By Boyce Watkins
When I heard the controversial and heated comments about President Obama that were made by my respected colleague Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, I felt like a second grader running outside to see the fight between two middle school kids. Both Barack and Michael are men I’ve grown to appreciate, and I love them for their strengths as well as their imperfections. Michael was the reason I became a public scholar during graduate school, as I would watch the words flow out of him like an MC in the booth dropping his hottest album.
The man is good, damn good. President Obama needs to listen to the words of Michael Eric Dyson. In fact, he should give Dyson as much, or more respect than he gives me or any other Black public intellectual in America.
Dr. Dyson, no matter how you perceive his critique of President Obama, represents a form of insight that you are not going to find in politics, the pulpit or anywhere else. At the same time, I will confess that his words may also come from an impure place that lies within the darkest part of our souls. In other words, Dyson, Tavis, Barack, Jesse and every other ambitious man in America is always going to be tempted by the “Demon of Playerhaterology.”
Men are naturally competitive, and no man likes to be disrespected. Obama, as a condition for his employment, is often asked to disrespect other leaders across America who represent the essence of meaningful Black thought. That’s going to create a long list of enemies.
“Dyson was one of the first to publicly
endorse Obama ... ”
But let’s make this point clear: When Tavis Smiley holds President Obama accountable, that doesn’t mean he’s jealous of Barack. In fact, jealousy is an overly simplistic way to marginalize someone’s comments before you even hear what they have to say. We must be more intelligent than that.
The other truth is that even a jealous man may be making a good point. The same thing is true for Dyson’s recent challenge to Barack Obama: He might not like Barack (I can’t confirm or deny his personal relationship), but that doesn’t mean that he’s wrong in his assessments. Dyson was one of the first to publicly endorse Obama, long before many of the “Obama-maniacs” had gained the courage to jump on board his campaign.
To get a more balanced critique on this issue, I did something that we should all do: Remember that there is more to the universe of Black scholarship than Cornel West, Boyce Watkins and Michael Eric Dyson. So, I’ve reached out to an army of Black intellectuals who are committed to serving their communities (please take a look at their comments if you can), and asked for their assessment of Obama’s first 100 days in office.
One sad truth about the Black intellectual in America is that the potential of Black scholars has been muted, socially castrated and distracted from the God-given mandate to help people in the Black community. Our one-dimensional training teaches us to dumb ourselves down in order to accomodate suffocatingly racist bureaucracies, bury our intelligence in abstruse niches and create a long stretch of non-transferable skills with no desire to distribute these skills to a broader audience. Given that intelligence is partially measured by one’s ability to communicate complex ideas to a multitude of audiences, African-American scholars have made ourselves into some of the least intelligent individuals in the Black community. Even rappers like Diddy have more intellectual impact than most professors (remember the “Vote or Die” campaign?), and that’s just plain crazy. With that said, I want people to hear the words of Dyson without pulling out their pitchforks.
We need to understand that during this critical time in Black American history, we should not suck ourselves into the temptations of McCarthyism by shutting down every progressive voice that doesn’t agree with the great Barack Obama. The other truth is that we should not “drink the kool-aid” that makes Obama into an instant sell-out because he doesn’t wear his dashiki to work every day. Barack is an important piece of Black history and we must respect that. Some are tempted to take sides on the Dyson vs. Obama situation, and some are sitting in the middle. I am doing neither, since I wish to do the impossible and support both sides of this important conversation.
You see, racism forces us to make uncomfortable choices, since we are all bottlenecked into the fight to become the HNIC. We are asked, as a condition for our advancement, to denounce those within our culture who make the power structure uncomfortable. We are told that getting Barack Obama elected means we must chop off the political heads of Jeremiah Wright, Jesse Jackson, Tavis Smiley, Louis Farrakhan, Cynthia McKinney and Cornel West. I will never make such a choice, and neither should you.
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