The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (97 page)

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.