Imagining Black Men: The Politics of Cultural Identity

In a series of shallow comparisons between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., Perry describes Malcolm as a charismatic leader who did not offer any incisive and meaningful analysis of political oppression but was popular simply because he articulated the anger of his followers: “King’s penchant for lofty phrases did not diminish his moving, eloquent appeals for racial brotherhood, which were so unlike Malcolm’s machine-gun-like, unbrotherly outbursts. Whereas Malcolm gave his followers leave to express their hatred of their hateful oppressors, King gave his followers the courage to confront them. Eventually, King’s . . . approach would prove more effective politically.” Both King and Malcolm are reduced in the next paragraph to men who became leaders because they could, finally, eclipse their “tyrannical fathers” only by “rebelling against more powerful tyrants.” Eventually, Perry situates Malcolm himself as a “tyrant” behind the scenes who was incapable of providing effective leadership. “Martin Luther King, Jr., gathered about him a group of articulate, independent-minded co-workers who could make him see his mistakes. While King and his aides transformed their disagreements into a consensus that produced creative political solutions to pressing political problems, Malcolm permitted . . . disagreements to tear his stillborn movement apart.”

Aspects of Malcolm X’s life that could be illuminated by references to history are displaced by narrow and uncritical interpretations of his childhood. For example, Perry maintains that “instead of expressing his negative feelings about his Christian parents, he vented his wrath upon Christianity itself.” Perry continually explains and interprets Malcolm X’s political beliefs in terms of his youthful repression of emotions, his rebellion against parental authority, and his self-hatred. What should be analyzed as the development of a series of complex and varied political critiques arising from Malcolm’s response to particular social conditions at specific times warrants only the most superficial references to the conditions of the nursery. Perry’s book could not be a more devastating attempt to undermine the political significance of the life of Malcolm X had it been written by the CIA as an exercise in disinformation. Perry concludes that Malcolm X was a “political chameleon,” but in the context of reading his biography this tells us as much as if what we had read were merely an extensive record of his potty training.

Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby is a testimony to the ways in which the grounds of racial identity, established during childhood, can be reworked to incorporate new dimensions of political meaning. For Stephen Carter, a professor of law at Yale, the label “affirmative action baby” exists both as an individual affiliation and as an appropriate description for the cohorts of his generation. His narrative is reminiscent of the structure of the slave narrative—manhood is denied or its terms mitigated through the imposition of a racial identity that limits entry into full and equitable recognition as a citizen. But this structure has also been significantly revised. William McFeely, professor of American history at the University of Georgia, argues in his Frederick Douglass that Douglass brought his full cultural and political presence “into being” through his speeches, political writings, and autobiographies. In other words, Douglass asserted his powers as an intellectual in order to be regarded as a man. But Stephen Carter maintains that the very terms of the process of preferential treatment that has enabled him to function as a intellectual have denied him his intellectual equality, and thus his common humanity.

Whereas McFeely illustrates how Douglass located slavery in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, as a condition into which he was born but not trapped, Carter states categorically that “to be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box”: “Affirmative action has been with me always. I do not mean to suggest that I have always been the beneficiary of special programs and preferences. I mean, rather, that no matter what my accomplishments, I have had trouble escaping an assumption that often seems to underlie the worst forms of affirmative action: that black people cannot compete intellectually with white people.” For Carter, affirmative action has meant losing the chance to prove himself on his own merit. It is as though he owned both the boots and the straps but someone came, uninvited, and pulled them up for him. A crucial moment in this narrative of the denial of intellectual equality is a chapter entitled “The Best Black.” Carter explains how in order to be awarded a National Achievement Scholarship for “outstanding Negro students” when a graduating senior he had to forfeit the chance to be awarded a National Merit Scholarship for which he had qualifying scores: “People who get National Achievement Scholarships,” he was informed, “are never good enough to get National Merit Scholarships.” When he told his teacher that he wanted to attend Stanford, the teacher replied that Carter would get in not because he was smart but because he was “black and smart.” Carter wanted, he insists, to be regarded simply as the best, not as the “best black,” but that recognition has eluded him; his first chapter opens with the statement “I got into Law School because I am black.”

Slave narratives were important ideological and political weapons for the antislavery movement. In these narratives it was crucial that the history of the ex-slave as slave be carefully documented and emphasized. The protagonist’s construction of his or her cultural identity as slave and ex-slave was the privileged site of abolitionist activism. On the evening of 16 August 1841, in Nantucket, Frederick Douglass made his first public address to members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and the story he told was the tale of a runaway slave. William Lloyd Garrison immediately recognized the value of this demonstration of the slave’s humanity and the importance of Douglass himself to antislavery propaganda. But if, for example, Douglass had chosen a different political identity and had stood up and attacked racism in the “free” northern states and had told of how, despite his training as a caulker in Baltimore, he was excluded because of his color from being a skilled laborer in the boatyards of New Bedford, it is doubtful whether his value to the abolitionist cause would have been so quickly recognized.

Stephen Carter’s adoption of a primary identity as an affirmative action baby has definite political effects that not only shape the way he writes of his social experiences as a black person but influence the way these experiences are to be read and understood. Circumstances that are usually regarded as promoting the chances of academic success, like the fact that he grew up as the son of a Cornell University professor in an atmosphere where intellectual work was valued, encouraged, and could be financially supported, are displaced to preserve the narrative dichotomy of progress through merit alone versus progress through affirmative action. A particular racialized identity is being shaped when the phrase “affirmative action has been with me always” is selected over, for example, “books have been with me always,” a phrase that refers to a rather different and more class-specific cultural identity. Indeed, Carter argues that affirmative action policies only benefit those already socially advantaged enough to profit from them. While this claim supports Carter’s narrative creation of himself as an affirmative action baby, it contradicts the results of social scientific research. William L. Taylor, writing in the Yale Law Journal in 1986, summarized the results of such research:

Although one criticism of affirmative action remedies has been that they tend to benefit minorities who are already advantaged or middle class, the results . . . suggest otherwise. The focus of much of the effort has been not just on white collar jobs, but also . . . on areas in which the extension of new opportunities has provided upward mobility for less advantaged minority workers. Nor does the criticism appear valid for the professions. Studies show that of the increased enrollment of minority students in medical schools during the 1970’s, significant numbers were from families of low income and job status, indicating that the rising enrollment of minorities in professional schools stemming from affirmative action policies reflects increased mobility, not simply changing occupational preferences among middle class minority families.

Carter’s vision of a meritocracy in which he has been uniquely handicapped is also somewhat disingenuous. Merit is consistently qualified by other categories operating in admissions procedures for universities and colleges. The preference shown in many schools to children of alumni and to athletes, for example, reveals that merit is but one of many criteria. But to have considered affirmative action in conjunction with a series of preferential policies for college admissions would have weakened Carter’s offensive against his political target.

Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby is at times an eloquent and persuasive plea for the recognition of the diversity not only of black social experiences but of black political agendas. Carter is outraged by attacks by some black intellectuals on other black intellectuals who dissent from a civil rights agenda, and he explores why he thinks that the label “black conservative,” one from which he assertively distances himself, functions only as a pejorative. He is also angered by the lack of confidence that the conservative movement, in particular the Republican party, has in its black members. But at times the book reads like a diatribe against open debate even as it aims to “spark a dialogue.” To argue for complexity and diversity of opinion must mean to be prepared for vigorous opposition and criticism. It will, I am convinced, mean facing the challenge of political turbulence. But Carter seems to yearn for a narrow definition of dissent. In the final chapter, on the relation of the black intellectual to questions of racial solidarity, earlier arguments about the multifarious nature of black voices have disappeared, replaced by an undifferentiated “we” that is embroiled not in complex debate but in constant “squabbling” and “internecine warfare.”

If Carter closes by reducing his concerns to his own imagining of a black community, William McFeely expands the landscape that his subject inhabits. McFeely imagines Douglass not as an ex-slave who becomes a black intellectual and leader but as an important American intellectual and leader. He deliberately and consciously presents Douglass as functioning in relation to the national entity, and this is reinforced by the narrative structure of the biography.

To establish Douglass’s role as a national intellectual, McFeely is careful not to limit Douglass’s presence as intellectual to any single community of interests. The biography is thus organized by place. We move from Tuckahoe, Maryland, where Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1818 and where he lived with his grandmother, through the various sites of his captivity to Baltimore, where he escaped from slavery. In New Bedford he made his first home with Anna Murray and became a father, and in Nantucket he entered into the abolitionist movement. In this fashion each chapter is named after and situated within a different place, which gives the book a sense of perpetual movement and Douglass’s life a quality of incessant wandering until the book closes at Cedar Hill, the house that overlooked the city of Washington and in which Douglass died on 20 February 1895. This organization makes the reader respond to Douglass’s political activity, to his speaking, and writing, from a number of locations and communities, which emphasizes the national and even international character of his existence as an intellectual: Douglass was appointed minister to Haiti in 1889. For McFeely, Douglass as an American intellectual both articulates and characterizes the tensions and contradictions of his moment. Douglass embodies, for the author, the schisms of the nation.

For Charles Hamilton, professor of government at Columbia, the American dilemma can be described as the distance between society’s ideals—the American creed—and how much American institutions fail to embody or practice those ideals. At different moments, Hamilton argues, Americans have decided to rationalize, ignore, deny, or act to eliminate the “gap.” Moments of intense political activity to make American institutions live up to American ideals, Hamilton argues, are times of “creedal passion” politics. Attempts to rationalize contradictions between ideals and practice lead to feelings of “moral helplessness,” ignoring it leads to “creedal passivity,” and denial is an attempt to redefine reality as if it were consistent with professed values and ideals. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma is an accomplished and informative account of the congressman from Harlem who was elected in 1944, the year that the Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma, his account of the discrepancy between American values and the way black people were treated.

Hamilton portrays Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., as “a mirror, as a reflection of what others saw and understood to be the state of the American Dilemma Myrdal and others so aptly described.” He argues that as a leader Powell was dedicated to the issue of how America treated black people in particular and the downtrodden in general.

These were the people who elected him; these were the people to whom he turned when he needed political protection, as was often the case. His official policy positions were never absent of attention to this issue. This is so whether the particular concern was civil rights and racial segregation, as it was earlier in his career, or broader socioeconomic issues in the 1960s. How one responded to Adam Powell reflected how one responded to the American Dilemma. His personal eccentricities made the response more difficult, but in a sense this made it more meaningful. . . . Powell always required that everyone—friend or foe—question whether his being black was the real reason he was attacked so often or indicted for income tax problems or refused his seat in Congress toward the end of his career. More often than not, his supporters had to take an “in-spite-of-Adam” stance in order to defend what he “stood for.” In other words, they had to engage the American Dilemma that Powell exposed, notwithstanding the source of the exposure.

Hamilton’s insights about the connection between how one responded to Powell and how one responded to the American dilemma can equally characterize the possible reception of his political biography. The book is published at a time when the Reagan-Bush hegemony has been secured upon the establishment of a consensus of opinion that would deny the existence of a discrepancy between social conditions and the ideals embodied in the Constitution. But Hamilton, like Powell, forces us to engage the contradictory and tenuous nature of this apparent consensus.

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was a flamboyant and controversial figure who as a politician had, in today’s slang, an “in your face” attitude toward the establishment. His life provides endless source material for currently popular forms of interpretive psychobiography. But Hamilton, in this magnificent book, has scrupulously resisted any attempt to reduce Powell’s life either to that of an exceptional (best black) individual or to a representative type or voice. Although Hamilton’s account of Powell is so detailed that we can imagine Powell as a passionate, contrary individual who embodied at once the most morally principled and the most ambiguous politics, Hamilton consistently challenges us to read Powell in relation to his times. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., is presented as both a product of his historical moment and a means for reading the political history of this nation between the 1930s and 1960s, which he helped to shape and give voice to and which ultimately rejected him.

On 30 November 1991, a front-page article in the New York Times asserted that “not since the tumultuous 1960’s has there been such an intense focus on blackness,” challenging readers to face yet another crisis in the “ever-changing black experience in America.” The article focuses on what Lena Williams, the journalist, calls the black “quest” for identity in the 1990s, and her central argument is this: “The ‘race question’ in America has deeply troubled blacks since the days of slavery, when a ‘single drop of black blood’ classified a person as Negro. Today, increasing efforts to define blackness and what many blacks view as internal pressure to ‘choose sides’ dramatize the persistence of the conflict, and the confusion over racial identity.” Williams stresses that it is black people who are “deeply troubled” by the “race question,” but the process of racial classification itself involves no social agents: it is as though Williams imagines that the “single drop of black blood” rather than a set of social, political, and economic practices actually did the classifying. Within the context of the article the issue of “racial identity” is a matter of “conflict” and “confusion” only for people defined as black by the magical makeup of their bodies.

Williams’s article is indicative of how processes of racialization are commonly discussed as if they were not only generated by but the sole concern of the racialized subjects themselves. Black people in general are increasingly viewed as responsible for their social condition and for its amelioration. Such thinking accords with the shift in the general political climate of the Reagan-Bush years—one marked by the massive cutbacks in federal funding from urban areas and the withdrawal of federal support for civil rights legislation and affirmative action policies. The language of the article is also a good example of a general refusal to recognize significant “confusion” and “conflict” within the dominant social order over the meanings of racial identity and a persistent white fascination with meanings of blackness.

Much of the apparent current concern with racial identity in the media is generated in direct response to the interest of a white, not a black, audience. Many branches of the media, for example, are reluctant to produce programming directed primarily to black audiences, the long-standing exception being the recording industry, which introduced “race records” that were distributed to black consumers as early as the 1920s. The publishing industry in particular is notorious for its reluctance to recognize the existence of a black reading public as a significant sector of its consumer market. In other words, if narratives, visual or written, by or about black people, are to sell in profitable quantities, the culture industry in general markets its products primarily to white consumers. If indeed the unacknowledged white readers of the New York Times are the primary consumers of a story about a crisis of racial identity, then perhaps we should reject assumptions that only black people are experiencing recurring identity crises and instead ask how much these so-called crises about the meanings of blackness determine the boundaries of what can be legitimately established as white, or non-black.

From the vantage point of the academy it is obvious that the explosion of published fiction by black women has influenced the development of multicultural curriculums. And now, in white suburban libraries, bookstores, and supermarkets the availability of biographies and autobiographies by and about black men has suddenly increased. For white readers, these books about black lives are substitutes for intimate contact with black people. The retention of segregated neighborhoods and public schools and the apartheid-like structures of black inner-city versus white suburban life means that those who buy these books are unable to grow up equitably with each other. For white suburbia, then, these books are rapidly becoming a way of learning about the “other”—learning that seems both to satisfy and to replace the desire for any political action that would challenge segregation. White suburban residents live a contradictory social existence. They can consume the lives of black men through books while simultaneously opposing the building of affordable housing that might attract black urban residents to their neighborhoods. There is vehement opposition to the bussing of black children from city schools into white suburban areas and outrage expressed by many white parents at the suggestion that their children be bussed across the border from conditions of suburban affluence into the urban blight that is the norm for black children. Have we as a society eliminated the desire to achieve integration through political agitation for civil rights and opted instead for ways of knowing one another through cultural texts?

We are living in a time when, because of these cultural texts, it should no longer be possible for anyone to imagine that there is only one way to be black. It is difficult, though not impossible, to believe in the existence of what is now referred to as “the essential black subject,” a figure that in the past has functioned as the voice of the “Negro” or embodied a representative black experience. The disappearance of this figure who thinks and acts in a predictable way for the dominant culture marks the beginning of a series of political adjustments that our society must make in order to grasp the turbulent consequences of recognizing the multifarious social experiences of people designated as black. As a society we have to ask if we are finally ready to confront the fact that the processes of racialization, so fundamental to the formation and development of the United States, have invented, not just sustained, categories of racial identity. What do we do with the realization that race is a product of our social, political, and cultural imaginations? And how do we release the very real power that these imaginary categories have over all aspects of all our lives?

There is clearly a very real disparity between the largely academic debate about the diversity of cultural and political meanings of racial identity and the material conditions of segregation, particularly in housing and in education, under which we live. The institutionalized racism of our society without question has had and continues to have violent and horrifying effects, particularly on young black lives. But it is absolutely necessary to confront the consequences of the ways we live the racial identities that are the products of our political imagination. Those consequences are agonizingly evident in the material deprivation of our urban landscapes of racism and devastation.

Malcom: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America
by Bruce Perry (Station Hill Press, 540 pp., $24.95 [cloth])

Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby
by Stephen L. Carter (Basic Books, 286 pp., $23.00)

Frederick Douglass
by William S. McFeely (W. W. Norton & Company, 544 pp., $24.95)

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma
by Charles V. Hamilton (Atheneum Publishing, 545 pp., $24.95)