Falling Off the Race Relations Tightrope (Constantly)

From Der Spiegel‘s recent interview with Michael Eric Dyson on Obama, race and his [highly likely] U.S. presidency:

SPIEGEL: It would obviously be an enormous achievement if Barack Obama were to be elected president. What would he be able to change for black Americans?

Dyson: Well, let’s start with what he can’t change. Given the investment of black people in Mr. Obama’s success, you would think that he was a kind of political Santa Claus, that the day after he was elected, black people wouldn’t have to pay taxes or would get a get-out-of-jail-free card. But social inequalities will still be real. Ironically enough, he has imposed upon himself certain restrictions when it comes to showing a willingness to be susceptible to the demands of black people.

SPIEGEL: In order not to lose the support of white people?

Dyson: That is exactly the tragedy — that he cannot afford to show too much sympathy and support for black people. Were he to do that, it would ruin him politically. On the positive side, at least black kids can honestly say: I can grow up one day to be president. Obama will open the ceiling of possibility for so many other careers as well.

SPIEGEL: What concrete policies should he try to advance?

Dyson: What he is doing now is quite effective, that is, advancing policies that may be seen as race neutral but end up helping black people nonetheless.

I shouldn’t just quote the tame parts of the interview, should I?  Because I’m more than pissed.  

In my (completely humble) opinion, Dyson’s perspective of The Black Experience (because, folks, there is only one) revolves around the poor inner-city Black youth who runs all up into The Man every day.  The Man, often White and armed with oodles of cash, constantly slaps this poor inner-city Black youth down with in-your-face down and dirty racism.   The poor Black youth can’t walk without a Ferragamo-clad shoe delaying his sojourn.  The poor Black person can’t work without a well-aimed nigger-filled diatribe from The Man’s mouth.  The poor Black person can’t relieve himself because The Man covered his latrine with a sheet of Saran Wrap; so now that poor Black person — mired in their own shit, bruised from walking so long to reach a very short distance, and broken psychologically – hates The Man irrevocably and carries that racism-motivated anger everywhere they go.

After explaining this fantastical reality, Dyson then talks about how Obama did not experience the same problems; therefore he chose to live in the Black community, to “marry a black woman with the classic biography of a black overachiever” (as Cordula Meyer from Spiegel puts it and Dyson tacitly agrees), and to cobble together a black identity that resonates with the True Black Experience and the Palest of the Pale.

Excuse me for wiping my ass with this concept.  Too much bullshit lodged in it.  

This interview, insightful as it is at briefly pointing about how Obama must universalize issues that have profoundly disproportionate effects on the black community (because he must and he does), churns out stereotype after stereotype about poor Black people in the United States.  I shouldn’t be surprised, and I’m not.  I’m more ashamed and disappointed about the views receiving a public forum and possibly being taken as unbiased factual accounts about Black America.  Take this exchange (with added emphasis sprinkled throughout):

SPIEGEL: One of your central theses is the black community in America can be divided into two groups. You’ve said that there is an “afristocracy” made up of the 1.1 million African-Americans who earn at least $100,000 a year. And then there are poor people who live in the ghetto — the “ghettocracy.” Rich black people, you have written, hate poor black people.

Dyson: I know that that’s a harsh statement. But no other group has internalized its self-hatred as much as blacks have. It would be difficult to find other groups who behave similarly in that their most esteemed members berate its poorest members. The entertainer Bill Cosby is the most obvious example.

SPIEGEL: Cosby argues that you cannot fault racism for the fact that 60 percent of black children grow up with only one parent. What is so wrong with saying: Study hard, work hard, shun the culture of despair?

Dyson: There’s nothing wrong with that. I am the last one to say that poor blacks should not behave. But Cosby said that since girls become mothers so early, you are going to have to have a DNA card in the ghetto to avoid making love to your grandmother. I find that an example of black self-hatred.

First of all, $100,000+ income may have been rich 10 or 15 years ago (or a shorter time than that); but you’d likely be hard-pressed to find it pushing above middle class these days because of the recession our country has danced around with the change of each season.  

Secondly, no other race holds contempt for its poorer members the way Black folks do?  Really?!  Walk into a college town and ask White students about how they feel about the townies — the ones who don’t commute and share classes with them.  Hell, mention poor White trash among White folk, for that matter.  Ask affluent Latinos and Latinas about unskilled Latino immigrants and cholos y cholas.  Ask affluent Asians about those who haven’t made it in their communities.  The contempt is there, it’s class-based, and perhaps it would have been clearer to explain that it is more culturally acceptable for rich and poor Americans at any level to hold contempt for poor Black Americans than for most minorities and whites in the same position because of how Black Americans are utterly shafted in popular culture.  (But wait, according to you Black Americans “also watch more television than anybody else.”  Unspoken adjectives in that context: poor, irresponsible, childbearing.  My bad.)

Finally, while talking about internalized self-hatred, a person shouldn’t talk about how he’s “the last one to say poor blacks should not behave.”  What standard are we using for self-hatred?  Because passive classist paternalism, Mr. Dyson, is as telling as the unconscious racism in White America from that Dr. King quote with which you agreed in the beginning of the interview.  

I speak with growing disappointment at race experts like Dyson showing a television-inspired approach to dealing with class, education, and lifestyle differences throughout Black America.  For example, alleged “suburban-versus-urban” universalization doesn’t capture the dynamic of rural Americans (of different races, mind you, including Black folk) with the same piss-poor public school conditions as schools in the most metropolitan areas.  Obama’s white family members were working class; he didn’t quite live the fantasies of The Man through his blood ties.  I suspect if Obama’s father was in his life he would have had a different, yet racially relevant reason to absorb what he calls “the certainty of the tribe” — African immigrants have their own biases and racist obstacles to confront (such as being mislabeled categorically as Muslims, backward, or simply Black — all are problematic), and perhaps that’s why his father traveled back to Kenya.  Perhaps that’s why absent from all discourse at the recent debates was a realistic, honest, and thorough treatment on the issue of immigration in the United States.  I wonder if Obama would send his father to the back of a citizenship line or charge him a fine if he stuck around to be an American success story like “his black overachiever wife” Michelle (the woman with no name in this interview who contradicts most of the theses put forward by Dyson). 

Oh, that’s different… ‘cept when it’s not.

I can’t stand the fact that Dyson proudly describes his background from the inner city (The Black Experience), went to a “suburban private school” and got kicked out, explains how he was working class and even on welfare (ooooh!) for four years, and from there put himself on the path of seeking higher education — and then he still sets himself apart as an empathetic observer of the people in the same boat in which he rowed to where he is and stereotypes them abysmally.  His own brother (alternately referred to as The Dark One for many reasons) grew up in the same realities as Dyson and sits in jail for a murder that people believe he did not commit — but rather than challenge the institutional racism that likely has helped keep him in jail for 20 years (because you know former drug dealers must atone for the murders of others because they drag property values down), he attributes the difference in their lifestyles to colorism*  and explains his brother is a “transformed man” by his incarceration.  

Isn’t Special Negro Syndrome another endemic characteristic of self-hatred, Mr. Dyson?   

Seriously, if Dyson put himself on this tightrope he claims Obama is walking, his ass would’ve fallen off by step four.  I likely shouldn’t be as upset as I am except when I see people like Dyson say, “My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more complex and that the truths of their suffering have to be told honestly.”  

I’m not seeing the complexity of the truth of a poor Black American.  A bundle of stereotypes and superficial divisions do not a complex, empathetic and nuanced treatment of Black America make.

*Dyson, you are not light bright and calling a school and telling them your grades so you can continue your education — as you describe in the article as your initial gateway into reaching your Georgetown professorship — does not equal people loving your purty light-skinded self.  People don’t like when people degrade intelligence for racial favoritism; the counter dynamic is equally loathsome, and in your case, highly suspect.  Sit your fool ass down with that shit, B.