Race and Masculinity, Sports and Swagger -- Second Thoughts after Justin Timberlake

One day I was watching C-Span's Book TV. Toni Morrison was speaking to a room of librarians. She read from the first pages of her then-new novel, Love. When she finished, she closed her portfolio and said: "This is from the new novel, Love, which--as you can tell--is perfect."

I hollered.

The combination of audacious pride and irony tickles me to this day. But if I like pride and audacity, why was I so repulsed by Punk'd and then, again, by Timberfake's and Fallon's History of Hip-Hop (the topic of last week's thoughts on the Timberlake phenomenon) ? Why do I find it ok for the senior black diva to show this arrogance and not the junior white boy?

Well, to start, I'd have to say I consider the artist's back story. I know that Morrison didn't just waltz into her position in national (not to mention global) arts and letters. Her success came relatively late in life -- she was nearly 40 when her first novel was published. The acclaim for her work was not immediate and universal. She paid dues. And, to this day, some cultural critics take it as a badge of honor to despise her writing.† So, I like her for the same reason I like the way Navratilova and Boris Becker played tennis. (Schiavone has the mantle now). I admire people for whom it doesn't come easily, but who persist and excel nonetheless. I admire people who take a risk and leave it all on the court (or on the stage). Conversely, I also admire those--like Morrison and Roger Federer--who can produce magic, seemingly at will, yet have a humility about it, even if slyly expressed.*

But the obligation to work hard and the freedom to express self-satisfaction often get distributed unevenly in a race-and-gender matrix--especially in an economy that sells us fantasies of race- and gender-specific properties (see: the Jersey Shore, or, actually, nearly any reality show where there is no task at hand). So, in the interest of taking a risk of my own, I am going to step down from my academic pedestal and try to explore the roots of my contradictory distaste for white braggadocio and admiration of the diva mode... but through autobiographical rather than sociological means. Of course, I don't think that social and historical forces can be taken out of the picture, but those can be delivered via pronouncement or implied in a narrative. I'm going to try the latter as an experiment.

if you have to ask

When jazz was on the border between subcultural pleasure and mainstream commodity, Louis Armstrong was asked to define it. Although perhaps apocryphal, the story goes that he replied -- if you have to ask, you'll never know.


Nevertheless, I did think that, as a second post, I might try to explain why the phrase I ain't studying you appeals to me. The task poses a bit of a dilemma. That is, it forces me to confront two (of many) opposing forces in the stalled cultural "dialogue about race" in the United States. At one end, we have the proponents of cultural diversity. Put in charitable terms, these are cultural relativists who believe equality and understanding can come from a sharing of "perspectives" and-- usually--food and dancing. Although in theory this sort of ethnic sharing is supposed to avoid making any one culture central, diversity in the United States means "divergence" from a presumably white American-ness. This tendency places an undue burden on non-white people to explain themselves to what can only seem like a mainstream culture suffering from Alzheimer's. We remember white granddad, but he doesn't seem to remember us. So we have to let him feel our hair, nose, and face and sing him one of our people's traditional songs in the hopes of a brief flicker of recognition. The product has been the other pole--a group of deservedly exhausted non-white folks who are tired of explaining themselves and, in fact, refuse to do it. Their credo would be something like: To hell with explaining myself to you. Read a book!

Finding the middle is not always a virtue, especially if the poles keep moving (as they do with the two major parties in US politics). So, even if I make the wishy-washy concession, as I will here, that "both sides have a point," you can rest assured, it will not be my habit.  I still believe one has to choose in order to avoid paralysis. Luckily, we get to make a series of choices and correct for past errors.

In this case, though I do tire of having to explain myself to a white majority that always has the choice to listen or to stop their ears, I also chose an explaining profession. I am an educator. So, for me, the question is not whether to explain things across cultures, it's when, how, and with what amount of my energy. Of course, there is the larger question of why--to what ends do I explain? For me, that answer has two parts. First, there is the human desire to want to be heard and understood by somebody--anybody. The second aspect is a bit more specific to African-American life. To quote James Baldwin:

A people at the center of the Western world, and in the midst of so hostile a population, has not endured and transcended by means of what is patronizingly called a 'dialect.' We, the blacks, are in trouble, certainly, but we are not doomed, and we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that we know to be a lie.

This is not to suggest that I am interested in donating my time to be the earthy black conscience of whites who, by their elevation, have lost touch with their--you get the drift. No Jimminy-Cricket in blackface for me. I'm not that altruistic. I am willing to "explain" to white people not for their own moral betterment--although that's a perfectly acceptable by-product. Instead, I am hoping to ensure more just treatment. I am hoping to inspire not a personal conversion but a disposition toward decision-making that does not immediately rule out the voices of the very parties who are most adversely impacted. In a deliciously precise and understated gloss, Toni Morrison calls this "studied indifference." Think about that. She means that people got diplomas and degrees, filled libraries, and funded research on not studying you.