My dear friends, please try to understand that whiteness is limitless possibility. It is universal and invisible. That’s why many of you are offended by any reference to race. You believe you are acting and thinking neutrally, objectively, without preference for one group or the next, including your own. You see yourselves as colorless until black folk dump the garbage of race on your heads. At your best moments you may concede that you started the race game, but you swear to the God you love that it is we black folk who keep it going. You have no idea how absurd that notion is, and yet we have grown accustomed to your defiance of common sense.
I got a taste of this when I taught at the University of North Carolina in the mid-nineties. I touched a raw nerve of race, and certainly whiteness, when I delivered a commencement address at the school in 1996. I knew that my speech might cause some controversy. There was no way that I could step to that podium and not offend the south’s codes of polite bigotry just by speaking openly about the racial situation at hand. And even though whiteness had metastasized all over the country, its diseased core remained in the south, where black folk were fighting for their rightful place in society. But nonetheless I eagerly stepped into the Dean E. Smith stadium, where six thousand folk had gathered to wish their loved ones a joyous transition to another part of the real world.
(It irks me as a professor to hear folk describe the university as somehow unreal. It may be gilded, or privileged, certainly shielded, but it is no less real than, say, the corporate world, or sports, or the assembly line. We have real conversations, real conflicts, real thoughts, and real bodies to think those thoughts with.)
I grappled in my speech with whether America was still the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr., said it was in a commencement speech he delivered at Lincoln University 35 years earlier. King’s audience was predominantly black, mine mostly white. In his 1961 speech “The American Dream,” King said that “America is essentially a dream, a dream as yet unfulfilled.” Two years later at the Lincoln Memorial King famously shared his dream with the nation. Four years after that, King declared that his dream had turned into a nightmare of church bombings, ghetto poverty, riots, and war.
I battled the notion that young folk were dragging the American dream down with their destructive pop culture and their social narcissism. I defended youth culture and wrestled with some of its most popular figures, from Kurt Cobain and Alanis Morissette to Snoop Dogg and Jenny McCarthy. I quoted the lyrics of The Notorious B.I.G. to make my point, including his use of the word “fuck,” though, on reflection, I should have left it out. I didn’t seek to offend the white grandparents and other kin who had gathered.
I defended affirmative action at graduation. Lawmakers had abolished it in California with the passage in 1996 of Proposition 209. That effort was led, painfully enough, by the University of California’s regent, Ward Connerly, a conservative black man I’d soon debate. I deemed it my duty to use whatever platform I had to speak back to him. I also encouraged young white folk to appreciate the sacrifices made by some of their poor and less educated kin. Michael Jordan, the most famous alum of UNC, had recently given one million dollars to the university. Jordan said he didn’t give it to the Black Cultural Center, though his mother then sat on the board, because the money would have been limited to one group. Instead he gave it to the School of Social Work, where, he said, the sum would benefit everyone. But the school of social work wasn’t the law school, nor the school of dentistry, nor any other school in the university, and thus, the money couldn’t possibly be for everyone. What saddened me about Jordan’s comments was that even this black athletic legend believed that whiteness signified the universal. Blackness in his view signified the limited and particular. I challenged the black students to do better than Jordan and remember to help other blacks attain the American dream too.
There was no social media back then, but the local newspapers lit me up. One called my speech “a political screed dressed up in trendy academic gobbledygook.” I suppose it’s racial progress of a sort when the black guy is accused of speaking over the heads of white folk. An editorial cartoon featured me sitting on a commode using toilet paper to prepare my next speech. There were calls for the university to fire me, and a flurry of angry columns and letters to the editor. “He is not worth our tax money,” one letter said.
But the real anger rang out from a sense of aggrieved whiteness. One writer asked if the Constitution “protect[s] black citizens but not white citizens?” Another writer puzzled over the liberal discomfort with my speech since progressives had “labored for years to disabuse us of any notions of Western cultural superiority.” He defended the superiority of whiteness through a straw man argument in the form of an extended conditional statement: “But if America is not more than Africa, if Christmas is not more than Kwanzaa, if William Shakespeare is not more than Maya Angelou, then Dyson is not less than Demosthenes.” Then the kicker: “Chapel Hill, welcome to the Third World.” Whiteness had been challenged at its intellectual and institutional heart.
Thankfully a few folk did defend me in public. One letter argued that the paper’s attempt “to discredit [Dyson] by depicting [him] researching cultural expression in a lavatory” means the editorial staff “would benefit from attendance at one of Dyson’s courses,” since the attempt to place “such expression in the context of the political economy and cultural norms that dominate U.S. society, is profoundly important.” A fellow faculty member said that “this is an event when we shouldn’t be afraid of words. Control emotions and try to listen to the message.”
I must say that I was taken aback by the vitriol. The calls for me to be fired were one thing; but the scorn, even the death threats that came simply because I expressed a different view, a black view, were way over the top.
My friends, it’s not as if I had only focused on reactionary white folk. As one letter said of my speech: “Rarely in one sitting can an individual insult Michael Jordan, white liberals, the black middle class, the United States and his own employers.” My God, at least give me credit for being an equal opportunity offender! But white folk who get upset at being challenged hardly ever see the balance, never hear that they’re not the only ones being singled out, even if one has just cause to indict whiteness to start with. I wasn’t angry as much as I was saddened by the unvarnished hate and denial of reality that still pulsed in whiteness. But I should not have been surprised. After all, the country had just weathered a major racial catastrophe that revealed how blind whiteness could be.