Violent Words in African-American Culture: Boyce Watkins and Michael Eric Dyson Discuss Hip-Hop at Brown University

“Now Lonnie, you listen to me,” the cross-eyed woman screamed from the stairs.  “You stop referring to our people as ‘Boots,’ you hear me?  Don’t do it!  Don’t be giving that white man the immoral satisfaction of hearing you talking so common!  Can’t you see that that’s his only reason for letting you run your big mouth?  He’s the kind who likes to twist and turn everything a colored person says and does wrong-side out!  And if you’d stop running your mouth long enough you’d see it!  He’s just taking in everything you say so he and his friends can laugh about it!  He’s the kind that has so little respect for folks like us that if he sees us ladies being escorted a few times by different gentlemen he’ll be calling us prostitutes!  You know that!  And that’s because as far as our people go, he has a low-rating kind of mind…”

 Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting… (From the section “Hickman in Washington, D.C.,” p. 624)

Over the past six months I have been reading books by and about the African-American authors Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.  In our current benighted culture these names may be less familiar than they once were.  Some decades back when intellectual ideas had a social currency that they largely do not have anymore, Wright and Ellison’s writing became a central part, in the pre-Civil Rights era of the 1940s and 50s, of the question of African-American identity and the way America has dealt with slavery, Jim Crow, integration, and the status of oppressed minorities.

In Wright’s most famous novel, 1940’s Native Son, he forced mainstream American readers to confront the tragic place of African-Americans in our country and its history.  The novel became a massive bestseller and engendered a good deal of serious discussion about African-American identity in both elite and mainstream circles.

So too did Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man advance this discussion in a serious and profound manner.  Critics noted the similarities and differences between the two writers’ rhetorical styles and how their different styles reflected diverse ways of approaching the issue of African-American identity.

Wright used the style of social realism to depict Bigger Thomas, a protagonist who had lost his way in the world and found himself in dire straits after killing a White woman.  Wright’s social realism brought the harsh realities of African-Americans into the consciousness of mainstream Americans in a way that had not been done previously to such devastating effect.  It was a searing indictment of socio-economic conditions that opened the door to Ellison’s engagement with African-American identity.

Ellison famously used a more open and philosophically-challenging style that left the realist tradition, or better, added to the realist tradition, in a way that expanded – in the Modernist style – the strict parameters of social realism that Wright deployed.  Ellison incorporated reflexive parody and a surrealism that deepened his themes of social oppression and the communal dysfunction that afflicted African-Americans.

To this day both Native Son and Invisible Man remain cornerstones of American literature.

Over the course of time Wright became estranged from American society.  After a difficult experience with the Communist party, he found himself without a stable institutional framework in which to identify.  He left America for Paris and began to travel the world, making trips to Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  But in the end an embittered and alienated Wright found himself a man without a home and a writer who failed to build institutionally on the success of Native Son.

On the other hand, Ellison’s Invisible Man opened important doors that allowed him to enter the most elite circles of American culture and society.  He
became the “go-to” African-American during the era of Civil Rights protest.  His voice was the one that many colleges and official government organizations and cultural institutions turned to for a learned and insightful explanation of the African-American condition.  Ellison used his newfound cachet to formulate a sophisticated and complex understanding of African-American culture that was grounded in the aesthetics of the Blues and Jazz, and the American literary tradition with its pluralistic Humanism and democratic values.

As the years went by, Ellison found himself gradually drifting from the mainstream of African-American society.  By the time that the Civil Rights movement had been transformed into the Black Power movement Ellison was seen by many radical activists as a sell-out whose views were profoundly out of step with what was happening on the ground and in intellectual circles.  The much-anticipated second novel Ellison was working on for many years was left unfinished and unpublished at the time of his death. [In 1999 a portion of the book was issued under the title “Juneteenth,” and in 2010 a massive tome was published under the title “Three Days Before the Shooting…”  The latter contained much of the extant materials that Ellison had saved in his archives (brilliantly pieced together by the scholars John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley) but the novel, if it can be called that, remains frustrating and infuriating; both brilliant and overwrought, it lacks structure and narrative continuity.]

The fate of Wright and Ellison and their literary productions continues to haunt the cultural universe of African-Americans.  As we now grapple with an African-American culture that has been transformed by the exigencies of Hip-Hop as a commercial juggernaut, the literary-philosophical world of Wright and Ellison and the profound debates which it engendered has been shunted off to the side as a new anti-intellectualism has gripped African-American expression.

After a golden age of African-American music, exemplified by the Soul revolution of seminal artists like Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Al Green, James Brown, Parliament/Funkadelic, Aretha Franklin, Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Prince, Michael Jackson, and so many other luminaries of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the emergence of Hip-Hop has been a major change in African-American culture and the way in which it figures in the American socio-political scene.

Evolving from the street culture of DJs and rappers in the 1970s, Hip-Hop has taken on a style all its own.  Although there has been an attempt by socially-conscious rappers to maintain the activist ethos of the 1960s and 70s, the massive commercial success of Hip-Hop has largely drawn from the genre of Gangsta Rap with its grounding in violence, misogyny, homophobia, profanity, anti-intellectualism, and promises of a pampered libertine lifestyle.

Hip-Hop was first developed by young African-Americans hungry for success and intent on using the ghetto experience as a means to formulate a stark and frightening worldview that would refuse the cultural resonance and assimilative values of literary Modernists like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.

At the same time that artists like NWA, 2 Live Crew, and Snoop Dogg were emerging in the late 1980s, the intellectual heirs of Wright and Ellison were developing their own understanding of how this new musical trend fit into the culture of African-American society.

Many younger scholars were mentored by post-Wright and post-Ellison intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cornel West, and Toni Morrison who represented a bridge to the older culture and, perhaps, the last flowering of a style of intellectual engagement that has been profoundly transformed in the wake of Hip-Hop’s successes in the commercial arena.

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