Our World with Black Enterprise: Zerlina Maxwell and Michael Eric Dyson Discuss Re-Election of Barack Obama

BEMultiMedia

 

We look at President Barack Obama's successful re-election bid and what it means for America over the next four years. Our guests include: David Webb, co-founder of Tea Party 365; Zerlina Maxwell, political analyst and writer for the New York Daily News; and Michael Eric Dyson, author and professor of sociology at Georgetown University.

Michael Eric Dyson on "Black Self Hatred"

BETNetworks

 

Following a heated panel discussion about the black community and racism, Michael Eric Dyson shares why he thinks fellow Don't Sleep! sleeptalker is "an honest expression of black self hatred in action."

Michael Eric Dyson & Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report Debate Obama Presidency

Democracy Now 

As President Obama accepts the Democratic nomination to seek four more years in the White House, we host a debate on his presidency with Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report and Michael Eric Dyson, professor at Georgetown University and author of numerous books. Ford calls Obama the "more effective evil" for embracing right-wing policies and neutralizing effective opposition, while Dyson argues Obama provides the best and obvious choice for progressive change within the confines of the U.S. political system.

Michael Eric Dyson on "American Empire"

Nas and Michael Eric Dyson Talk Music & Politics

Nasir Jones talks Music and Politics with Michael Eric Dyson, guest host of The Ed Show.

DL Hughley Talks Race, Obama and America with Michael Eric Dyson

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DL Hughley discusses his new book I Want You to Shut the F*ck Up: How the Audacity of Dopes is Ruining America on The Ed Show with Guest Host Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson: How Did Chavis Carter Die?

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Big Think: Michael Eric Dyson on Black Misery and a Black President

Big Think:
 

Michael Eric Dyson on what a black president could do to alleviate black misery.

A New Way Out: Melissa Harris Perry & Michael Eric Dyson on Frank Ocean

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The Obama Effect on Marriage Equality

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James Braxton Peterson (Lehigh University); Joe Watkins Discuss Marriage Equality on The Ed Show with guest host Michael Eric Dyson.

Marc Morial, Jamal Bryant & Michael Eric Dyson Discuss LGBT Issues in the Black Community

Marc Morial, Jamal Bryant and Michael Eric Dyson on Our World with Black Enterprise hosted by Marc Lamont Hill.

Michael Eric Dyson to Black Church: "Don't Ask God to Co-sign Your Bigotry"

with Obery Hendricks and Bishop Harry Jackson.

The NRA, The Koch Brothers and the "Stand Your Ground Laws"

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The Martin Bashir Show (with guest host Karen Finney) featuring Michael Eric Dyson (Georgetown University), Joy-Ann Reid (theGrio.com) & Julian Epstein (The Nation).

Boyce Watkins & Michael Eric Dyson Debate the State of 'Hip-Hop' at Brown University

Bill O'Reilly and the Soul Train Line?

 

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Michael Eric Dyson and James Braxton Peterson discuss Bill O'Reilly's dated notions of Black America on MSNBC's The Ed Show.

Religion Scholar Obery Hendricks Discusses "Class Warfare" on the Ed Show with Michael Eric Dyson

 

Obery Hendricks is Visiting Scholar at Institute for Research in African-American Studies and Department of Religion at Columbia University and the author of the recent The Universe Bends Toward Justice: Radical Reflections on the Bible, the Church, and the Body Politic.

Politics as Usual: Decoding the Attacks on a Liberal Education

Politics as Usual: Decoding the Attacks on a Liberal Education

by David J. Leonard, Mark Anthony Neal and James Braxton Peterson | NewBlackMan

Few university courses generate much attention from mainstream media, but Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson’s course “The Sociology of Hip-Hop: Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z” has drawn national attention from NBC’s Today Show, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, USA Today, and Forbes.com among many others.  To be sure such attention is not unusual for Dyson, who is one of the most visible academics in the United States and has offered courses dealing with hip-hop culture, sociology, and Black religious and vernacular expression for more than twenty-years.  Yet, such attention seems odd; hundreds of university courses containing a significant amount of content related to Hip-hop culture and Black youth are taught every year—and have been so, for more than a decade.  In addition, there are dozens of scholarly studies of Hip-hop published each year—Julius Bailey’s edited volume Jay-Z: Essays of Hip-Hop’s Philosopher King, among those published just this year—and two Ivy League universities, Harvardand Cornell, boast scholarly archives devoted to the subject of Hip-Hop.

Any course focused on a figure like Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter), given his contemporary Horatio Algernarrative, and his reputation as an urban tastemaker, was bound to generate considerable attention, but the nature of the attention that Dyson’s class has received and some of the attendant criticism, suggest that much more is at play.

In early November, The Washington Post offered some of the first national coverage of the class, largely to coincide with the arrival of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne tour to Washington DC’s Verizon Center.  Jay-Z dutifully complied with the attention by giving Professor Dyson a shout-out from the stage. The largely favorable article about the class, did make note, as have many subsequent stories, about the cost of tuition at Georgetown; as if somehow the cost of that tuition is devalued by kids taking classes about hip-hop culture.

Other profiles of the course and Dyson have gone out of their way to make the point that the course had mid-term and final exams, as if that wouldn’t be standard procedure for any nationally recognized senior scholar at a top-tier research university in this country.  Such narrative slippages speak volumes about the widespread belief that courses that focus on some racial and cultural groups, are created in slipshod fashion and lack rigor; it is a critique that is well worn, and that various academic disciplines, such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies and even Sociology have long had to confront.

As ethnomusicologist Joe Schoss, author of Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York, recently suggested on Facebook, courses constructed around the mythology of “great men” are often the vehicle in which outlier disciplines are made legible within traditional academic settings. Indeed Dyson’s career has been marked by such studies, where he’s examined figures such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marvin Gaye, hip-hop artists Tupac Shakur and Nas (Nasir Jones).  He is also teaching a class on the legacy of Jesse Jackson this semester, to commemorate the Civil Rights leader’s 70^thbirthday. 

Figures like Dyson, and Brown University Professor Tricia Rose, who authored the landmark Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America in 1994, were at the forefront of establishing Hip-Hop studies as a viable—and yes popular—academic discipline for nearly two decades. 

The reality of the presence of Hip-Hop Studies at virtually every major college and University, unveils the “oh my, golly gee” discovery mode of so much of the reporting and controversy surrounding the Jay Z class, as more manufactured, than anything else.  More to the point, the attack on the validity of a class focused on a prominent and highly influential cultural figure, who happens to be a young Black man who has trafficked in outlier sub-cultures, seems more emblematic of an assault on the value of a liberal education. This assault comes at a historical moment when the products of a liberal education, are literally raising critical questions about the nature of inequality in American society.

There are other critics, some of whom throw darts from within the realm of Hip Hop Studies.  They disparage Jay-Z as merely a misogynist, a hustler who promotes consumerism and other poisonous messages to young minds that mindlessly follow him.  Some of these same critics have also questioned Dyson’s knowledge of Hip Hop culture, his cultural bona fides on the discourses of the subject matter and his ability to choose the appropriate subjects.  So at the same time that conservative critics question the validity of Hip Hop studies vis a vis Shakespeare or *yawn* classical music, other critics (the one’s we’d assume might appreciate the value of such a course in the broader context of Africana, Popular culture, and Hip Hop studies) are quick to cast Dyson as an outsider; to proffer Dead Prez or Mos Def as more appropriate subject matter for this kind of course. 

Well, “we don’t believe you/You need more people.” “Do you dudes listen to music?/Or do you just skim through it?”   Yes Jay-Z’s music has many limitations, faults, and critical flaws – some of which he is poignantly aware.  But that is exactly why his life and lyrics make substantive subject matter for sociological inquiry.  His influence and impact – or what some may deem popularity or sell-out-status – are more grist for the sociological mill.  In the end, the critique of the course that suggests that Hip Hop Studies has no place in the academy is eerily connected to those critiques that question Dyson’s authenticity as either an elite scholar or a ‘real’ Hip Hop Head.   And we LOVE Dead Prez, but the “mainstream” media ain’t checking for a Dead Prez class and in order to stave off the onslaught against area studies, interdisciplinary studies, Hip Hop studies, and more broadly but directly, the Humanities, we are going to need some of that mainstream attention.  Folks hate to hear this, but part of the reason why we have access to so much of the ‘underground’ Hip Hop that we know and love is because there exists a healthy amount of popular attention (and dollars) directed at the drivel we (love to) hate.

In a recent article that was less than optimistic about the future of the humanities within American higher education, Dr. Frank Donoghue wrote, "When we claim to wonder whether the humanities will survive the twenty first century, we're really asking, 'Will the humanities have a place in the standard higher-education curriculum in the United States?' (2010).  The answer appears to be no from a myriad of places.   “But there's no denying that the fight between the cerebral B.A. vs. the practical B.S. is heating up,” writes Nancy Cook in “The Death of Liberal Arts.”  “For now, practicality is the frontrunner, especially as the recession continues to hack into the budgets of both students and the schools they attend.” Peddling the often-cited binaries between “cerebral” and “the practical,” the intellectual and the useful, Cook highlights the ubiquitous attack on academic enterprises that seemingly don’t produce tangible results or profits.

While commentators tend to focus on the declining interest and place of a liberal arts education that has resulted from the increased costs of higher education, the focus on securing a good job upon graduation, and the professionalization of higher education, the waning place of liberal arts and humanities is not simply an organic process.  It reflects a direct assault from conservative factions within the American political landscape.  In Texas, Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation called for substantial changes in the delivery of higher education, proposing greater emphasis on teaching and research that benefits the state and its economic needs.  Defending the call for reform, Ronald L. Trowbridge, “The Case for Higher Ed Accountability” described his views on educational reform in the following way:

What is the value of any research endeavor to students or to wider societal needs? Some process of evaluation must be established. If researchers wish to pursue matters that do not serve students or wider societal needs, they are certainly free to do so, but such should be so without release time from the classroom.

Texas is not alone.  In Florida, Governor Rick Scott recently announced his desire to remake public universities with greater emphasis on programs that stimulate the economy and produce future workers in key industries.  “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take that money to create jobs,” Scott noted “So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state.”  The divestment of public investment in the arts, human inquiry, and humanistic endeavors has been central to the conservative movement.  Opposition to intellectual pursuits and the neoliberal emphasis on professionalism has had profound influence on contemporary culture.

Describing a friend who wanted to study comparative literature, Andrew Bast notes his initial reaction as one of “bewilderment” and “fascination,” asking himself, “What in the world would be the value in that?” Capturing the hegemonic of the assault and systemic devaluing of the humanities within contemporary culture, he makes “The Case for a Useless Degree:”

I later learned that there's actually a huge value in it. Computer science, accounting, marketing—the purpose of many majors is self-evident. They lead to well-paid jobs and clear-cut career paths. (One hopes, at least.) But comparative literature, classics, and philosophy—according to the new conventional wisdom—offer no clear trajectory.

The recent spectacle and media frenzy surrounding Michael Eric Dyson’s “Sociology of Hip-Hop” course points to the powerful ways that “useless degrees” and “useless” knowledge are under attack.  It also exposes the critical discourses that exist within Hip Hop studies – who can teach it/who is authentic enough to teach it.  The media frenzy and the debate about this class reflect a well-organized attack on the humanities, liberal arts education and individual academic FREEDOM.

Strangely enough, the internecine squabbles about whether or not Jay-Z is fit to be taught or if Dyson is fit to teach similarly swirl in the discursive diatribes against certain “less practical” disciplines.  What reflects back at us is an ideology that demonizes critical thought, demonizes intellectual inquiry, and silences conversations about race, gender, inequality and other issues of social injustice.  A focus here on Jay-Z or Michael Eric Dyson misses the point because the class is becoming a stand-in for a larger assault on education, intellectualism, and critical thinking.  The media coverage and the ensuing debates about it—on social media—reflect  an overall effort to demonize those who teach, those who educate, and those who articulate "freedom dreams."  The culture wars are back and it’s us against them and us against us. 

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris. Follow him on Twitter @DR_DJL.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press) and Professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University.  He is founder and managing editor of NewBlackMan and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black.  Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

James Braxton Peterson is Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University  and the author of the forthcoming Major Figures: Critical Essays on Hip Hop Music(Mississippi University Press). Follow him at @DrJamesPeterson.

#Occupy Post-Blackness?

"negro sunshine"--Glenn Ligon

Occupy Post-Blackness?

by Wahneema Lubiano | special to NewBlackman

As some of the contributors articulated in Toure’s Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, others in numerous pieces of scholarship produced over the past decades, and still others in public discussion in various places, Blackness is both a form of chosen identity and, at the same time, is an imposition from the larger social order.  Under some circumstances that imposition has coercive power and pressure behind it; we don’t live solely within the terms of our own imaginations, not even in our own drama around that identity.  That external imposition often interrupts our identity reveries and speaks a pathology narrative about us and does so sometimes with and sometimes without our own consent.  It is that understanding of the imposition of coercive history in the present moment that makes “post-blackness” inadequate as a rubric for accurately describing the effects of structural racism, of white supremacy in the present.  And Toure takes note of that fact in his book. 

But “post-blackness” is also situational—or, as Michael Eric Dyson asserts in the introduction: “. . . Blackness bends to the tongue it tumbles from at any given moment of time” (xii).  And it is in this regard that I’m interested to some great extent in specific situational elements of the phrase’s use: its use as a means to describe a moment in cultural, artistic, or emotional self-understanding – yes, there indeed I can see its usefulness and it is that usefulness that I’m addressing when I’m quoted in the book talking about why Dave Chapelle’s show prompted me away from any simple dismissal of the phrase when Toure first brought it up in our conversation.  I thought that the phrase was a useful way to describe what I saw as a kind of pre-figurative existence in Chapelle’s work—he was performing possibilities of art—of humor and wit—that were not completely captured by the imposition of social blackness both across our history and in the present moment.

Yet, the phrase itself is redolent of past decades of anxiety about black art, black cultural production—an anxiety exemplified in the 1926 fight, in the pages of The Nation magazine, between Langston Hughes (“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”) and George Schuyler (“The Negro Art Hokum”) around the burden of representation (as Stuart Hall has described it) for Negro artists.  “Post-blackness” is a rubric that reminds me that cultural producers are continually caught in the dilemma in the West of a pressure to define themselves, to distinguish themselves, as mythic individuals—that’s the ur-narrative of U.S. individuality writ large; so, of course, artists, other cultural producers, cultural critics, and we ourselves continually produce narratives of “generational shift”—it’s a handy way to make individual space, to posit a conversational imperative, and have that imperative recognized. And it doesn’t much matter, when that posture is assumed, that space claimed, whether it is a new moment in fact or a seemingly new moment—the gesture is meant to establish a possibility here and now.  I find those repeated moments sociologically rich and interesting.

But while I don’t want to cast aspersions on that gesture, I do want to move onto something else that came up as we explored the gesture of Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon, something that I’d love to talk about more, if people care to, and it’s this: the social utility, the currency, of post-blackness. Let me make what I’m saying more concrete.

When Toure asked me about the most racist thing that ever happened to me, my first response (along with many of the other contributors he quoted) was to say that structural racism enacted itself in such a way that I wasn’t personally confronted with the most racist things that had ever happened to me.  But Toure pushed back on this; he pushed me to think about my earlier and younger understandings of racism: the moment prior to my arrival at an analysis of structural racism.  He wanted me to speak about something that hurt way back when.  So, I told a story from my high school years and a bad encounter with a guidance counselor bigot because that story gave me a chance to talk about Howard University; being a student at Howard was a moment of a kind of pre-figurative post-blackness for me.  The most powerful take-away of that story was not the incident with the guidance counselor.  What transformed my life was my discovery of a rich and complex existence within the terms of blackness (a situated blackness) at Howard University.  I found ordinary life at Howard. (That was the saving grace.)

My imagination’s earned currency of post-blackness in turn contributed to a moment of real tension at the end of my interview with Toure when we were talking about Barack Obama, and he asked “How do we create more Barack Obamas?”  In my response, I remember telling Toure that while Obama is certainly exceptional in that sense that he’s the U.S. head of state, he is also ordinary; he is the matter-of-fact product of his class origins and his elite education.  I know thousands of people who are proudly Black and intellectual, as Toure described him, but Obama’s existence, like theirs, like ours, was largely a matter of chance and the specifics of history.  An elite education produces a Barack Obama or any number of other specific kinds of black—or other—intellectuals. 

              

It is the constraint of capitalism that restricts those numbers.  My last sentence of that exchange was “And I think capitalism is a really bad idea.”  I remember that Toure responded with “Wow, we’ll really have to talk about that sometime.” 

              

This then might be a great time for all of us to talk about the currency of post-blackness within the terms of late capitalism in this moment of occupy everywhere.

***

Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African & African American Studies at Duke University.  Lubiano is the editor of The House That Race Built:  Black Americans, US Terrain

Jay-Z Subject of Georgetown University Course

from AP:

Author and educator Michael Eric Dyson is decoding the rhymes of rapper Jay-Z to teach students at Georgetown University about race, gender and poverty. But critics argue lyrics about swag and hustle have no place in higher education. (Dec. 2)

The Today Show: Reading, Writing, Rap? Jay-Z Inspires College Course

Had the privilege of presenting portions of "My Passport Say Shawn: Towards a Cosmopolitan Hip-Hop Masculinity" (from the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities) to Michael Eric Dyson's class on October 5th.