The keynote speaker for Black History Month will be Dr. Michael Eric Dyson. The noted author, cultural critic, university professor, public intellectual and ordained Baptist minister will be on campus Monday, February 24 and will present a lecture on race relations in America . As one of America's leading intellectuals, he reveals the hidden rules of race that dominate politics, society, and cultural life. Best known for taking black studies "to the streets" with his passion for popular culture and his commitment to urban youth, many including The New Yorker says he is becoming "the most dynamic force in the American intellectual arena since the fifties."
Dyson, who earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University, has taught at Hartford Seminary, Chicago Theological Seminary and at Brown University. He is presently Professor of Communication Studies, and Director of the Institute of African-American Research, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written for a broad variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Century, Vibe Magazine, Emerge Magazine and Rolling Stone. He received the 1992 Award of Excellence in Journalism for Magazines from the National Association of Black Journalists.
His first book, Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism , won a 1994 Gustavus Myers Center Award for an Outstanding Book on Human Rights. Dyson's next book, Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X, was named a notable book of 1994 by the New York Times Book Review, and by the Philadelphia Inquirer. It has also garnered critical praise from The Washington Post, U.S.A. Today and The New Yorker, which calls Making Malcolm "a study that is as substantive and comprehensive as 'public' cultural criticism of such a figure can hope to be." Published in 1995, Between God and Gangstra Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture is a provocative collection of essays on black culture. Copies of his latest work, Race Rules: Navigating the Color Lines, are available in our bookstore.
To get an appreciation of his work, below are excerpts from some of his publications. The entire WPI campus community is invited to attend his lecture for what should prove to be a thought provoking discussion.
...In the end, we can only have racial progress if we take the lessons of this case seriously. Despite the undeniable advances we have made, despite the enormous strides taken, we remain a deeply divided society. (Although this case framed our racial problems in black and white, we must certainly realize that there are all sorts of racial and ethnic tensions brewing that involve Asian, Native American, and Latino communities.) We cannot wish our differences away. We must work to increase our understanding of the contexts, pretexts, and subtext of race. Then we must do something concrete about racial suffering and racial injustice. We have the negative examples of O. J. Simpson and Mark Fuhrman, the two men at the center of this trial, to spur us on past their, and our, tragic limitations and failures. Simpson, in particular, is a man without a country. The white folk who once adored him, and whose acceptance Simpson still seeks, now despise him. The blacks Simpson has never shown much interest in, and who have welcomed him, do not inspire his allegiance.
Black Youth and Pop Culture
...It's clear too, that '50s rock and roll, '60s soul music, '70s R&B, '80s new jack swing, and '90s hip hop soul have touched on themes that rap has addressed, though often in a dramatically different style. Some of the most important black music of the '60s and '70s, for instance, attempted to reconcile the political demands of a new black consciousness with the changing rules of domestic life. This music attempted to join erotic desire to its political ambitions. Thus, Marvin Gaye followed his 1971 masterpiece "What's Going On" with his brilliant 1973 release "Let's Get It On," moving from the social to the sexual sphere in exploring the complex dimensions of black culture. While hip-hop addresses these same concerns, its ideological orientation, and therefore its artistic direction, is almost reversed. With the increasing attacks on the black family as an unreliable space to shape sexuality in socially acceptable forms, a lot of hip-hoppers try to join politics to erotic desire. Many artists move from the sexual center of rap to the varieties of political consciousness hip-hop manages to embrace along its cutting edges.
State of black leadership
...Before he decided not to run for the presidency, Colin Powell was a compelling figure for many whites because of the hope that he could heal racial conflicts by transcending race. His appeal as a potential racial healer had barely taken hold when the verdicts from the Simpson trail raised the stakes of Powell's crossover ambitions. Before the Simpson verdicts, the general's political appeal depended on his rejection of racial bad faith. For many Americans, racial bad faith was viewed as resistance to the politics of radical integration. After the verdict, Powell's plausibility as a presidential candidate depended on a negative charisma: his ability to portray the transcendence of race as the suppression of race. For many whites, nothing short of Powell's rejection of any sort of racial solidarity with blacks would prove satisfying. Where there is a conflict between racial and national identity, race loses its power to hold the trust or interest of those outside its ranks. Why? Because black identity, at least, is seen as particular, and, therefore, limited. The transcendence, or suppression, of black identity becomes the condition for its survival. This is the paradox that Powell's success both reinforces and obscures.
...For many whites, Powell is how the American dream looks when it wears black. For them, his strong endorsement of American citizenship neutralizes the strong suspicions blacks possess of unqualified loyalty to our country. Powell's heroism is rooted in military service and the moral discipline that we like to believe comes with the territory. He eases the fears of many whites who view black masculinity as a symbol of moral chaos and social disorder. If Powell loomed as a potential political savior, it is in large part because he appeared to bleach the dangerous elements of black masculinity in the curing pool of patriotism.
For the past twelve years, fateful changes in American culture have sapped our nation's ability to speak about race with informed passion. The collapse of the will to undo the legacy of past racial injustice with immediate intervention, through either governmental sponsorship or the beneficent public action of the private sector, has left a gaping hole in the patchwork of remedies that at our most hopeful moments we imagined could remove the bruising inequalities that continue to haunt us.
Also, the fierce rivalry among previously despised or ignored groups for a visible stake in the politics of public attention has masked the source of their anxieties; that too often, social goods are parceled out as so many concessions to demands by the strongest group in a system of reward held hostage by zero-sum thinking. African-Americans, women, Latinos and Latinas, and Asian-Americans are often pitted against one another in a battle for scarce resources - a sour arrangement indeed, for they aren't the source of one another's primary pains. In this light, all the noise about "special interest groups" seems a disingenuous denial of the factors that led minorities to adopt competition as their stock-in-trade to begin with.
Moreover, the thinly veiled contempt for racial minorities during the Reagan and Bush administrations unleashed a racist backlash, the worst effects of which had been held in check by the gains of the civil rights movement and the altered social landscape it brought into existence. For those who point out that even that arrangement was dishonest (that it simply shifted racism underground, concealing the persistence of bigotry that conforms the American character to its ugly, irrational image), a word of caution is in order. To paraphrase Ernest Becker, the American character may be a lie, but it's a vital lie. Some forms of restraint that protect the possibility of rational dialogue and humane behavior must be retained as we work through the occasionally deadly consequences of reordering our unjust racial practices.