Introduction of Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
By Crispin Sartwell
Since this book is about autobiography and race, I will begin with an account of some of the experiences that made me a white man.
I grew up in a lily-white enclave of Chocolate City: Washington, D.C. My parents were leftists, and as a child I attended a number of civil-rights demonstrations, including the Moratorium held in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. King's death was a pivotal event in my developing sense of racial situatedness; I was ten years old, and I remember my mother crying when the news of the assassination was announced on television. But I remember also her fear: She speculated that King's assassination would lead to a race war. Nor was she far wrong. That night there was a citywide curfew, and a pall of smoke rose over D.C.; the fourteenth-street corridor was burning. Thirteen years later, when I went down to that area to try to collect unemployment, it was still burned out, and I wended my way through the ghetto in fear. It was on fourteenth street, too, that my brother Adam scored the heroin with which he committed suicide in 1992. At that time, fourteenth street was still a black ghetto, though undergoing restoration, and I returned, still in fear, to try to get some of Adam's stuff out of hock.
There was one black kid at Lafayette Elementary School in Chevy Chase; his name was Benjy. When the time came to put on a performance for parents, the elderly white music teacher had a special solo number in mind for Benjy: a pseudo-Caribbean song that was about some bone-headed Jamaican building a house on the sandy ground and watching it wash away. In rehearsals, the music teacher kept telling Benjy how to move in a kind of rhythmic sway, while making exaggerated gestures. And she continually yelled at him to grin, until his face was fixed in a leer. This puzzled me; I did not understand the various signifiers involved. When I told my mother about it, she got angry. But when Benjy performed in front of the parents and kids--all of whom, except Benjy's parents, were white--he brought down the house.
Around the same time, my immediate neighborhood was integrated for the first time by a family of light-skinned black folks who moved in around the corner. I played basketball in the alley with the kids, while their Dad watched us from the back porch. They had moved from downtown, and one thing was pretty obvious: They thought that the white kids in the neighborhood were wimps. They told stories of their old neighborhood that sounded to me like something out of a horror film, but they took great pride in the toughness they had developed. This toughness impressed and intimidated me, and these kids kicked my ass continually on the basketball court. No other black families had moved to the blocks near my house by the time I moved out in 1976.
The year I started Junior High, 1970, D.C. started a program of forced bussing. Alice Deal Junior High School had been over ninety per cent white; the year I started it was about half black. The kids were bussed up from Mount Pleasant; by no means the roughest area of the District, but much poorer than Chevy Chase. The racial situation was extremely tense. There were individual confrontations and collective pitched battles. I had to fight or run every day to preserve my lunch money from black guys, whose refrain was "Anything I find, I can have?". I let myself be robbed a couple of times, then started making sure I had other white kids around me as much as possible. Even so, I got into some fights. I also made some black friends (though they never came to my house, nor did I go to theirs; they disappeared on the buses when school let out). But these guys told the other guys to leave me alone. Before very long, I felt pretty comfortable.
Lord knows that Alice Deal was a hard place to feel comfortable. Kids of both races got beaten up regularly. The next year, many of the white families, most of whom lived within walking distance of the school, had pulled their kids out; I'd estimate the ratio at seventy per cent black and thirty per cent white, with a smattering of Hispanic kids. There were a lot of weapons: small-caliber handguns and knives, mostly. Teachers, many of them white ladies who had been at Deal before busing, had no control of their classes. Students walked in and out at whim. A male French teacher took out his frustrations on an Hispanic kid I knew: threw him against a wall and broke a chair over his head. The student disappeared to the hospital for a couple of weeks (after which he reappeared in casts); the teacher disappeared entirely. A black friend of mine, Vertisse, was stabbed in the library with a pair of scissors. Periodically, the paramedics would arrive and drag an OD out of the bathroom; it was the heyday of the (first) D.C. heroin epidemic.
The administration started locking the doors. They hired a bunch of three-hundred pounders and called them "Community Aides." These bouncers prowled around the halls with two-by-fours. One day when I was in eighth grade, the whole school gathered at windows to watch one of the Aides chase a black kid who had tried to escape the school. He landed on top of the kid and proceeded to beat the piss out of him with a board. Lockers were subject to random searches, or at least the lockers of black students were subject to random searches. The aides and administrators would gather the weapons and drugs they found into big piles. No one, that I could see, was learning much of anything except how to survive.
One rare zone of exception to this was the classroom of a teacher named Willie Singleton. Singleton, a young black man, ruled his history classes with an iron discipline, and he taught Marx, Che Guevara, and Malcolm X. He had the respect of his students, black and white, and his course in Afro-American history was both scary and absorbing for me: scary because there were a lot of ticked-off black kids in there learning about me as an oppressor, absorbing because reading Malcolm X and others made me change my thinking about race in a way that gave me some perspective on what was happening in my life and contributed to a growing political radicalism. I started a "free" paper at Deal (for which I was twice suspended), ran for class President on the "No More Bullshit" platform (I finished second), and led a student walkout when, the following year, the teachers went on strike (demanding, as I recall, a supply of basic materials). Finally, I instituted a terrorist campaign demanding an end to compulsory attendance and grading. My little cell spread a stink solution made of eggs and Drano all over the administrative offices. When I returned to the school three or four years later, the place still stank.
I looked at the black kids around me with a mixture of fear and desire that I will explore at length as this book goes on. They were sometimes armed, and sometimes fucked up, and I learned to watch my back. But these kids seemed much older and hipper and smarter than me or my white friends. They seemed to know a whole bunch of stuff we didn't know. In seventh and eighth grade, for example, most of the white kids were sexual naifs, and most of the black kids, including the girls, radiated sexual confidence and experience. I was intensely attracted to some of the black girls, in particular a girl named Jaqui. When I approached her to ask for a date (it had taken me weeks to screw up the courage), she laughed in my face and said something like: "You wouldn't know what to do with me if you had me, white boy." That was true. Meanwhile, several girls from my neighborhood were impregnated by their black boyfriends, which led to real panic on the part of white parents. In the following chapters, I will have some things to say about interracial sexual desire, including my own. Let me just make explicit my awareness that my history and attitudes on this matter are, putting it mildly, a problem.
By the time I got into ninth grade, the school was perhaps ninety per cent black. That year, too, my brother started at Deal. After he was battered a couple of times, my parents--despite their deep commitment to integration and to public education--moved him in a private school.
The most popular music of the time was black music, and the black kids at Deal seemed to know everything that was happening; they had the best music before I even knew the artist. The Jackson Five were hot, as were such nuggets as the "Theme From Shaft" by Isaac Hayes, and a song called "Money Runner." James Brown was probably the most popular artist, and the halls reverberated with "Say it Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" (though that was a few years old) and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." I immersed myself in the history of African-American music: I was listening to Muddy Waters, Aretha Franklin, the O'Jays, and anyone else I could get my hands on. The black kids thought that was pretty funny.
I could continue this narrative, but it would consist fundamentally of more of the same; my basic racial attitudes had been set by the time I finished at Deal. (Nevertheless, there are going to be autobiographical bits scattered throughout this book.) Any book about African-American writing by a white man is, obviously, problematic. I cannot hope to escape the possibility that some of what follows--or even all of it--is racist. It should be even more obvious that a white man who has had the experiences just described cannot hope to erase the traces of racism from his own writings. Indeed, if what follows is anything like right, the claim of a white American man not to be a racist is always extremely suspicious and also false. And what follows is written in the anxiety that it could be interpreted to express racist attitudes. Indeed, and what is even more problematic, I have ended up spending much of my life in the South (in Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama), and have developed a kind of redneck persona. A couple of years ago you might have seen me working on my car (ineffectually, it's true) in front of my house in Cottondale, Alabama, tattooed, spitting Skoal juice, and listening to Hank Williams, Jr. I feel perfectly comfortable in redneck culture and in fact romanticize it in a way similar to the way I romanticize black culture. But here I belong, or at least pass, and one of the central ways in which people belong to redneck culture is simply by not being black, so that even in the midst of poverty, say, there is a sense of membership and of privilege; even in poverty (which admittedly I didn't share) there is the pleasure of power.
I have tried, in what follows, both to inscribe my own racism and to elide it or even destroy it, a conflict that surely renders this entire text problematic. But I hope that this conflict also serves to clarify the racing of white men; it is a conflict characteristic not only of me, but of us. Both my racial position in the dominant culture and my anxiety about that position are, I hope, legible on every page. This is not a tension I intend to resolve in what follows; indeed, I hope both to intensify and elucidate it. That tension is, finally, what the book is about.
One way in which this tension is manifest is in the selection of materials that I have chosen to discuss. For reasons that will become obvious as the book goes on, white folks have paid a fair amount of attention to African-American autobiography, and relatively little to the theory and philosophy produced by African-Americans. (This fact has been emphasized and diagnosed by Michele Wallace and Patricia Hill Collins, among others.) I think it is a fair generalization that a disproportionate number of the books in the African-American tradition that have been canonized as central texts have been autobiographies. This book continues the white habit of attending to autobiographies of black people, though I will also discuss various theoretical writings by African-Americans on black autobiography.
However, I want to throw the distinction between autobiography and theory quite generally into question. First of all, works of theory are, it seems to me, autobiographical. Certainly this book is autobiographical theory as well as theory of autobiography. For the most part the autobiographical elements in the European and European-American traditions are systematically concealed, and for reasons that track precisely the nature of that tradition and in particular its racial content. Yet, as I have elsewhere urged, each work of theory, though it may purport to be produced from no standpoint, out of no personal history, proceeds necessarily from some standpoint, out of some personal history. This means, among other things, that it emerges in a particular historical and social location. It is characteristic of European and European-American male theoretical production that it fails to acknowledge its sources in personal experience, and its sources in social situations: In particular it fails to acknowledge its location in the social situation of privilege and oppression. The neutral theoretical subject, whose tone is transparent to the argument, is itself a particular raced (and gendered) construction. I take as the models for the form and voice of this book such African-American thinkers as Michael Eric Dyson, Houston Baker, and Patricia J. Williams, all of whom do theoretical autobiography or autobiographical theory, and speak with an especial power because they own the source of their ideas in their experience. These figures show the connection of thought and life in an exemplary way.(1)
We white male philosophers tend to read our own tradition as non-autobiographical, as proceeding from no particular location, and our voices as we write are often designed to disguise the sources of our preoccupations in our own lives. This is true of my own authorial voice, though I have spent years trying to pit myself against that voice, to work against it or away from it. I am constantly slipping into transparency and "objectivity," constantly dragging myself back in fear to passion and particularity, slipping again, and so forth. Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the "whiteness" of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting or apparent transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in "comprehension" of a vast range of materials.
On the other hand, the white reception of the authorial voices of black cultural production takes place within a set of expectations that removes those voices from the space of authoritative theory. Even those works which display elaborate and compelling theoretical structures get read as the traces of particular lives and social locations. One effect or cause of this way of reading is a segregation of black discourse; we try to make sure we hear you speaking as a black person, that we hear you speaking to "the black experience." Thus, we attempt to insulate our own discourse from the critique or even destruction which threatens that discourse from its other. We try to maintain our theory in its "purity," its whiteness, its abstraction. What counts as theory or as autobiography, thus, proceeds through the racial codes that imaginatively locate white authors as amorphous objective observers and black authors as precisely located recorders of their own lives.
So I want to work toward breaking down the distinction between theory and autobiography, or more precisely to show that it has already broken down in fact. This occurs in the literature itself that I will be surveying. W.E.B. Du Bois's book Dusk of Dawn, which I will discuss at some length, is subtitled "An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept." This explicitly collapses the autobiographical and theoretical dimensions of his authorship. Autobiography has theoretical purposes, theoretical underpinnings, and theoretical effects. And I will certainly, in what follows, take these features seriously in the autobiographies I discuss. Anyone who asserted that The Autobiography of Malcolm X or Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road did not emerge from an elaborately-developed theoretical framework would have some serious explaining to do. And I find a useful alternative to the Western tradition in these works, for they develop theory precisely out of a concrete human context; they acknowledge the source of theory in lived experience and social construction. In the very insulation of our theoretical discourse, we articulate by negation the limits of that discourse and the conditions for its collapse. So I want to use these works, among other things, precisely to throw the distinction between theory and autobiography into question. And the reasons I need to do so are themselves autobiographical.
Houston Baker has worked explicitly on breaking down the distinction between autobiography and theory, particularly in his book Workings of the Spirit. And he offers this caution to white folks who want to deal with African-American texts and traditions: "'Autobiographical,' in my proposal, means a personal negotiation of metalevels--one that foregrounds nuances and resonances of an-other's story. The white autobiographer who honestly engages his or her own autobiographical implication in a brutal past is as likely as an Afro-American to provide such nuances."(2) What Baker suggests is that for a white person to write about African-American literature without acknowledging his own situatedness in a racist culture would be colonializing, disingenuous, and would simply reinforce the "objective" stance and the "neutral" authorial voice which themselves participate in the construction of whiteness.
Hazel Carby has been even clearer on this matter. "In practice, in the classroom," she writes, "black texts have been used to focus on the complexity of response in the (white) reader/student's construction of self to a (black) perceived 'other.'" She continues:
We need to recognize that we live in a society in which systems of domination and subordination are structured through processes of racialization that continuously interact with all other forms of socializastion. Theoreticaly, we should be arguing that everyone in this social order has been constructed in our political imagination as a racialized subject. In this sense, it is important to think about the invention of the category of whiteness as well as that of blackness, to make visible what is rendered invisible when viewed as the normative state of existence: the (white) point in space from which we tend to identify difference.(3)
Carby deftly identifies the difficulty which this book diagnoses and within which it exists. For I intend in what follows precisely to "use" texts produced by African-Americans in order to construct or reconstruct myself in distinction to the black "other." But I intend also to make whiteness visible as a particular social construction, and by the very same means. If I am right, the most promising strategy for bringing whiteness to visiblity is in an encounter with what it has, in imagination, extruded or ejected from itself. And I hope that whiteness can also be compromised in this encounter; for one thing, I hope that it can be shown to be a sort of hallucination, though a hallucination with concrete effects.
So I will explore the construction of whiteness elaborately in what follows. I am, I hope, answerable to black folks' descriptions of their own self-understandings. But I am answerable only to myself about my own self-understandings. I cannot be an authority on African-American experiences, but I am an authority on the phenomonology, the inside view, of white racism. And what I say about it might even disconcert black critics: perhaps especially when I speak about its pleasures. I have a fairly extreme self-loathing about the self-constructions that go into making a racist social structure, but by the same token I can neither shuck off those self-constructions by an act of will nor cease to experience the pleasures of power: even the pleasures of the "objectivity" or "neutrality" (the hallucinated detachment of the voice from the body, of autobiography from theory) that mark the white authorial fiction. Of course, theory and autobiography can be loosely distinguished as literary forms; I only insist that every work of theory is also the trace of some particular life, and I seek for ways of acknowledging that in my own work, which would also be a way of compromising "whiteness" in one of its aspects.
I have never stopped fearing black folks, and I have never stopped romanticizing them. This book is an attempt to explicate and deal with my own immensely complicated racial attitudes. It is an attempt, among other things, to find the racism both in my fear and my romanticization. This book is "about" African-American autobiography in the sense that it is those texts that are quoted and discussed. But it is, above all, a safari to the mysterious heart of whiteness: It is my attempt to locate myself, to make myself visible, as a white man. In this sense, this book takes up a place within the growing field of "white identity studies."(4) But I am not going to deal with that literature in what follows (though I hope to write about it in the future), for strategic reasons: this book is about the encounter of a white man with texts produced by African-Americans. My identity is raced, through and through, in innumerable ways. But one theme of this book is that while white racism seeks obsessively to render blackness visible in the prescribed stereotypical way, white racism also seeks to render whiteness invisible. One of the major strategies of preserving white invisibility to ourselves is the silencing, segregation, or delegitimation of voices that speak about whiteness from a nonwhite location; above all, we can't stand to be looked at, described, or made specific. I attend to black autobiographies in this way in order to reveal whiteness by hearing what whiteness excludes. I try also--and necessarily with limited success, since I remain white, and thus to some extent unmarked to myself--to take seriously what black writers say about white people, about how we look from there. For such reasons, along with sheer constraints of time and energy and creativity, this book is anything but comprehensive. Though the works I write about are, I think, excellent and important, they represent only a tiny fraction of black autobiographical production. I write about these works in particular--some of the slave narratives, some writings of Du Bois, Malcolm X's and Zora Neale Hurston's autobiographies, and some rap music--because I think they are particularly potent in showing how whiteness is made. I also make use of other texts in each chapter as foils or confirmations: works by James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Patricia J. Williams, among others. These works, too, are employed as ways of revealing the interlocking structures of racial identity.
To be a privileged white man in American culture is to be a neutral, all-seeing eye; to be black is to be the object of the gaze. What is "normal" in our culture is always, invisibly, raced white. This fact is crystal-clear with regard to recent debates on multicultural curricula, for example. The opponents of multiculturalism often appeal to the hackneyed image of the melting-pot: They ask why we can't all form a single people, and they offer to welcome African-Americans and other minorities into European-American culture with apparently open arms. (As one white student in my African-American philosophy class put it: "Can't we just forget about race? Let's just all be the same.") But this argument rests on two crucial and intertwined errors. First, it equates American culture with European-American culture, and offers this culture to everyone in the form of the canon of Western literature, science, and philosophy. However, American culture is also deeply African; the identification of the American canon with the Western tradition and American culture with European culture expresses white America's anxious provincialism.(5) We're located at the margins of the Western tradition, and also dead center (well, maybe a bit north of dead center) of the African diaspora.
Thus, second, the "neutral" culture which these folks offer "minorities" is in fact raced white. What is regarded as the neutral content of American culture, into which we are waiting to welcome you, is the very same neutral content that justified your enslavement, your exclusion, your systematic impoverishment. The problem is this: We white folks can't see ourselves as having a race, as taking up by virtue of our skin-tone a perfectly precise place in the ongoing systemic racism of America. Thus, our welcome becomes an assault that seeks to expunge African-American culture; our offering to you of our culture becomes, in terms to which I will return, a premonition of cultural annihilation.
I am not an African-American. But I am an American, and thus I am embedded in a situation in which cultural division and interchange between black and white are fundamental. My race is as central to this situation as is theirs because, as many figures (notably Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin) have shown, our identities are interwoven, are inconceivable without one another. A fundamental contention of this book is that this situation creates and embodies a particular epistemological transaction. Both the oppressor and the oppressed are articulated within this transaction in a way that allows and constrains the production of knowledges. In one dimension, this regime consists of the confrontation of general truth by particular truth: the truth of the stereotype by the particular lives of Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Sister Souljah. In another, it consists of mirrored hypocrisies: the hypocrisy, e.g., of the "Uncle Tom," who conforms his behavior to a stereotype, while thinking who-knows-what, and the hypocrisy of the professed Christian or democrat who buys and sells people, or lives in and helps maintain a segregated community. I will, thus, contend that the truths of American culture are permeated thoroughly by race relations. The division of inner life and outer enactment, of authentic and inauthentic living, of mind and body as they play out in our culture are incomprehensible outside the structure of black/white relations. On my view, racism is a form of what I will term ejected asceticism; white Americans practice the purification or the mortification of the body by ejecting the body imaginatively into black persons, who become associated with the physical per se: sport, sex, violence, and dance, for instance. Or as Ralph Ellison puts it: "Being "highly pigmented," as the sociologists say, it was our Negro "misfortune" to be caught up associatively in the negative side of this basic dualism of the white folk mind, and to be shackled to almost everything it would repress from conscience and consciousness."(6) The American self is made in a racial transaction.
One of the fundamental features of the epistemological situation I have just described is that, in it, the oppressed are rendered invisible; their inner lives cannot be expressed in the wider culture's public space (this is obviously thematized, for example, in Ellison's Invisible Man). Nevertheless, they are continually "comprehended" under the general truth of the stereotype, or of the social sciences, or of the vast information-gathering machinery of the welfare system. Thus, the oppressor forces the oppressed into concealment, or tries to. More accurately: the oppressor seeks to constrain the oppressed to certain approved modes of visibility (those set out in the template of stereotype), and then gazes obsessively on the spectacle he has created, as the white music teacher and the white audience gazed on Benjy.
On the other hand, the oppressor becomes in this process totally visible to the oppressed, so that (as has often been observed) the oppressed person knows the oppressor better than the oppressor knows himself. This is shown with perfect directness in, for example, Douglass's devastating indictment of southern Christianity, or in King's attack on the hypocrisy of racists who profess to endorse the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. White hypocrites do not, for the most part, know themselves to be hypocrites; American racial oppression supposes a breakdown in self-awareness. In this transaction, then, the European-American becomes invisible to himself, and simultaneously visible to those he oppresses, and therefore silences. The silencing of the voices of the oppressed--or, again, the restriction of them to approved modes of audibility--is a strategy that seeks to maintain the epistemological transaction of racism. White oppressors do not know what they are because they do not allow anyone to tell them. One devastating effect of the texts considered here is that, by bringing what is invisible into the space of publicity, they make the oppressor visible to himself as an oppressor. They remove the shroud of generality in which white culture wraps black bodies. Thus, reading these texts as a white man is a particularly dangerous and needful activity. Hearing black voices, if I am right, is the only way for white people to make visible to themselves their own racial self-construction.
That was brought home to me when I taught African-American philosophy at the University of Alabama in the summer of 1994. The class consisted of eighteen students, thirteen of whom were black. The first question I asked them was whether they thought racism was a problem at Alabama. This, recall, is the same school where George Wallace tried to exclude black students by force of arms, but it's now about ten per cent black. The white students held unanimously that racism was not a problem anymore, that they themselves were not racists (supposedly shown by the very fact that they were taking the course), and that no one they knew was a racist. They did notice, however, that black students tended to "separate themselves off" and that (due to "paranoia") they resented white students and suspected them unfairly of racism. Then the black students started in. They recounted literally dozens of incidents of discrimination, prejudice, and massive insensitivity, ranging from systemic practices (such as the complete segregation of the fraternity system, absence of black materials from the curriculum, and lack of black professors and administrators) to a hundred specific slights, subtle exclusions, and unintentional insults, including the diagnosis of paranoia made by the white students.
For example, there was often a presumption that black students had unfair advantages because of affirmative action programs, whether or not the students in question had benefitted from such programs (which were in any case tentative and ineffective). Black students, especially males, were assumed to be athletes, and athletes in turn assumed to be dolts who took gut classes and passed because of athletic department pressure on professors. The white students did not detect any racism at the University; the black students held it to be obvious that racism was the major problem there. The course became a catharsis, as we often forgot about the texts completely or used them as occasions to discuss the issues that the students faced.
What was instructive about this situation was how much the white students learned about themselves. For some reason the class became very close; the students partied together, and I'd see the black and white students eating at the same table at the student union (a rare sight at UA). And as the stories multiplied, and the white students began to take the experiences of black students seriously, the white kids slowly became aware of some of their own racist attitudes, and, much more significantly, of their complicity in racist practices (for example, within the greek system) whatever their attitudes. Again, the only way to learn of such complicity is to hear black voices, but the incredibly elaborate segregational practices in place at Alabama and throughout our culture relieve us white folks precisely of the burden of hearing such voices, and provide us with machinery for their dismissal or minimization when they do speak to us.
There was also, as I will discuss below, a reversal of authority in the classroom; I could hardly stand up there and claim to be an authority on the black experience (though I could claim to know something about the forms of white racism). So I had to appeal to my students precisely as the authorities, and this was for me the most refreshing aspect of the course, because I have always had an anxious or perhaps violent repsonse to authority, even my own. I hate being an authority. Now that structure is also going to be enacted in this text; it is the function of my quotations from and references to African-American theorists. I have to appeal to authority in this book in a way that I have always before resisted appealing to authority in my scholarly work (which is conspicuous for having no references at all to "secondary sources"). I still resist this kind of authority, whether the authority is black or white, and I may not have addressed the African-American critical tradition adequately in what follows. But I am going to try to appeal to it to whatever extent I can, because to do otherwise would be to fall into the sort of "colonialism" that this book is dedicated both to attacking and to elucidating.
As especially the works of Malcolm X demonstrate, there is, in the cases both of the oppressor and the oppressed, an implosion of the self in which the distinctions of public and private, authentic and inauthentic, break down. The oppressed person may "internalize" oppression, as Malcolm X points out in his passages about African-Americans, including himself, making themselves over to look like white people: They have internalized white standards, and paid a hideous price in self-loathing. But likewise, the oppressor "externalizes" his oppression, shunts it away from himself, seeks to release himself from responsibility for it. Finally, the oppressor no longer knows what he is or what he is doing: he hides himself from himself, as my white students effectively concealed their own racism from themselves. This crisis is personal, public, and epistemological. The notions of truth and of self become obscure, chaotic.
It is in and out of this last crisis that I want to try to locate some contemporary speech, especially rap music--much of which (Ice T, Public Enemy, Kool Moe Dee, Sister Souljah, Biggie Smalls) is, I think, serious philosophy and excellent autobiography--as the construction of a discourse that resists this implosion of self, as an often beautiful reassertion of cultural and personal identity precisely out of the materials of stereotype. Rap is an invasion of silence by the spoken word of the silenced, using the modes of expression to which they have been consigned in order to attack white culture at its most vulnerable points.
Let me make a few general remarks on how I am thinking about race in what follows. Race in the United States has been conceived to be a rigid dichotomy. This dichotomy has had to be enforced, by law and by a thousand micro-disciplinary procedures and representational practices. For example, in order to sort people by race, what counted as black had to be codified, and this codification amounted finally to a conception of whiteness as purity, and a shunting of every "impure" case into the category of blackness by the one-drop rule. Similar principles, most of them no longer codified by law, underpin de facto segregation practices in housing and employment, and underpin even affirmative action programs. You must turn out to be black or white, and if you seem to slip through the fissure in the dichotomy, everyone involved is likely to be very uncomfortable. Judith Butler has argued that sex is not a fact antecedent to its enforcement, that the rigid dichotomy of male and female is applied over a range of biological sexing that forms a continuum, rather than a binary pair. This structure seems even (or much) more obvious in the case of race. The consignment of each person to a racial location, white or black, is a social operation carried out on a continuous range of genetic heritages and skin shades.
Now as I will go on to argue, this dualistic conception of race is absolutely required, and not only to produce certain desired economic and political results for white people (though certainly and centrally for that, too). It is required by the dualisms that dominate the Western tradition; that is, the specific forms of economic and political hegemony which we practice are articulated through what is essentially a metaphysical construction. The primordial dualisms of the Western tradition are between mind and body, culture and nature, general and particular (and when you cut to the chase, these are the same dualism). The dualisms are inscribed in European languages or, it has been suggested (by Derrida among others), are constituent of European languages. So if black is coded as physical, natural, and particular (all of which, again, amount to the same thing), and white is coded as intellectual, cultural, and general, this calls into service the vast machinery of Western conceptuality that has been developing since the Greeks.
To encode blackness as physical, natural, and particular is to deploy black people into a metaphysically-grounded axiomatics. This axiomatics is simultaneously ethical and economic, abstract and brutalizing, and it calls into play the grounding assumptions of Western thought about what it means to be human that at the deepest strata include ideas such as this: that the body entraps the soul (the person), and hence that the body is the other that must be dominated. Thus, among other things, in this racial schema black people are bestialized, which has the economic consequences we white folks want (we constrain them to perform cheaply the labor we find degrading).
But our construction of black folks as bestial, as particular bodies, is also our construction of ourselves as pure white souls, as embodiments or disembodiments of "the highest human functions." That is, our selves are made by the exclusions that give them shape. We white folks appropriate to ourselves intellectual pursuits and the exercises of managerial power that are conceived as the functions of "mind" in a social body. In our strange metaphysics, the mind commands the body to move; the mind must master the body's functions and desires. What is physically dependent--cognition--becomes metaphysically independent, and hides its actual dependence on bodily support. In parallel, white dependence on the labor of black people is hidden, while we assume the "necessary burden" of guidance and administration. Thus, what is coded black becomes the sign of the slave and also of desire, the sign of white power and the sign of the origin of that power as emerging from mind to control the human body and the physical world technologically.
In this book, I emphasize the interlocking constructions of race as the product of a metaphysical system for articulating selves. I am not going to try to solve the chicken-and-egg problem about whether this system drives forms of economic exploitation, or whether on the contrary it is driven by them. It is obvious, I suppose, that the dualisms of Western thought start with the Greeks, and perhaps it is fair to say that they were not articulated out of Greek exclusion of Africans (though that is controversial). The Greeks, however, held slaves, and bestialized them in various ways. But the various dualisms are channelled and concretized in very specific configurations starting with the Renaissance and proceeding apace in the Enlightenment. These developments of the tradition, which give it the specific forms it assumes in modernity, coincide precisely with the economic expansion of Europe by colonialism, the slave trade, and the massive exploitation of third-world labor that continues today. The economic arrangements suit our raw self-interest, but they also aid in our self-constructions, and our constructions of the universe, including the notion that the world consists of raw inert materials that must be made available for technological exploitation. For most of what follows, I describe white self-image as a sort of collective psycho-drama, as the building of a metaphysical system, and also as a reflection of that system. But it should be borne in mind at all times both that this metaphysics is designed to have the most direct economic effects, and that it disguises its own economic applications.
Let me make one thing explicit about this construction: It is imaginary, which is a nice way to say that it is luridly false to the situation at hand, though not simply false, insofar as it succeeds in manufacturing its own confirmation. First of all, there is no defensible biological definition of race, as we will see Du Bois and Hurston argue. This is illustrated by the example of what it means, in America, to be Jewish (and I am Jewish by birth). Prior to World War II Judaism was considered fundamentally to be a matter of race, and it is still traditional to regard any child of a Jewish mother as Jewish (this I regarded as a great boon when I married a woman from an orthodox Jewish family: I didn't have to deal with the explosive reaction of that family to "intermarriage"). This is analogous to practices of racing in American slavery: any child of a black woman was to be accounted a slave, so that the master, by acts of rape and threats of punishment could add to his own "stock." And in fact, it is a common claim within the Jewish community that the practice of counting the child of a Jewish mother as Jewish emerged in similar conditions of oppression and attendant rape, though here as a self-defense and means of survival for the people. The point is that Jewish identity in many (though not all) communities began to be regarded, first, as an "ethnicity"--a cultural identification that is not held to supervene on biology--and finally as more or less a religious preference. These shifts are regarded as a loss in some segments of Judaism, are regarded as a threat to Jewish identity, but they also display the fact that racial distinctions can shift or be eliminated. It is my opinion that the distinction of black and white in our culture will endure for a long time; indeed I will argue that it is roughly as intense as it ever has been at the present moment. But with regard to my Jewishness, I'm either "passing" as a white man or I simply have a certain ethnic background within the white world, depending on who you're talking to, when, and where. (In fact, I often enough felt, with my wife's family or at a synagogue, that I was "passing" there too; I am neither a goy nor Jewish enough, being myself the product of a "mixed marriage.") If nothing else, this displays the fact that races are a cultural construction and one that is fairly liquid.
The conceptual dichotomy of black and white does not, then, supervene on a defensible distinction, on any properties whatever that could be conceived to be intrinsic to the people whom the dichotomy sorts. Second, even within the traditional "scientific" account of race, there are not only two races, but at least three, and perhaps many. Yet when race is deployed in American discourse, there is a continual effort to re-assert it as a dichotomy: white and nonwhite. Third, and related to both of the first two points, the racial situation, even if we started out with an opposition of black and white, is incredibly complex. Every possible combination of the races is instantiated over and over again. If race were a dichotomy, there would be many, many more people in the gap between the sortals than could possibly fall into either. As we are going to see, this is an immense problem for any theory or practice that takes race as dichotomy or a trichotomy, for any system that deploys any racial taxonomy whatever.
Lastly, race itself is an interactive variable; race does not come neat.(7) The racing of women is not the same as the racing of men. The racing of southerners is not the same as the racing of northerners (for that matter, the racing of Alabamans is not the same as the racing of Tennesseeans, the racing of Birminghamians is not the same as the racing of Mobilians, etc.). The racing of old people is not the same as the racing of young people. The racing of poor people is not the same as the racing of middle-class people. People fight to retain the dichotomy in face of this endless complication, but in fact the situation on the ground is infinitely vexed. I enter into the complications on the ground many times in what follows. But the basic project is to elucidate the content of the imaginary dichotomy itself and the modes of resistance to it mounted by African-Americans. This imaginary dichotomy is the way we try to race ourselves as white. So if I return again and again to race as a dualism, it is in an attempt to reveal, through the content of white imaginations, us to ourselves.
Even if it was not continually compromised in its application to the situation, the dichotomy could not possibly accomplish what it wants to accomplish. For what it seeks is precisely an insulation of the white from the black. This insulation is perfectly literalized in segregation practices, but it has conceptual underpinnings. Descartes imaginatively ejected his body from himself; he argued for an identification of himself with his mind or soul. We white folks seek to define ourselves in insulation from, and to dominate, what we exclude from ourselves in the construction of race as a dichotomy. Yet the terms are perfectly interdependent. White self-image is made out of its exclusions; it is incomprehensible without precisely these exclusions. It exists in a continual dependence on that which it segregates from itself, that from which it insulates itself. There are no minds without bodies; there is no managerial expertise without labor, no freedom from desire without the mark of desire and its erasure from the semiotic order. If our language is constituted by its dualisms, it is continually implicated in the terms of the dualisms that it seeks to devalue: in body, nature, particularity.
This, as we are going to see, has the most practical and immediate consequences. We desire what we exclude, for one thing, and this desire is hyper-intensified when what we exclude is, precisely, desire. This is elaborated in practices of slumming and spectacle. Forms of dominance are also, covertly, forms of dependence, and if the Confederacy fought for slavery, it was because its economy was dependent on slave labor. In other words, we need what we exclude, both because its exclusion is a fragmentation of the self that leaves a laceration that must be healed, and because we cannot live the life we have made for ourselves without making ourselves economically and socially and aesthetically dependent on what we have attempted to dominate. For this if for no other reason, the dualism of race has already broken down at the moment of its articulation; it seeks to erase the dependence of the privileged term on the dispossessed term, but it inscribes exactly that dependence in its very possibility.
There is a final complication I want to mention. We white folks articulate what is black by a series of ejections from white selves and white culture. If we now assert (as I have asserted) that racial identities are interwoven, that makes it appear that black selves and black culture are made by white ejections, that the black "other" always merely subserves the white "same." But a notion like that could itself emerge only out of racism. Rather, the conceptual schema inscribes the 'logic of the Same,' while actual persons inhabit it at various points and with complex tensions.
White culture (despite its own views) did not find a raw, cultureless, languageless human material in Africa, and then make it over technologically into the limit condition of white civilization. On the contrary, what it tried to appropriate to this purpose was already encultured as elaborately as itself, but often in ways that seemed unrecognizable to Europeans and European-Americans. The attempt to make Africans into the other of European culture was quite literally the attempt to achieve a total erasure of African languages, African religions, and African arts. And yet African cultures survived and became means of survival for Africans in the diaspora.(8) What speaks to white people out of "the black experience" is not, or not only, the voice of our own exclusions, but voices that speak out of great cultural resources that we have repressed in order precisely to make an other for ourselves. And so the very form of our exclusion is also given form by the antecedent character of what we found; since we require ourselves to be whatever you are not, every event that shows us who you are changes us. Further, since the constructed limit is permeable and forms the zone of a transaction of desire and knowledge, we practice incorporations as well as exclusions. For example, one way that young white people can rebel against their parents and their culture is precisely by finding out about black culture, by searching for the intrinsic content of what has been abstractly excluded. Thus, the ways in which black and white identities are interwoven are endlessly complicated and, despite and because of the hegemonic relation, mutual.
The voices in the texts discussed in what follows speak from very different locations: different genders, different eras, different regions, different economic circumstances, different individualities. But in some sense they speak to the same situation, a situation in which we are all located.
1. See, e.g., Michael Eric Dyson, Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). As in several of his books, Dyson begins with an autobiographical excursus. In fact, our stories, across the racial divide, run in an amazingly parallel course: we were born in the same year and raised in mostly black cities (Dyson grew up in Detroit); for both of us, the King assassination was a pivotal moment in the development of racial consciousness; we both spent some years in Tennessee, and were both influenced by the work of Richard Rorty, who was my dissertation supervisor. There is a similar autobiographical excursus in the first chapter of Houston Baker's Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972). Patricia J. Williams consistently connects extremely sophisticated legal theory with intense personal description, as in The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991) and The Rooster's Egg (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
2. Houston Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 48.
3. Hazel V. Carby, "The Multicultural Wars," in Black Popular Culture, a project by Michele Wallace, Gina Dent, ed. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), p. 193.
4. A small sample of the field: David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991) and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1994). Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994). Race Traitor, John Garvey and Noel Ignatiev, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1996). Fred Pfeil, White Guys (New York: Verso, 1995). Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). William Upski Wimsatt, Bomb the Suburbs (Chicago: The Subway and Elevated Press Company, 1994). Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1994). Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
5. This case is made beautifully by Brenda Dixon Gottschild in Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996).
6. Ralph Ellison, "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," reprinted in The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie McKay, eds. (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 1542.
7. This has been remarked by many black feminists, e.g. Barbara Smith in "Notes for Yet Another Paper on Black Feminism, or Will the Real Enemy Please Stand Up," Conditions, 5: 3 (October 1978), pp. 123-132. See also Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon, 1988).
8. This point is compellingly argued in many places, e.g., by Gottschild in Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, in Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983), and in Africanisms in American Culture, Jospeh E. Holloway, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
