Meet the New Dad, Same as the Old (Deadbeat) Dad: Justin Timberlake Pt. 1

In a previous post, I talked about the unexpected trouble caused by the success of African-American Studies (broadly) and black feminism specifically. It's a common story about subnational cultures or youth subcultures. When the underground comes above-ground, more often than not, the community that nurtured the art when no one else respected it suddenly finds that the fruit of their unassisted labor-- newly popular and profitable--is claimed as common property.

Some of you are old enough to recall (and others should avail themselves and look into) the bad old days in the history of hip-hop. Once, MTV wouldn't touch the stuff. Then they played it on a restricted hour on a Saturday night on a show called Yo! MTV Raps. From those marginal beginnings, hiphop has replaced rock as the sound of the US, exported to the world. Well, this is the way of things. And it is certainly a kind of success.

But then there's the moment when you turn on the TV, and Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon are performing a "history of rap." They aren't apologizing. They know the songs and they're doing it. Am I just jaded and paranoid for noticing the Roots, the all-black back-up band whose musical talent underwrites the white boys messing around up front? Does anyone listen to what The Roots actually play behind them, or is it just assumed that, since they are the black back-up band and they sound fine that they must also sound good (enough)?

What did I want from Fallon or JT? Certainly not a disclaimer: We apologize for being white and performing these songs. That would have been ridiculous. Yet, some other things stuck out to me--and this, with only one viewing. The one song they referenced by a white rapper was cut extremely short. They just gave us the Alright stop of "Ice, Ice Baby." What's the message there? That one of the first rap songs to hit #1 on the Billboard charts did not deserve to be performed? (Ice's single and album went to #1 on Billboard's pop charts, the first double-whammy in the genre's history. Well, I suppose if I can root irrationally for the Williams sisters and any black contestant on Jeopardy, white people can go nuts for white rappers in a black-invented and -dominated genre).

Timberlake's and Fallon's refusal to sing the lyric said to me that "Ice, Ice Baby" was simply too uncool to perform. But isn't part of its uncoolness that Vanilla Ice's roots in the vanilla suburbs were exposed? So isn't part of what is happening when Fallon and JT do not deign to perform it a refusal to inhabit the illegitimate white rapper position? It seems to me that this moment establishes distance from the old white person who couldn't hang. We are the new white party boys, it says. And we don't even need your permission to be in black cultural territory, because we've moved the hood to a sound studio at 30 Rock and hired you to bring the funk to us.

In the end, I just want good art. I love Michael McDonald's soulful singing; I agree with New Yorker film critic David Denby that the best black actors clamor to get in John Sayles' movies because he writes such amazing parts for them. I think John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation is among the very smartest, most beautiful narratives of race, class, and sex in our literature. So it's hard for me to put my finger on what makes me defensive when it comes to Timberfake (now that he's off Saturday Night Live, I quite like Jimmy Fallon). I suppose it is that with the artists I enjoy, I sense they are hard-working and humble, and this combination wins them amazing, uncommon insight. They don't think they already have black culture down (hell, I been black for thirty-three years and I still don't have it down).†

Milan Kundera once wrote that love is a continual interrogation of the other. I take this to mean that when you have no more questions, you have fallen out of love -- the opposite of love being indifference (or dis-interest, as it were). So the white artists that I enjoy are those who show a continued curiosity about the black thing, the way it may overlap with their experiences and, right at the moment of identicality, breaks off again... only to return, at the moment of extremest difference, to another point of convergence. This is our shared history in this country. Its inequalities are not simply dissolved through the arrival or acknowledgement of the multiracial. To reverse a point made by Mahmood Mamdani, even if cultural identities are cumulative, political identities tend to be singular. In other words, bilingualism, mixed-parentage, and cosmopolitanism do you little good when the person sitting in judgment of your job application or your court case has one of those switches flipped. You become citizen or illegal, man or freak, Israeli or Palestinian, family man or sexual predator, and your fate proceeds accordingly until the next reading.

But it is a bit strange, now, after channeling culture, geography, and money along racial lines for centuries to suddenly declare that your black blues ain't so black after all. I find myself hearing things like That's not black: it's Southern--as if something couldn't be both. As if black is exclusionary in the ways that white was. Hell, as a discard category, black has had far less capacity to reject what gets thrown into it. The real estate (and symbolic space) of blackness has not been typically been sealed by restrictive covenants. Speaking generally we have been obliged to take in all shades and all kinds--those who wanted to be with us, and those who were banished and had nowhere else to go.

But the fact that white American culture is hybrid is the result, it would seem, either of intentional appropriation or of minority influences that had to overcome white indifference or dismissal. Claiming, then, that black cultural production is hybrid is an entirely different enterprise--one that comes perilously close to staking a claim to the very baby you once dropped at the side of the road and left to fend for itself. To the extent that white America has been a deadbeat Dad to black America (to borrow from Hortense Spillers' "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe"), white scholars and cultural producers might tread lightly when returning to embrace the children, all grown up with no help from Dad. A rapprochement can happen, but it takes time and effort.  The claim of genetic similarity will not be enough, just as the knowledge that we've all been here together on this continent as one (un)happy family has not been enough.

 --- In one week, Part Two -- "Sports and Swagger"

† Guare, for example, builds an enormously moving story out of a simple dilemma for the white female protagonist. This gay black hustler comes into their lives, after having memorized the connections of Manhattan's social circles and learned an amazing amount of art and literary history. She decides, at his request, to take him in, to teach him the family business. Her children want nothing to do with her, but this kid wants in. After he is arrested by the police on nebulous charges, he disappears into the prison system. She tries to find him but realizes, sadly, "We weren't family. We didn't know Paul's name." This person who knew her, loved her, touched her life and invaded her dreams was gone to her forever, as if he'd never been there at all. It's this loss, and the desire to prevent it, that sparks a massive change in her life. Guare was smart enough not to pretend that we get a complete passport into someone else's community--or even into their individual psyche. But we get the possibility to work on it, to turn it  over and over like the film famous Kandinsky canvas in the film, painted on both sides.

Discovering Inhabited Lands: Black Studies Becomes Everybody's Business

In honor of Ann duCille's "The Occult of True Black Womanhood," I offer an article-in-progress that, like hers, was "difficult to write and...will be, for some, a difficult article to read."

The trend of turning African-American intellectuals' work into a straw man seems to be gaining currency among scholars these days. In an earlier post, I discussed David Reynolds's admonition that black people should re-read Uncle Tom's Cabin and return to the style of nonviolent resistance that Stowe champions. I still am unsure what good this would accomplish, except returning his favorite writers and heroes to popular favor and, perhaps, rendering some black people who scare him less frightening.

I could just as well have pointed to some black writers of the Anglophone Caribbean who disdain black Americans as culturally impoverished (Orlando Patterson), provincial (the Paul Gilroy of The Black Atlantic, Hilton Als), or even fascistic (the Paul Gilroy of Against Race).† I'm going to put that part to the side for now, because I'll have to find out more about this inter-diasporic beef. But I do want to turn my attention to some full-length scholarly works I feel more ready to comment upon.

In his Lying Up a Nation, ethnomusicologist Ronald Radano claims that there is no African-American music that isn't influenced by the overarching presence of white racism. His emphasis is on white transcriptions of black singing and how these early musicologists took interracial religious ceremonies and insinuated that black vocality was different. While Radano may be right that the literary records of what black music "is" are influenced by literate whites' preconceived notions of black difference, he is not therefore correct that all black musicians were perpetually looking over their shoulders wondering what white people thought while they made music. While he may think the feeling of black community is simply the collective delusion of people who want to escape the violence and amalgamation of life in the Americas, I would counter that the violence of racism is not all-determining. There are moments--however brief--in which the violent separatism of racism seems to fade away. Our thinking has to be able to account for those as well as the tenacious persistence of racism.

*[Addendum 8/1/11: As I mention below in the comments, Radano puts forward a "mulatto" thesis, arguing that American culture--on both sides of the color line is utterly entangled. This makes one of his text's strategies even stranger. The book is meant to overthrow the entirety of African-American scholarship on black music -- from the oral history of Bernice Johnson Reagon to the detailed musicological analysis of Samuel P. Floyd. His contentions: 1) There is no such thing as a black musical tradition, there is only sound that then gets classified within a racist discourse run (it seems) by whites. 2) African tradition also stopped in North America because drums were confiscated and all the enslaved had left were their voices. So the so-called continuity of the drum is an illusion, based on slaveholders' diaries.

Now, he is going against what every living black music scholar (academic or independent) believes. And that's fine. But then he has this strange tactic of using *dead* canonical black figures (such as DuBois and Hurston) to support his stance. Now, who is likely to be closer to DuBois's ideas: someone who went to Fisk, or a white academic who did not? So, it becomes very strange to hear him talk about what DuBois or Zora Neale Hurston "knew" -- and have their knowledge reflect perfectly what he believes today, rather than the beliefs of people who come from the places and institutions they helped found. And, besides, if black culture is a nonentity and all we have is hybrid, then why is none of the "tour guides" in Lying white? In an irreducibly mulatto culture, there should be dead white intellectuals who had as much insight into black music as the super-canonical black intellectuals he revises. 

To be clear, it's not the argument Radano makes that grates; it's the way he goes about making it.]

Eric Goldstein differs from Radano in that the black people who just don't get it in his The Price of Whiteness include the living and the dead. In addition, Goldstein's black people are not just mistaken, they actively perpetuate racial problems. When it isn't blaming African-Americans for controlling the US racial discourse to produce simplified notions of Jews as white, Price is an astute, wide-ranging history of the complex and regionally specific ways American Jews situated themselves as a race or in relation to the black/white paradigm of race. His discussion of American Jews' relationship to the category of race in the twentieth century is unparalleled, necessary, and nuanced. Yet, he couldn't allow the book to be that. Instead, he begins with a strange attack on James Baldwin for having a supposedly "simple" view of Jews' relation to whiteness. Yet, in a later chapter, he repeats, almost verbatim, Baldwin's claim that many Jewish shop owners were as charitable as they could be to black Harlemites considering the middleman status of Jewish merchants in the US's white-over-black economy. Still, Baldwin and every other black thinker Goldstein invokes signify unsophisticated thinking that Goldstein is there to correct. [Reynolds, too, attacked Baldwin who, to be sure, makes some errors in his interpretation of Tom, but makes a larger point that cannot be dismissed: namely, that the impossible goodness of some of Stowe's characters is as dehumanizing a portrayal of African-American men as is the standard fare of morons, sambos, and studs.]

It may not be politic to say this, but it appears that the result of integrated academic units, such as American Studies, is that everyone can have one chapter about race in her book, or speak with authority on topics that, for decades, no one with academic ambition would even touch. I am happy to have knowledgeable white colleagues and mentors, let me be clear. But the presumption of a sort of over-arching knowledge informed by a more objective position... this just seems like having the supposedly objective, disinterested, and even-handed whites take over fields that they had no hand in building (and that their predecessors actively stifled). 

This is not to say that every white scholar has to defer to scholars of color. We know you don't have to be one to study one: some of the most important advances in queer theory have come from women partnered with men--Eve Sedgwick and Madhavi Menon, to name two. So, by all means, welcome to the party. But a caveat: to deem that the field was unsophisticated and amateurish before you showed up is not an opening gesture likely to win friends and influence people. But, even more important, it is likely to weaken the scholar's own work with misunderstandings that could have been avoided by presuming that the the knowledge in place before he arrived (like Columbus on inhabited Hispaniola) issued from intelligence and not simply superstition and paranoia. 

It is also crucial to do some of the careful self-scrutiny that anthropology demanded: knowing who you are and what your interests and investments are might shed light on why you see the situation so much differently than "the natives" do. In that case, it might not be that they were gabbling Calibans who did not know their own meaning all along but that they fit differently into your universe. African-Americans have long been deemed partial or marginal, rendered vulnerable to being resituated within science, Christianity, liberalism, Marxism or some other European universal. Of course, since Af-Am Studies doesn't occupy the high ground of the universal, the gesture can't be reciprocated. 

In another future post, I want to think and talk about the ways that the pressure to distance ourselves from the alleged provinciality of Af-Am has affected my generation of African-American scholars.

-----------------

† I am considering an essay about the reasons for this rivalry between black people coming from Britain's orbit and those from the US. 1) It seems that black immigrants to the US often receive the same message that their white counterparts did--specifically that the native-born African-American population is lazy slime that is beneath them. 2) I'm sure there are remnants and reconfigurations of black American nativism that appears in Harlem Renaissance novels--African-Americans directing insults and violence toward Caribbean and African immigrants they considered less civilized "monkeys." Perhaps #1 above is just a reversal of fortune. 3) My understanding is that Britain's commonwealth education system steeps students in the supposedly universal canon of dead white masters--Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Thackeray, Austen, et al. This might account for the occasional accusation that African-Americans are comparatively provincial, what with the pride and interest many take in African-American art. 4) There may also be a rivalry and jealousy because of the US's dominance in the cultural marketplace. Because most of the media companies with the widest distribution are here, US products go out while even an international star like Bob Marley had trouble getting his work in. This imbalance may have changed, but it still seems that to become an international superstar, internationals must pitch themselves to the US market, while US stars can become international stars by virtue of being American stars.