The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (57 page)

The second tension in regard to King’s heroism rests on the fact that, although his achievements merit praise and honor, those accomplishments are related to a larger tradition of African-American protest, as well as traditions of liberal democracy. For instance, the King Holiday reminds us that by celebrating King’s life, and career in particular, America celebrates the profound accomplishments of black America in general. This recognition offers to American intellectual life the vital resources of a living Afro-American intellectual tradition that can continue to inform, challenge, and even transform American discourse about race, class, justice, freedom, and equality. More specifically, since, as I have stated above, King’s life was developed and shaped in the ethos of a black church worldview and since the locus classicus of his moral vision was the Afro-American religious experience, our attention is redirected back to that experience as a crucial resource for the maintenance and extension of King’s moral vision, in alliance with other progressive sociopolitical, historical, and economic thought.

Indeed, the notion that King himself was the producer, not the product, and the cause, not the effect, of Afro-American liberation potentials that had been long latent, and at times vitally visible, in the fabric of our national experience is entirely alien to King’s thought. Although he believed historical forces, under the direction of a demanding but loving providence, had arranged his ascension to a leadership position, he always believed that he articulated what many black people thought, knew, and held to be true. King obviously understood that he was the voice for a protest movement that had been growing for a long while and that had finally gathered the strength to resist the cumulative evils visited upon black people by the apartheid-like conditions in the American South. In fact, in speaking about the experience that initially catapulted him into international fame, King wrote:

The recognition that King was part of a larger tradition disallows America to escape its obligation to those King represented by relegating his thought to the fixed and static past. Instead, it forces America to critically engage and constantly examine the dynamic contemporary expressions of the thought and practices emerging from the tradition that birthed and buttressed King.

Furthermore, the need for a reinvigorated moral vision can only be immediately strengthened by portraying the explicit relationship among King, the civil rights
movement, and the most recent and powerful popular expression of the AfroAmerican intellectual and religious tradition: the Jackson campaigns for president. No honest and complete assessment of the movements and forces made possible by King’s and his comrades’ achievements can be performed without mention of the Jackson candidacy. The Jackson campaigns, which have already in a fundamental way transformed the shape and contours of modern American politics, were made possible by a host of historical ingredients, not the least of which was the tradition of sociopolitical insurgency stimulated by the Afro-American religious tradition and the civil rights movement.

The Jackson campaigns in part enact a profound transformation in the ideas we inherit from the mature Martin Luther King. They underscore the need for a transition from an initial emphasis on civil rights to an appreciation of issues of class and economic inequality.
²²
Thus the relationship between King and Jackson, as participants in the same tradition and in active pursuit of the goals of economic empowerment, racial harmony, and universal justice, regulated by a vision developed in an Afro-American religious perspective, must not be lost as we celebrate King’s birthday.

Indeed, as we celebrate his birthday we must exercise extreme caution in retrieving images of King, especially those that avoid the painful truth of recent revelations about King’s character. The latter includes charges that King plagiarized portions of his dissertation, that he was a womanizer, and that he possibly physically abused a woman the night before his death. In the face of these revelations, how can we proceed celebrating King’s life?

First, it is important to remember that the celebration of King’s achievements is not predicated upon a notion of human perfection. Before these revelations, it was well known that King was a great but flawed human being. He admitted on several occasions his own guilt over sexual indiscretions and pledged to remedy his infidelity with all the strength to resist temptation that lay in him. King’s obvious recognition of his finitude and limitation serve as a worthy model of emulation for us as we seek to celebrate his moral legacy of protest for civil and social rights. But his legacy of self-examination, admission of fault, and the attempt to concretely rectify the wrong, even if it is not always successfully done, is a model we can usefully incorporate as responsible and mature moral agents.

Second, the charges of King’s alleged plagiarism are disturbing and inexcusable. To use someone else’s written work without proper recitation is a form of verbal thievery. This painful truth, however, forces us to raise even more questions about why it occurred. Since we cannot question King, we can only surmise, infer, and speculate. King’s dissertation was completed while he was pastoring his first church in Montgomery and during the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott. Undoubtedly, the pressures of the burgeoning movement tempted King to plagiarize Jack Boozer’s dissertation in order to complete his own doctoral studies.

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 professors and colleagues, and who was faced with an unpredictable and unfolding social crisis, could be tempted to rely on work that had already been accepted and viewed as competent.

The best approach to these charges, as well as charges about King’s possible physical abuse, can be made by developing a healthy and realistic framework of assessment of King’s life and career that will remain consistent even in the event of other revelations about his person and character. The power of King’s achievements, the real force of his genius, consisted in his passion for justice to be done for the most lowly and oppressed inhabitants of American society. His moral authority as a spokesperson for truth, equality, and the embodiment of a particular slant on the American Dream cannot be compromised by revelations about his personal and student life.

What these revelations do achieve, however, is a sad reminder of the forces of wrong and dishonor by which we are all subject to be tempted and corrupted. King serves as a reminder that no figure establishes an Archimedean point of moral perfection from which to argue for social change, that all argument for transformation is immanent criticism rooted in the faults and limitations of being human, but those limitations do not ultimately destroy the truth for which limited and faulty humans stand. Although the vehicle for that truth is tarnished, enough of the truth’s power and persuasion can emerge to convince others of its necessity and worth. We must view King in such a realistic fashion. These revelations show that King was an enormously complex human being, confirming what we know of him as we study his ideological evolutions and his political maturation.

As has been much remarked on, toward the end of his life King began to discern inadequacies in his former analyses of racial antipathy, social injustice, and economic inequality. He discovered that these problems were much more deeply rooted and structurally expressed than he had initially surmised.

As a result he focused his considerable critical skills on the larger national and international economic, political, and social contexts of Afro-Americans’, and other oppressed people’s, plight. King began to speak about the redistribution of resources, guaranteed incomes for the poor, and forming a multiracial coalition of the unemployed and the poor. This signified his changing perspective. In an article written just before his assassination and published after it, King wrote:

King had already begun to speak out against the war in Vietnam, decrying the lamentable manner in which resources for the poor were being pilfered by an ever increasing war chest. He was criticized within the civil rights movement for squandering its social influence and political capital with the Johnson administration. He was attacked outside the movement for delving, even “meddling,” into larger domestic and foreign affairs that were not the legitimate concern of a civil rights leader.

King’s moral vision, however, could not abide the spurious schizophrenia that compartmentalized moral concern into distinct and separable spheres. Morality was of a piece to King, and his moral vision was integrated and unified. The whole of life fell under its searching purview and rigorous scrutiny. King’s later efforts to unite poor blacks, whites, and other minorities, as well as labor and other progressive concerns, marked him as a highly dangerous man who was greatly feared in many governmental, political, and social quarters.

These facts must be recalled as we engage in the rituals of remembrance and rites of recovery of the meaning of King’s moral vision. We must refuse those who would commodify King’s career into acceptable packages of comfortable, and not dangerous, memory, to be consumed by the American public in the name of a mythologization project intent on subverting King’s radical and disturbing memory. In short, we must engage in hermeneutical combat and interpretive warfare over the future of King’s memory, making certain that the custodians of the King canon include and remember his provocative words and oppositional ideas, as well as his comforting thoughts and hopeful beliefs. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a man who possessed a profound moral vision that was rooted in the AfroAmerican religious experience and that advanced a creative American moral hermeneutic. Remembering his life and thought challenges us to examine the present condition of American moral life and discover it wanting in regard to its treatment of those King represented: the black, the poor, and the oppressed.

Construed in the above manner, King’s birthday serves as an outpost in progressive terrain, creating space in which to collect the energies of protest and struggle as they are related to the visionary revival and recovery of the moral tradition within which King lived and labored. King Day can facilitate a broadly conceived coalition of the oppressed and suffering who have a desperate interest in recovering the symbol and substance of King’s moral vision.

Celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday as an official holiday promises a poignant and profound change in the rhythm of public rituals commemorating events of ultimate national and historical significance. King Day structures in the recurring cycle of American holidays a period of time that concentrates attention upon the meaning of King’s life and thought. It also extends beyond King, transcending his personal and individual meaning, and celebrates the ingenuity of black survival in an American political, social, and cultural ethos often inimical to Afro-American existence.

King Day also points us back to that Afro-American religious tradition that produced King and that continues to thrive in the midst of American religious, social, and political life. It also provides a means of reconstituting King’s moral vision by challenging us each year to more closely approximate in our national and individual life and thought the goals and purposes for which he gave his life. In this sense, the name Martin Luther King, Jr., no longer merely represents the time and place of his life and body on earth, but symbolizes the hope of oppressed people everywhere that the dignity and worth of human life will be universally respected and uplifted.

WHEN I VISITED WITH EASTSIDAZ RAPPER Big Tray Dee, he surprised me with his frank discussion of his fallen colleague’s art. “I’m real critical and skeptical about lyrics or what people say and how they put it from an artistic standpoint,” Dee says. “It would be maybe like thirty percent of Tupac’s songs that I wouldn’t really feel all the time. I would be like, ‘That’s all right.’” Dee speaks of Tupac’s method of creation, highlighting in the process what made him such a big force in hip-hop. “But [his songs] wound up in my head because they would grow on me, and I would see where he was coming from. I had to get that feeling or be in that mood to really relate to what he was saying at that particular time, on that particular song. He showed me how he created music through his heart and through his spirit, showing me that you have to have a certain vibe and continuity. You are not going to appeal to everybody.”

Dee’s comments underscore a crucial paradox: Tupac’s art as a hip-hop emcee was an acquired taste among the genre’s cognoscente, even as the masses embraced him through huge record sales and he gained international notoriety as a symbol of rap’s fortunes and follies. Tupac was not hip-hop’s most gifted emcee by any of the criteria that define the form’s artistic apotheosis. He did not, for instance, possess the effortless rhythmic patterns of Snoop Dogg, the formidable timing and breath control of the incomparable KRS ONE, the poetic intensity of Rakim, the deft political rage of Chuck D, the forceful enunciation of M. C. Lyte, or the novelistic descriptions and sly cadences of Notorious B.I.G.—the “mathematician of flow,” according to hip-hop luminary Mos Def. Still, Tupac may be the most influential and compelling rapper of them all. It is not that Tupac lacked supreme talent in writing lyrics, composing dramatic stories, and manipulating his voice to haunting effect. But he was more than the sum of his artistic parts. A considerable measure of Tupac’s cultural heft was certainly extramusical, especially his well-publicized clashes with the law and his shamanistic thespian efforts. Above all, Tupac was a transcendent force of creative fury who relentlessly articulated a generation’s defining moods—its confusion and pain, its nobility and courage, its loves and hates, its hopelessness and selfdestruction. He was the zeitgeist in sagging jeans.

“I wasn’t a big Pac fan when he was out,” Mos Def lets on. “But I’ll tell you why people loved him: because you
knew
him.” Tupac was easy to know because he was the ghetto’s everyman, embodying in his art the horrors and pleasures that came to millions of others who were in many ways just like him—except they lacked his protean genius and a microphone to amplify tragedy and triumph. Despite being pegged a “gangsta rapper,” Tupac ranged freely over the lyrical landscape of hip-hop, pursuing themes that bled through a number of rap’s subgenres, among them conscious rap, political hip-hop, party music, hedonism rap, thug rap, and ghettocentric rap. Tupac was equally adept at several modes of address within hip-hop, from the dis rap (“Hit ‘Em Up”) to the hiphop eulogy (“Life Goes On”), from the maternal missive (“Dear Mama”) to the pastoral letter (“Keep Ya Head Up”). There is something fiercely eloquent and haunting about Tupac’s accomplished baritone: Its regal, distinct register vibrated directly to the heart and gave him an intimacy and immediacy of communication that are virtually unrivaled in hip-hop. If one were confined to a desert island with the choice of taking only one artist to capture rap’s range of expression, Tupac could hardly be surpassed. Tupac’s genius can be understood only by tracing the contours of contemporary rap and placing him within its rapidly expanding boundaries.

Hip-hop culture has come a long way since its fledgling start in the late 1970s. Early hip-hoppers were largely anonymous and could barely afford the sound systems on which the genre is built. By contrast, contemporary artists reap lucrative contracts, designer clothing lines, glossy magazine spreads, fashionable awards,
global recognition, and often the resentment of their hip-hop elders. If there is a dominant perception about today’s rap superstars among hip-hop’s purists, it is that they have squandered the franchise by being obsessed with shaking derrieres, platinum jewelry, fine alcohol, premium weed, pimp culture, gangster rituals, and thug life. Although hip-hop has succeeded far beyond the Bronx of its birth, it has, in the minds of some of its most ardent guardians, lost its soul. To paraphrase an ingenious storyteller whose haunting tales elevated and examined the poor—Charles Dickens—these are for hip-hop the best of times and the worst of times. In his embattled soul, Tupac embodied both.
¹

Contemporary rap is filled with stirring reminders of why the marriage of the spoken word to music has revolutionized black culture. Figures like Lauryn Hill, Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Bahamadia generate black noise to spur the eruption of social conscience. Gifted wordsmiths like Jay-Z, Nas, DMX, and the assorted rappers of the Wu-Tang Clan use their pavement poetry to probe urban existence in gripping detail. But there is still strong criticism of rap’s musical vampirism and its dulling repetitiousness. Those who claim the mastery of instruments through the production of original music is the only mark of genuine artistry offer the first criticism. Such purists ignore the severely depleted funding of arts in public schools since the late 1970s, a fateful development that kept many inner-city students from learning to play musical instruments. The critics also overlook the virtuosity implied in the technical manipulation of existing sounds to create new music. Although hip-hop was vulnerable to the claim that it lacked original music at its birth, Tupac was fortunate to have producers who gave melody to his rage. The sounds that bathed his beautiful baritone were often striking. “I loved the kind of tracks that were put together for him to rap over,” says contemporary jazz musician George Duke. “They had a lot of the oldschool vibe in there. I thought what he did was interesting in terms of the chords. It just felt like something I could play over.” Moreover, the fact that so many rappers repeat tired formulas that have been successful for other artists cannot possibly distinguish rap from, say, contemporary rhythm and blues or rock music. And neither can the gutless, uninspiring imitation on which too many raps thrive be said to be unique to hip-hop. After all, contemporary American classical music and smooth jazz—a misnomer worth fighting over, according to jazz purists—do the same.

To be sure, there are more serious criticisms of hip-hop. It is easy to understand the elements of rap that provoke consternation: its violence, its sexual saturation, its recycling of vicious stereotypes, its color-coded preference for light or nonblack women, its failure to engage politics, its selling out to corporate capitalism, and its downright ugly hatred of women. Tupac has come to symbolize the blights on hip-hop’s troubled soul. His self-destructive behavior and premature death inspired a great deal of hand-wringing over hip-hop’s influence on black youth. Unfortunately, many critics divide the wheat from the chaff in hip-hop by separating
rap into its positive and negative expressions. That distinction often ignores the complexity of hip-hop culture and downplays rap’s artistic motivations. Instead, rap is read flatly, transmuted into a sociological phenomenon of limited cultural value. Rap is viewed as a barometer of what ails black youth. It is apparent that a great deal of bitterness and anger clutter the disputes between rap’s advocates and its critics. It is equally obvious that black youth are under attack from many quarters of our culture. In hip-hop, as with most youth music, that is nothing new. “All art created by young people is despised by adults,” says Toni Morrison. “Whether it’s Mozart or Louis Armstrong, if it’s young, it always has to fight . . . . And what shakes out of that, of course, becomes the best.” From its origins, rap music was dismissed or denigrated, even by blacks. The point here is not to berate blacks for missing the boat on what has turned out to be one of the most popular, creative, and commercially viable art forms in many decades. I am simply suggesting that there was a love–hate relation between many black folk and hip-hop culture long before Tupac and long before rap’s controversial headlines, its tragic deaths, and its worldwide influence.

Early seeds of suspicion have often bloomed into outright rejection of hip-hop as a vital source of art and imagination for black youth. That is why black wags of every stripe have stepped up to denounce the music as misguided, poisonous, and inauthentic, since music that gyrates into the spotlight has little truck with the revolutionary thrust of, say, Gil Scott-Heron or the Last Poets. In other words, hip-hop is not really black music. On such a view, hip-hop is but the seductive corporate packaging of the vicious stereotypes black folk have tried to defeat since our ancestors were uprooted and brought to America in chains. Except now, critics of hip-hop claim, the chains that bind us are more mental and psychological than physical. And the great-great-great-grandchildren of slaves who fought to be free and who hoped that their seed would escape rather than embrace enslavement create the images that destroy our standing in society. “Thanks to music videos, the image people all over the world now have of African Americans is of violence-prone misogynists, preoccupied with promiscuous sex and conspicuous consumption,” says writer Khephra Burns. “Despite years of striving to distance ourselves from the negative ways in which white folk once portrayed us, we have come at last to the point of portraying ourselves to the world in this way.” Stanley Crouch sees an even more sinister effect of the relentlessly negative and stereotypical portrayal of blacks. “You can talk to people who have traveled around the world, and they’ll tell you the contempt that has developed for black people over the last twenty years is mightily imposing,” he says. “You and I might have a completely different experience, but if we were in our early twenties, that’s another vibration. People would say, ‘Uh-oh, here they come,’ and people would be suspicious and cross the street. That’s going on all over the world.”

Burns and Crouch make powerful arguments about the lethal consequences of flooding the airwaves and video screen with self-defeating visions of black life.
There is little doubt that the effect is exactly as they describe it, with the caveat, however, that the global portrayal of black life surely cannot rest on the images or words of barely postadolescent entertainers. This is not to deny that a single video by a rap artist can more successfully shred international boundaries than a hundred books by righteous authors. Neither is it to deny the huge responsibility such artists bear in confirming or combating hateful and ignorant beliefs about black folk that circulate around the globe. But that is just it: These beliefs are part of the ancient legacies of colonialism, racism, and regionalism, legacies that persist despite the efforts of intellectuals, artists, and leaders to destroy them. Is it fair to expect DMX to achieve what W E.B. Du Bois could not, or for Tupac to succeed where Archbishop Tutu failed? The complex relationship between art and social responsibility is evident, but we must be careful not to place unrealistic, or even unjust, demands on the backs of artists. Their extraordinary influence cannot be denied, but the very argument that is often used against them—that they are not politicians, leaders, or policymakers, just entertainers who string together lines of poetic meter—is often conveniently forgotten when it might work to hiphoppers’ advantage.

This recognition does not discount the troubling manifestations of youth culture that merit consideration. One such instance is Tupac’s vigorous embrace of “thug life.” In the interview taped in 1995 when he was in prison, Tupac explained that “it’s not an image; it’s just a way of life; it’s a mentality.” He claims that thug life is “a stage that we all go through. It’s just like that for white kids and rich kids. They get to go to the military academy or ROTC, or they take all the risk, energy, and put it into the armed forces. And for a young black male, Puerto Rican, or Hispanic person, you’ve got to put this in the streets; that’s where our energies go.” Speaking of his thug life mentality, Tupac says, “The way I was living and my mentality was a part of my progression to be a man.” In outtakes from an interview he did with Snoop Dogg for MTV, Tupac clarifies what he means by “thug life.” “It’s not thugging like I’m robbing people, ’cause that’s not what I’m doing,” Tupac said. “I mean like I’m not scared to say how I feel. Part of being [a thug] is to stand up for your responsibilities and say this is what I do even though I know people are going to hate me and say, ‘It’s so politically un-correct,’ and ‘How could you make black people look like that? Do you know how buffoonish you all look with money and girls and all of that?’ That’s what I want to do. I want to be real with myself.” Tupac’s thug life mentor, West Coast rapper Big Syke, eloquently and simply defined for me “thug” and “outlaw,” another word Tupac embraced and transformed. “I call thugs the nobodies,” Syke says, “because we really don’t have nobody to help us but us. And then outlaw is being black and minority. Period.”