The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Read Online Free

And there were quite a few choices, including colored, Negro, black, Afro-American, and later, of course, African-American. Which one you answered to depended a lot on how old you were, what part of the country you lived in, and how willing you were to examine yourself in the wake of a huge change in social status. Mrs. James took us on a whirlwind tour of black struggle. She took special delight in pointing out the exuberant champions of our survival: ministers and cowboys, lawyers and seamstresses, secretaries and inventors, railroad workers and politicians, folk who used their minds, pens, feet, mouths, and deeds to prove that we weren’t savages or coons and that we deserved respect for our intelligence and morality. At the very least, their example showed that we were the equals of our condescending “saviors.”
    In unfolding her lesson plan, Mrs. James persuaded me that my skills and talents, like those of our leaders, must help the struggle for black freedom. As long as I have understood what an intellectual is—especially one who rises from a people for whom history is not a blackboard, like it is for those with power, but a skuzzy washrag with grime and stains—I have believed that she should combat half-truths about the people she loves. To skeptics, that smacks of provincialism, propaganda, and the hijacking of knowledge for ethnic therapy and consolation. To be sure, if that’s what we end up with, we’re mere replicas of the very forces we decry as inexorably biased. But such fear is relieved when we consider the context in which our intellectual lives play out. The life of the mind is tied to the public good, and unavoidably, at least initially, the promise of this good is defined by the well-being of my tribe and kin. If there are insuperable barriers to our getting a fair share of what everyone deserves, the public good is diminished. Under these circumstances, it is, at best, a disappointing abstraction of a social ideal that is placed unjustly beyond our reach. The identification of the public good with what’s good for my group has limits and dangers, of course, since at times the public good may run counter to my group’s benefit. In fact, in many instances—say, when the Voting Rights Act undercut the monopoly on political power for Southern whites, or when the Equal Rights Amendment gave women the chance to compete with men for jobs—the public good was served by cutting off an unjust group privilege. We have to be willing to wish for every other group what we wish for our own if we are to make the identification of the public good with the good of our group work. The public good is hampered when we idolize our slice of the social welfare and elevate our group above all others in the political order. Such a thing is bad enough if groups simply aspire to unjust social dominance, but if they’ve got the power to get it done, it greatly harms the commonweal.
    If I say that as an intellectual I want to tell the truth about black culture and the folk I love, and thus contribute to the black freedom struggle, I’m not seeking to hog the social good for my group. I simply want to make society better by improving the plight of black and other oppressed people. Our plight affects the whole: if we prosper, society is better; if we go down, the larger culture suffers as well. It’s just as harmful for our society to embrace misinformation and half-truth about black folk as it is for blacks to keep silent about it. On that misinformation and half-truth rests public policies and social theories that take a yeoman’s intellectual effort to erode even a little. God knows what effort is needed to fight centuries of racial distortion and the fear of black identity fueled by stereotypes, myths, and outright lies. The struggle to specify the complex character of black life—how it is far more flexible, durable, and intricate, and contradictory and elusive too, than is usually acknowledged, even among some