Michael Eric Dyson (30 page)

32
James A. Harrison, “Negro English.”
Anglia
8 (1884), p. 232, cited in Shelley Fisher Fishkin,
Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 42.

33
James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” in
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985
(New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1985), p. 650.

34
Cited in Candace Murphy, “The Cosby Sweater Has Unraveled; Cosby has unraveled some woolly memories the past few months by lambasting African-American parents for their parental failures,”
Oakland Tribune
, August 8, 2004.

35
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Ebonics! Weird Names! $500 Shoes! Shrill Bill Cosby and the Speech That Shocked Black America,”
Village Voice
, May 26-June 1, 2004.

36
Bill Cosby, “Elements of Igno-Ebonics Style,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 10, 1997, p. A10.

37
Ibid.

38
Lawrence Linderman, “Playboy Interview: Bill Cosby—a Candid Conversation with the Kinetic Comedian-Actor-Singer-Entrepreneur,”
Playboy
, May 1969, p. 175.

39
Ibid.

40
Jonathan D. Rockoff, “Phonics Called Helpful to a Point: Many Md. Educators Favor Comprehensive Approach,”
Baltimore Sun
, January 14, 2005.

41
Elizabeth Chin,
Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

42
Ibid., p. 9.

43
Ibid., p. 129.

44
Ibid., pp. 60-61.

45
Ibid., p. 60.

46
“I Spy: Comedian Bill Cosby Is First Negro Co-Star in TV Network Series,”
Ebony
, September 1965, p. 68.

47
Stanley Karnow, “Bill Cosby: Variety Is the Life of Spies,”
The Saturday Evening Post
, September 25, 1965, p. 88.

48
Edward Sorel, “The Noble Cos,”
The Nation
, September 6, 1986, p. 243.

49
National Public Radio,
Talk of the Nation
, July 7, 2004.

50
Richard Hofstadter,
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963).

51
Ibid., pp. 3-4.

52
Ibid., p. 6.

53
Les Christie, “Endangered: The American Reader,”
CNNmoney,
July 12, 2004,
http://money.cnn.com/2004/07/09/news/bookreading
.

54
Vladimir I. Chuprov, “Youth in Social Reproduction.”
Russian Social Science Review
, September-October 1999, vol. 40.

55
Seon-Young Lee, Bonnie Cramond, and Jongyeun Lee, “Korean Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Academic Brilliance.”
National Association for Gifted Children,
Winter 2004, vol. 48.

56
Walter E. Houghton, “Victorian Anti-Intellectualism.”
Journal of the History of Ideas
13:3 (June 1952), pp. 291-313.

57
Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, “Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the Burden of ‘Acting White,’”
The Urban Review
19:3, pp. 176-206.

58
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Breaking the Silence,”
The New York Times
, Section 4, p. 11; “Transcript: Illinois Senate Candidate Barack Obama,”
Washingtonpost.com
.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wedyn/articles/A1975-2004July27.html
.

59
Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, “Weighing the Burden of ‘Acting White’: Are There Race Differences in Attitudes Toward Education?”
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
, Spring 1997, pp. 256-278.

60
“‘Acting White’: Is It the Silent Killer of the Educational Aspirations of Inner-City Blacks?”
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education,
Autumn 1997, p. 94.

61
Ibid.

62
Douglas Massey, Camille Z. Charles, Garvey Lundy and Mary J. Fischer,
The Source of the River
, cited in Tim Wise,
Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White
(New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 146; “Vital Signs,”
Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
, Winter 2003/2004, p. 65.

63
“Vital Signs,”
Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
, Winter 2003-2004, p. 65.

64
Massey et al., cited in Wise, p. 146.

65
Karolyn Tyson, William Darity & Domini Castellino.
Breeding Animosity: The “Burden of Acting White” and Other Problems of Status Group Hierarchies in Schools.
Paper # SAN04-03, September, 2004. Also see Paul Tough, “The ‘Acting White’ Myth,”
New York Times Magazine
, December 12, 2004.

66
Ibid.

67
Ibid.

68
“Vital Signs,” Autumn 2004, p. 73.

69
“The State of the Dream 2004: Enduring Disparities in Black and White,”
United for a Fair Economy,
January 2004, p. 20.

70
Ibid.

71
Cellblocks or Classrooms? The Funding of Higher Education and Corrections and Its Impact on African American Men.
Justice Policy Institute, August 28, 2002.

72
Michael Eric Dyson,
Why I Love Black Women
(New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), p. 202.

73
For claims of genocide, see Robert Staples, “Black Male Genocide: A Final Solution to the Race Problem in America,”
Black Scholar,
no. 3 (May-June 1987). For claims about young black males as an endangered species, see the essays in Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, editor, Young,
Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species
(Dover, Massachusetts: Auburn House Publishing Company, 1988).

74
Gibbs,
Young, Black, and Male in America
.

1
Diana Crane,
Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

2
Shane White and Graham White,
Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).

3
Ibid., p. 92.

4
Ibid., p. 93.

5
Ibid., p. 155.

6
Ibid., p. 154.

7
Ibid., p. 163.

8
Ibid., p. 222.

9
Ibid., p. 222.

10
Willard B. Gatewood,
Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000 [1991]), p. 187.

11
Ibid., p. 203.

12
White and White, p. 239.

13
Ibid., p. 229.

14
Ibid., p. 240.

15
Robin D.G. Kelley, “The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and Black Cultural Politics During World War II,”
Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Working Class
(New York: The Free Press, 1994), pp. 161-181; White and White, pp. 254-256.

16
Crane, p. 187.

17
Ibid., p. 189.

18
“Hot Clothes,”
American Demographics
, quoted in Crane, p. 191.

19
Crane, p. 191.

20
Ibid. Of course, I am not arguing that “ghetto chic” or “ghetto couture” is unproblematic: The black youth who drive its creation are surely not rewarded—either through wide cultural notice or in monetary measure—for their inspiration. And neither am I arguing that these youth are immune to the consumptive fetishes that mark the cultural landscape. But that is the point: These youth are part of consumer cultures that rest, in part, on the stimulation of desires for material products that can be, well, all-consuming. But black youth are no different in this regard than the rest of us, if it is true that they are more vulnerable because of their tenuous economic standing in society. Nevertheless, even given their limitations and conditions, black youth have helped to shape the consumptive desires of millions through their ingenious innovations in fashion and style.

21
C. Shilling, cited in Alexandra Howson,
The Body in Society: An Introduction
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), p. 111.

22
Howson,
The Body in Society
, pp. 110-111.

23
Rufus C. Camphausen,
Return of The Tribal: A Celebration of Body Adornment—Piercing, Tattooing, Body Painting, Scarification
(Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 1997), p. 16.

24
Ibid.

25
D. Altmann, cited in Howson, p. 111.

26
See Margo DeMello,
Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 174-177.

27
Ibid., p. 6.

28
Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar,
Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Binding of Women
[Reprint Edition] (New
York: Harvest Books, 1996).

29
Ibid., pp. 21, 27, 29, 41.

30
I realize, as proved by Larry Koger’s book
Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860
[Reprint] (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), and as Edward Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,
The Known World
(New York: Amistad Press, 2003), illustrates, that some blacks owned blacks during slavery. I am suggesting that poor, despised, subjugated blacks never owned other human beings. In the use of “Shaniqua” and “Taliqua” here, I intend the same class division Cosby suggested, but with a different interpretation: I am arguing that the poor black in slavery was never in a position, as were aristocratic blacks, to do the greatest damage to other blacks.

31
Ira Berlin,
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
[Reprint] (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 95-96; 149-150; Stephen Wilson,
The Means of Naming: A Social and Cultural History of Personal Naming in Western Europe
[Reprint] (London: Routledge Press, 1998), p. 309.

32
Ibid., pp. 95-96; 149-150; Wilson, ibid.

33
Wilson, p. 309.

34
Wilson, p. 308.

35
As Wilson writes, the question of who named the slaves—owners or blacks themselves—is “not easy to answer. Slaves who were bought would already have names but these could be changed. The naming of children born on plantations depended on the policy of the owners and also on what category of slave they belonged to: house or field slaves. Some owners and/or their wives clearly named their slaves. Humorous, classical or religious names may betray this control, or aspects of the pattern of naming. Few names were duplicated on the Chesapeake Bay plantations in the mid-eighteenth century and names were not usually transmitted within families.

36
Wilson, p. 312. There is proof that the significance of naming lasted far beyond slavery. In the rural South, there was often a big celebration attending the naming of an infant, and before that, rituals of recognition of the importance of birth for the expectant mother and unborn child, suggesting the transformation of time and space in black rural communities around family and female bonding. “Before the birth, the women quilted, sewed, had slumber parties, and developed a sisterhood group around the expectant mother. They met at her house and prepared it for the new arrival. Once the baby was born, they danced, sang, toasted the new mother with iced tea, and reminisced about old times, especially the last birth before this one. Much time was spent thinking of a name for the child and celebrating its meaning, which more often than not reflected family ancestors and traditions.

37
Berlin, p. 173.

38
Berlin, Ibid.; Wilson, p. 309. As Wilson points out, by the nineteenth century, that number had dropped to only one percent, signaling the erosion of the older generation’s influence and the successful incorporation, acculturation and, indeed, assimilation, of the African
slave to American life, at least at the level of naming practices.

39
Berlin, p. 173.

40
Ibid., p. 174; Wilson, p. 310.

41
Wilson, p. 310.

42
Ibid.

43
Peter Wood discusses this in
Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion
(New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 185, 182, respectively, cited in Leslie M. Harris,
In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 36.