20. I take up this issue in “Beyond Essentialism: Expanding African-American Cultural Criticism,” in Reflecting Black, pp. xiii– xxxiii.
21. The debate about cultural and racial authenticity as it relates to who is able to interpret Malcolm’s legacy legitimately has most recently occurred in writer-activist Amiri Baraka’s attacks on Spike Lee about Lee’s film portrait of Malcolm X before his film appeared. Implicit in Baraka’s charges that Lee would not adequately or accurately represent Malcolm is the belief that Baraka’s representation of Malcolm is superior. Baraka’s hagiographical recollections of Malcolm and his refusal to concede that Lee’s claims and representations of him may be equally valid are a prime example of the often insular intellectual climate surrounding debates about Malcolm. The irony here, of course, is that of all current black directors, with the possible exception of John Singleton, Spike Lee appears most suitably disposed to represent a vision of Malcolm that jibes with Baraka’s cultural views, given Lee’s Afrocentric film and aesthetic vocabulary and his neonationalist cultural perspective.
22. Malcolm X, “Answers to Questions at the Militant Labor Forum,” in By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter, by Malcolm X, ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), pp. 22–23.
23. See Henry Young’s two-volume study, Major Black Religious Leaders (Nashville: Abingdon, 1977, 1979).
24. Louis E. Lomax, When the Word Is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World (Cleveland: World, 1963), and To Kill a Black Man (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1968); James H. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare? (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991); Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, 2d ed. (1973; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979). For a discussion of moral saints, see Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints,” Journal of Philosophy 8 (1982): 419–439; and Robert Merrihew Adam’s response to her essay in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 164–173.
25. Of course, the classic treatment of the Black Muslims during the leadership of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X is C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon, 1961, 1973). Also very helpful is E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). For a treatment of the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, and it transition to orthodox Islamic practice and belief under Wallace Muhammad as the World Community of al-Islam in the West, see Clifton E. Marsh, From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Transition from Separatism to Islam, 1930–1980 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1984). For a historical and analytic treatment of the Nation of Islam, including its history under Elijah and Wallace Muhammad, and its separate revitalization as the second incarnation of the Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan, see Martha F. Lee, The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1988).
26. Lomax, When the Word Is Given, pp. 87, 68.
27. For an extended review of Cone’s book, see my essay “Martin and Malcolm,” in Reflecting Black, pp. 250–263.
28. Of course, Malcolm’s life and thought represented and addressed various aspects of both religious and revolutionary nationalism. In this regard, see John H. Bracey Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds., Black Nationalism in America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 505. Also see Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism. For a fine historical treatment of the heyday of black nationalism, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978).
29. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America, p. 151.
30. Ibid., p. 170.
31. Other works explore the relationship between King and Malcolm, along with comparative analyses of other intellectual and religious figures, in a religious and social ethical context. For two fine examples, see Peter Paris, Black Leaders in Conflict, 2d ed. (Louisville: Westminster Press/John Knox Press, 1991); and Robert M. Franklin, Liberating Visions: Human Fulfillment and Social Justice in African-American Thought (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1990).
32. Ralph Ellison, quoted in Robert B. Stepto and Michael S. Harper, “Study and Experience: An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” in Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, ed. Stepto and Harper (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 458.
33. For insightful treatments of Du Bois, see Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Manning Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne, 1986); and, of course, the definitive treatment of Du Bois to date, David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868 –1919 (New York: Holt, 1993). For the definitive treatment of Booker T. Washington, see Louis Harlan’s two volumes: Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972 ); and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
34. Lomax, To Kill a Black Man, p. 10.
35. George Breitman, “More Than One Way ‘To Kill a Black Man,’” in The Assassination of Malcolm X, ed. George Breitman, Herman Porter, and Baxter Smith (New York: Pathfinder, 1976), pp. 131–144.
36. Robert Franklin also makes use of Goldman’s notion of public moralist in his excellent book Liberating Vision ’s, a comparative study of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.
37. There is a swelling literature on the possible plots and theories of how Malcolm was murdered. While the close study of this literature is beyond my purposes here, it certainly constitutes an intriguing category of debate around Malcolm. See, for example, Breitman, Porter, and Smith, eds., Assassination of Malcolm X; and Karl Evanzz, The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 1992).
38. For arguments that Goldman’s views about Malcolm’s assassination support the official government story, and that the CIA and the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS)—the name of the New York secret police agency at the time of Malcolm’s death—were implicated in his assassination, see George Breitman, “A Liberal Supports the Government Version,” in Assassination of Malcolm X, ed. Breitman, Porter, and Smith, pp. 145–166.
39. Goldman, Death and Life of Malcolm X, p. 191.
40. Martin Luther King Jr., quoted in David Halberstam, “When ‘Civil Rights’ and ‘Peace’ Join Forces,” in Martin Luther King Jr.: A Profile, ed. C. Eric Lincoln, rev. ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), p. 202.
41. Clayborne Carson, “Malcolm and the American State,” in Malcolm X: The FBI File, ed. David Gallen (New York: Carroll Graf, 1991), p. 18.
42. Ibid.
43. See George Devereux, Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry, trans. Basia Miller Gulati and George Devereux (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1966), and Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967); Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962); Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Warner Books, 1979); Bruce Brown, Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life: Toward a Permanent Cultural Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973); Margaret MacDonald, ed., Philosophy and Analysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954); and relevant work of the Frankfurt school, including Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas. For a collection of essays by these authors, see Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1982). For a treatment of their work in relation to psychoanalytic theory, see C. Fred Alford, Narcissism: Socrates, the Frankfurt School, and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
44. Richard Lichtman, The Production of Desire: The Integration of Psychoanalysis into Marxist Theory (New York: Free Press, 1982), p. ix.
45. Ibid., pp. ix–x.
46. Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1969). For a more controversial psychobiographical treatment of a historical figure, see Erikson’s study of Protestant reformer Martin Luther, Young Man Luther (New York: Norton, 1958).
47. Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (1981; London: Free Association Books, 1989).
48. Ibid., pp. 1–2.
49. Ibid., p. xiii.
50. For an important historical examination of white working-class racism, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).
51. Other Marxist, socialist, and progressive approaches to race theory and racism attempt to theorize race as a socially, culturally, historically, and politically constructed category that undergoes change over space and time. See, for example, Cornel West, “Marxist Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 17–33; Lucius Outlaw, “Toward a Critical Theory of ‘Race,’” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 58–82; Michael Eric Dyson, “The Liberal Theory of Race,” and “Racism and Race Theory in the Nineties,” in Reflecting Black, pp. 132–156; Leonard Harris, “Historical Subjects and Interests: Race, Class, and Conflict,” and Lucius Outlaw, “On Race and Class, or, On the Prospects of ‘Rainbow Socialism,’” both in The Year Left Z: An American Socialist Yearbook, ed. Mike Davis et al. (London: Verso, 1987); and Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (London: Routledge & Regan Paul, 1986).
52. See Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1965).
53. Wolfenstein, Victims of Democracy, p. 37.
54. Bruce Perry, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1991).
55. Ibid., p. ix.
56. Ibid., p. x.
57. Ibid., pp. 41–42.
58. Ibid., p. 54.
59. For further discussion of this subject, see Dyson, “Beyond Essentialism,” pp. xiii–xxxiii.
60. For insightful discussions of the predicament of black intellectuals, see, of course, Harold Cruse’s pioneering The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967); Cornel West, “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” Cultural Critique, no. 1 (Fall 1985): 109–124; and Jerry Watts, “Dilemmas of Black Intellectuals,” Dissent, (1) Fall 1989: 501–507.
61. Christian ethicist Katie Cannon writes about the “white academic community’s flourishing publishing monopoly on the writing of black history, black thought, and black worldview. Black scholars did not abdicate their roles in these fields to white academicians. Blacks have written monographs, theses, conference papers, proposals, and outlines for books on various aspects of black reality since the 1700s, but white publishers did not give them serious consideration until the 1970s” (“Racism and Economics: The Perspective of Oliver C. Cox,” in The Public Vocation of Christian Ethics, ed. Beverly W. Harrison, Robert L. Stivers, and Ronald H. Stone [New York: Pilgrim, 1986], p. 121).
62. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; New York: Penguin, 1982).
63. Lomax, To Kill a Black Man, p. 142.
64. Goldman, Death and Life of Malcolm X, p. 189.
65. George Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary (New York: Pathfinder, 1967); Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1965); By Any Means Necessary; and Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, ed. Bruce Perry (New York: Pathfinder, 1989).
66. Breitman, Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 69.
67. Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, p. 159.
68. Breitman, Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 65.
69. Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, p. 159.
70. Given the variety and complexity of black nationalist thought, Malcolm could have accommodated and advocated such changes had he had sufficient time to link his broadened sense of struggle to the subsequent social and political activity he inspired. It is important, however, not to overlook the tensions between groups like SNCC and Malcolm while he lived. As Lomax says: “. . . Malcolm was never able to effect an alliance with the young black militants who were then plotting the crisis that is now upon the republic. His trip to Selma was arranged by SNCC people but no alliance resulted. The Black Power people would later raise Malcolm to sainthood but they would not work with him, nor let him work with them, in life” (To Kill a Black Man, pp. 157–158).
71. Breitman, Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 27.
72. Ibid., p. 34.
73. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, p. 128, quoted in Breitman, Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 35.
74. Malcolm X, “The Harlem ‘Hate-Gang’ Scare,” in Malcolm X Speaks, p. 65.
75. Ibid., p. 69.
76. Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, pp. 159–160.
77. See Leon Trotsky, Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination (New York: Pathfinder, 1978).
78. C. L. R. James, interview in Visions of History, ed. MARHO (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 270.
79. I do not mean to rule out other genres in which Malcolm’s life and accomplishments may be examined. For an example of a science fiction approach to his life and thought, see Kent Smith, Future X (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1989), which appears to have been influenced as much by Schwarzennegger’s Terminator films as by ideological currents in African-American culture.
1. Gary Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984), p. 109.
2. Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (New York: John Day, 1943), p. 153.
3. Ibid., p. 154.
4. For a good social characterization of the figures who surrounded King in the civil rights movement, see Taylor Branch’s commanding social history, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1955–1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
5. This quote is from Benjamin Mays’s introduction to Lerone Bennett, What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King Jr. (Chicago: Johnson, 1976), p. ii.
6. Hook, The Hero in History, p. 157.
7. Bennett, What Manner of Man, p. 131.
8. James P. Hanigan, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Foundations of Nonviolence (New York: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 31–32.
9. Wills, Cincinnatus, p. 132.
10. Conrad Cherry, God ’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 6.
11. Paul G. King, Kent Maynard, and David O. Woodyard, Risking Liberation: Middle Class Powerlessness and Social Heroism (Atlanta, Ga.: John Knox Press, 1988), p. 15.
12. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. iv.
13. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have A Dream,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 219.
14. Ibid., p. 219.
15. Ibid., p. 217.
16. Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), pp. 74–75.
17. These terms refer to the important works of James Scott. See especially Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
18. These Census Bureau figures are usually reported on annually by Robert Greenstein in Christianity and C risis. For a good example of such reporting, see John Bickerman and Robert Greenstein, “High and Dry on the Poverty Plateau,” Christianity and C risis, October 28, 1985, pp. 411–412.
19. For example, the Supreme Court is now, in effect, “Reagan’s Court,” due to Reagan’s appointees, who legally enact his conservative political agenda. For commentary on how the Supreme Court has turned back the clock on affirmative action, see my “Deaffirmation,” Nation, July 3, 1989, pp. 4–5.
20. For a brief exploration of racism in both segments of society, see my article “The Two Racisms,” Nation, July 3, 1989, pp. 4–5.
21. Washington, ed., Testament of Hope, p. 38.
22. Roger Hatch describes the relation between the perspective of the mature Martin Luther King Jr., and Jackson’s vision for America, and addresses Jackson’s evolution into the second phase of the civil rights movement, which concentrates on equity in every area of life (particularly economic justice), in Beyond Opportunity: Jesse Jackson ’s Vision for America (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), esp. pp. 11–23.
23. Washington, ed., Testament of Hope, pp. 67, 70.
1. Rose, Black Noise; Neal, What the Music Said; Boyd, Am I Black Enough for You? George, Hip-Hop America.
2. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollection of an Indian Official, and Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude, 1849–1850; Barren, The Rastafarians; Dyczkowski, The Doctrine of Vibration.
3. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels and Bandits; Seal, The Outlam Legend; Duncan, Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons.
4. Boccaccio, Decameron.
5. Davis and Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography; Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography.
6. Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences; Massey and Demon, American Apartheid; Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged and When Work Disappears; Kelley, Yo’ Mama ’s Disfunktional.
7. Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement; Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Dittmer, Local People; Fairclough, Race and Democracy; Hine, Hine Sight; Giddings, When and Where I Enter; Garrow, Bearing the Cross; Carson, In Struggle; White, Too Heavy a Load; Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind ; Branch, Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire.
8. Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music; Wolff, You Send Me.
1. These statistics, as well as an examination of the social, economic, political, medical, and educational conditions of young black men and public policy recommendations for the social amelioration of their desperate circumstances, are found in a collection of essays edited by Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species.
2. William Julius Wilson has detailed the shift in the American political economy from manufacturing to service employment and its impact upon the inner city and the ghetto poor, particularly upon black males who suffer high rates of joblessness (which he sees as the source of many problems in the black family) in The Truly Disadvantaged. For an analysis of the specific problems of black males in relation to labor force participation, see Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams Jr., eds., A Common Destiny, pp. 301, 308–312.
3. I have explored the cultural expressions, material conditions, creative limits, and social problems associated with rap, in “Rap, Race and Reality,” “The Culture of Hip- Hop,” “2 Live Crew’s Rap: Sex, Race and Class,” “As Complex As They Wanna Be: 2 Live Crew,” “Tapping into Rap,” “Performance, Protest and Prophecy in the Culture of Hip-Hop,” and in Jim Gardner, “Taking Rap Seriously: Theomusicologist Michael Eric Dyson on the New Urban Griots and Peripatetic Preachers (An Interview)” (see chap. 3, this volume).
4. I have in mind here the criticism of liberal society, and the forms of moral agency it both affords and prevents, that has been gathered under the rubric of communitarianism, ranging from MacIntyre’s After Virtue to Bellah et al.’s Habits of the Heart .
5. I am indebted to Christine Stansell for this characterization of how Singleton departs from Capra’s depictions of community in his films.
6. See Mike Davis and Sue Riddick’s brilliant analysis of the drug culture in “Los Angeles: Civil Liberties between the Hammer and the Rock.”
7. For an insightful discussion of the relationship between the underground or illegitimate economy, and people exercising agency in resisting the worse injustices and effects of the legitimate economy, see Don Nonini, “Everyday Forms of Popular Resistance.”
8. For a recent exploration of the dynamics of social interaction between police as agents and symbols of mainstream communal efforts to regulate the behavior and social place of black men, and black men in a local community, see Elijah Anderson, Streetwise, pp. 163–206.
9. According to this logic, as expressed in a familiar saying in many black communities, black women “love their sons and raise their daughters.” For a valiant, although flawed, attempt to get beyond a theoretical framework that implicitly blames black women for the condition of black men, see Clement Cottingham, “Gender Shift in Black Communities.” Cottingham attempts to distance himself from arguments about a black matriarchy that stifles black male social initiative and moral responsibility. Instead he examines the gender shifts in black communities fueled by black female educational mobility and the marginalization of lower-class black males. But his attempt is weakened, ironically, by a prominently placed quotation by James Baldwin, which serves as a backdrop to his subsequent discussions of mother–son relationships, black male–female relationships, and black female assertiveness. Cottingham writes: “Drawing on Southern black folk culture, James Baldwin, in his last published work, alluded to black lower-class social patterns which, when set against the urban upheaval among the black poor from the 1960s onward, seem to encourage this gender shift. He characterizes these lower-class social patterns as ‘a disease peculiar to the Black community called sorriness.’ ‘It is,’ Baldwin observes, ‘a disease that attacks black males. It is transmitted by Mama, whose instinct is to protect the Black male from the devastation that threatens him from the moment he declares himself a man.’
Apart from its protectiveness toward male children, Baldwin notes another dimension of ‘sorriness.’ ‘Mama,’ he writes, ‘lays this burden on Sister from whom she expects (or indicates she expects) far more than she expects from Brother; but one of the results of this all too comprehensible dynamic is that Brother may never grow up—in which case the community has become an accomplice to the Republic.’ Perceptively, Baldwin concludes that the differences in the socialization of boys and girls eventually erode the father’s commitment to family life.”
When such allusive but isolated ethnographic comments are not placed in an analytical framework that tracks the social, political, economic, religious, and historical forces that shape black (female) rearing practices and circumscribe black male–female relations, they are more often than not employed to blame black women for the social failure of black children, especially boys. The point here is not to suggest that black women have no responsibility for the plight of black families. But most social theory has failed to grapple with the complex set of forces that define and delimit black female existence, too easily relying upon anecdotal tales of black female behavior preventing black males from flourishing, and not examining the shifts in the political economy, the demise of low-skilled, high-waged work, the deterioration of the general moral infrastructure of many poor black communities, the ravaging of black communities by legal forces of gentrification, and illegal forces associated with crime and drugs, etc. These forces, and not black women, are the real villains.
10. For a perceptive analysis of the economic conditions that shape the lives of black women, see Julianne Malveaux, “The Political Economy of Black Women.”
11. The peculiar pain that plagues the relationships between black men and black women across age, income, and communal strata was on bold and menacing display in the confrontation between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill during Senate hearings to explore claims by Hill that Thomas sexually harassed her while she worked for him at two governmental agencies. Their confrontation was facilitated and constructed by the televisual medium, a ready metaphor for the technological intervention into contemporary relations between significant segments of the citizenry. Television also serves as the major mediator between various bodies of public officials and the increasingly narrow publics at whose behest they perform, thus blurring the distinctions between public good and private interest. The Hill-Thomas hearings also helped expose the wide degree to which the relations between black men and black women are shaped by a powerful white male gaze. In this case, the relevant criteria for assessing the truth of claims about sexual harassment and gender oppression were determined by white senatorial surveillance.
12. Thus, it was unexceptional during the civil rights movement for strong, articulate black women to be marginalized, or excluded altogether, from the intellectual work of the struggle. Furthermore, concerns about feminist liberation were generally overlooked, and many talented, courageous women were often denied a strong or distinct institutional voice about women’s liberation in the racial liberation movement. For a typical instance of such sexism within civil rights organizations, see Carson’s discussion of black female dissent within SNCC, in Clayborne Carson, In Struggle, pp. 47–48.
13. For insightful claims and descriptions of the marginal status of black feminist and womanist concerns in black communities and for helpful explorations of the complex problems faced by black feminists and womanists, see bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman; Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues; Audre Lorde’s Sister/Outsider; and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Garden .
14. Of course, many traditional conceptions of virtue display a theoretical blindness to structural factors that circumscribe and influence the acquisition of traditional moral skills, habits, and dispositions and the development of alternative and non-mainstream moral skills. What I mean here is that the development of virtues, and the attendant skills that must be deployed in order to practice them effectively, is contingent upon several factors: where and when one is born, the conditions under which one must live, the social and communal forces that limit and define one’s life, and so on. These factors color the character of moral skills that will be acquired, shape the way in which these skills will be appropriated, and even determine the list of skills required to live the good life in different communities. Furthermore, these virtues reflect the radically different norms, obligations, commitments, and socioethical visions of particular communities. For a compelling critique of MacIntyre’s contextualist universalist claim for the prevalence of the virtues of justice, truthfulness, and courage in all cultures and the implications of such a critique for moral theory, see Alessandro Ferrara, “Universalisms: Procedural, Contextual, and Prudential.” For an eloquent argument that calls for the authors of the communitarian social vision articulated in Habits of the Heart to pay attention to the life, thought, and contributions of people of color, see Vincent Harding, “Toward a Darkly Radiant Vision of America’s Truth: A Letter of Concern, An Invitation to Re-Creation.”
1. See Larry Black, “The Man in the Mirror,” Maclean ’s, May 2, 1988, p. 67; Michael Goldberg and David Handelman, “Is Michael Jackson for Real?” Rolling Stone, September 24, 1987, p. 55; Jay Cooks and Denise Worrell, “Bringing Back the Magic,” Time, July 16, 1984, p. 63; and Jim Miller and Janet Huck, “The Peter Pan of Pop,” Newsweek, January 10, 1983, pp. 52–54.
2. See Peter Petre, “The Traumas of Molding Crazes into Cash,” Fortune, July 23, 1984, p. 48; Alex Ben Block, “Just One More Thriller,” Forbes 400, October 1, 1984, pp. 232–234; “Michael Jackson Says ‘Beat It’ to Bootleggers,” Businessweek, June 4, 1984, p. 36; and Goldberg and Handelman, “Is Michael Jackson for Real?” p. 140.
3. See, for example, “The Prisoner of Commerce,” New Republic, April 16, 1984, p. 4.
4. For an explication of the European (especially French) contexts of postmodernism, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); for an exploration of contemporary American postmodernism, see Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983); see also Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); see also his essay, “Mapping the Postmodern,” in New German Critique 33 (Fall 1984), for a historical situating of German, French, and American arguments on postmodernism. Also see the excellent collection of essays edited by Andrew Ross, Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
5. Quoted in Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
6. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 145 (1984): 53–91.
7. Anders Stephanson, “Regarding Postmodernism: A Conversation with Fredric Jameson,” in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 1–12.
8. Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1988), pp. 168–170.
9. Hal Foster, Postmodern Culture (Concord, Mass.: Pluto, 1985), pp. xii–xiii.
10. Michael Jackson, Moonwalk (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 13. All future references will be cited in the text.
11. Cornel West makes this salient point about the use of a language of rights by African-American religionists involved in the civil rights movement, in West, Prophetic Fragments, pp. 22–24.
12. For a useful summary of the meaning of ritual in religious experience, see Leszek Kolakowski, Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 165–170.
13. For Bakhtin on carnival, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968).
14. See Cornel West’s insightful discussion of a Christian understanding of democracy in his Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), especially the introduction and chapter 4.
15. Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 10.
16. Michael Jackson, “Thriller,” Thriller, Epic/CBS Records, 1983.
17. Michael Jackson, “Bad,” Bad, Epic/CBS Records, 1987.
18. Michael Jackson, performer, “Man in the Mirror” (co-written by Siedah Garrett and George Ballard), Bad, Epic/CBS Records, 1987.
19. For a penetrating examination of rock music videos and a plausible way of categorizing MTV videos, see E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987), esp. chap. 4. Many of Jackson’s videos are more closely akin to short films, and thus demand a reading that regards them as such. Also, the religious, cultural, and racial contexts of Jackson’s video films must be examined, as I attempt in my analysis of two of Jackson’s video films and of a live performance on the 1988 Grammy’s telecast.
20. For the effect of Niebuhr on King’s thought, see his essay, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 35–36.
21. Goldberg and Handelman, “Is Michael Jackson for Real?” p. 138.
22. Robert Sam Anson, Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry (New York: Random House, 1987). For a hard-hitting, highly critical review essay of Anson’s book, see Michael Dyson, “Edmund Perry: The Help That Hurts,” Christianity and Crisis 48 (1988): 17–21, expanded as “The Liberal Theory of Race,” chap. 9, this volume.
1. I do not mean here a theory of commodification that does not accentuate the forms of agency that can function even within restrictive and hegemonic cultural practices. Rather, I think that, contrary to elitist and overly pessimistic Frankfurt School readings of the spectacle of commodity within mass cultures, common people can exercise “everyday forms of resistance” to hegemonic forms of cultural knowledge and practice. For an explication of the function of everyday forms of resistance, see Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance .
2. For a critical look at Jordan behind the myth, see Sam Smith, The Jordan Rules (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).