THREE AFRICAN AMERICAN MEDIA CRITICS: MICHAEL ERIC DYSON, DARNELL HUNT, HERMAN GRAY
What is Hip Hop?
When I returned to the US in 1996, people were talking about hip hop. I had heard the word but knew very little about it. After developing a great enthusiasm for soul music in 1972 when I was in Nigeria, I looked forward to connecting with black American music when I returned to the United States in 1996. But the ascendance of hip hop culture, and especially gangsta rap, was something that I wasn’t ready for. This music seemed to glorify the thug life, treat women as sex objects, and use a stream of obscenities. What had happened while I was away? Why were what appeared to be the worst aspects of black ghetto life being celebrated in popular music? Since a lot of my students of all races appreciated such music, I had to answer these questions in order to understand where my students were coming from.
The first question that I had to answer concerned the meaning of hip-hop. Advocates were usually discussing conscious rap while critics were addressing commercial rap, especially gangsta rap. For example in the documentary A Letter to the President, the claim is that hip-hop is really underground music that explores life-and-death issues for black people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It is also an attempt to give meaning to the experience of economic devastation brought about by President Reagan’s economic policies of the 1980s. And it teaches people how to survive under the most extreme conditions in the concrete jungle.
On the other hand, critics say that rap music is commercial, mainstream music that celebrates violence, misogyny, and obscene language. It is driven by materialist consumption. Reverend Calvin Butts says, “We’re not against rap. We’re not against rappers, but we are against those thugs who disgrace our community, those women who disgrace our culture, and those who have absolutely nothing of redemptive value to offer, except the legacy of violence, sexual assault, and foul language.”
Getting a better idea of what hip-hop is about brought on further questions that led me to study the relation between hip-hop and media. What power do rappers have over cultural production? Is hip-hop a cause or a reflection of social problems?
Is the hip-hop audience active or passive? Are the musicians themselves in control of the cultural production and do audiences demand such forms of creative expression? Or are the record companies in control? From this standpoint, capitalists are seen as exploiting black people for profit without regard for social consequences. As a result, rappers pretend to be thugs in order to get record contracts.
The view that the hip-hop audience is active is based on the idea that hip-hop is part of audiences’ lives and they use it for their own purposes. Hip hop provides them with an alternative culture and philosophy of life. Those who uphold the notion that the hip-hop audience is passive assert that black children internalize negative attitudes from rap music. They also believe that white stereotypes of blacks are being reinforced. According to Delores Tucker, the result is the cultural genocide of black children.
Those who proclaim the hip-hop revolution see cultural politics as real politics. In hip-hop, people discover their own voice, they raise the awareness of outsiders about black culture, and they help to create a social revolution. For John McWhorter, media has no social effect and music is just entertainment. Since cultural resistance achieves nothing, organization for real politics is needed. That means working for the campaigns of politicians who will improve the conditions of poor blacks rather than merely speaking the language of confrontation and opposing authority.
Jay-Z maintained that hip-hop is American and black is American; hip-hop is a vital arts movement created by young working-class people of color. It contains violence and hatred, lust and drugs that came from America. Critics of rap don’t protest against poverty and racism, gun violence and hatred of women, drug use and unemployment. Under such conditions, people live in America. These conditions were not created or spread by rappers; rap reflects America. In contrast, the critics of hip-hop maintain that rap music is helping to create a social reality that reinforces stereotypes of black people and influences black children to look down on women and view them as sex objects, to accept violence and obscene language as normal, and to focus on materialist consumption.
Michael Eric Dyson on Commercial Rap
With all these different views in the air, I looked to Michael Eric Dyson for further clarification. Dyson asserted that conscious rap and commercial rap cannot be easily separated. Conscious rappers do not want to be quarantined and isolated and they like to have fun and go to parties and entertain. In addition, they want to get played rather than only do what’s good for people. That means doing what people like. Dyson also stated that there is no reason why rappers must be political and take responsibility for combating injustice. Many rappers do not fit the commercial or conscious category easily; Jay-Z is a good example. He is mainstream and commercially successful but talks about politics in his concerts and is self-critical. Jay-Z said that when he raps about serious subjects, people don’t want to listen but when he raps about pimpin and hoes, then he is praised. So Dyson emphasized that rappers may be both social critics and artists. The problem was not enough conscious rap on radio.
Dyson, first of all, reminded me that understanding comes before judgment. I needed to understand the visions of black youth and the reasons why they came up with rap music before I criticized them. Take the example of Tupac Shakur. In Holler If You Hear Me, Dyson quotes Tupac as saying that his music is spiritual. Since Tupac’s music embraces violence and exudes hopelessness, I thought that Tupac’s outlook was nihilistic. But Dyson pointed out that his music is filled with passion and urgency. He is as honest and forthright as a person can be while exploring his suffering. I was forced to recognize that Tupac was a many-sided figure. He celebrated the gangster lifestyle, yet he was obsessed with discovering an authentic blackness, free from the stereotypical representations of mainstream culture.
Dyson argued that the attacks on gangsta rap were basically an unfair attack on black youth for problems that had long been simmering in American culture. If there was moral decline in American society, rap music was hardly the main culprit. Yes, rappers worked hand in glove with corporate capitalism, succumbed to blatant materialism, and helped to spread desensitization to violence, misogyny, and homophobia. But Dyson noted that many people hate gangsta rap because it brings out into the open attitudes and behavior that are found in the cultural mainstream and among black elites. It is gangsta rap’s in-your-face style that distinguishes it most from the more genteel expressions of sexism, homophobia, and one-upmanship that pervade middle-class life.
In his defense of the social value of hip hop, Dyson was not saying that gangsta rap makes a positive contribution to civic responsibility and community renewal. His claim was rather that gangsta rap is valuable for shining a light on the bleak conditions that lower-class blacks must endure in the face of societal indifference. These are the voices of the street, of the people that have been left to their own devices as they experience the great suffering, pain, and misery all around them. They live in a world that is, above all, violent. Dyson thinks that the fairest criticism of this type of hip-hop is “its tired, cliché ridden exploration of a subject that demands subtlety, artistic courage, and the wisdom to refrain from using a sledgehammer where a scalpel will do.”
Hip Hop and Moral Decline
It may not be surprising that white commentators blamed black youth for the country’s moral decline; yet they were joined in their attacks on gangster rap by older black people. In fact, the level of hostility and anger of older black people against black youth was striking. The common perception was that black youth are “moral strangers” in the sense that they reject the moral and spiritual values that enabled black people of earlier generations to survive difficult times.
Dyson questions the accuracy of older black people’s perceptions. To the extent that nihilism exists among black Americans, He sees it as the outcome of white supremacy which has taught black people that they are not worthy of love and of little value. This is where self-destructive nihilism comes from. It is white supremacy that has systematically destroyed black life by attacking and subverting black autonomy and self-esteem. But nihilism is not winning the battle since the black church is still doing quite well, many black families continue to thrive, and many poor black people have not surrendered to a life of crime and the perpetration of evil.
Dyson also demonstrated to me that hip-hop is not an unprecedented phenomenon within black culture. It isn’t like hip-hop is an aberration that has no connection with what came before it. If we go back 100 years, we will discover that black folk were concerned about the moral outlook of their children in those days as well. There has been a constant tendency to romanticize the past, especially as a way to motivate people to aspire to the heights their ancestors once reached. But such nostalgia becomes counterproductive when it is used to put down black youth as morally deficient.
So if black youth culture does not represent a decisive break with the past and if nihilism does not accurately characterize the state of black culture in the present, what then is distinctive about the situation of black youth today? Dyson is well aware that crime, and especially murder, is rampant among black youth. So is high unemployment and teenage pregnancy. For Dyson, the best explanation of these terrible events is that in the cities, young people have been gaining more power within the home and the community, and this has taken the form of what he calls “juvenocracy.” At the same time, though, he emphasizes that he is not denying the importance of morality, responsibility, and the cultural dimension. Rather, he is trying to understand the structural changes that have severely damaged minority communities.
What makes up a juvenocracy? For Dyson, a juvenocracy is characterized by mostly young males under 25 taking over power in black and Latino families. It can take the form of drug gangs, street groups, and individual youths who are involved in crime. They are not regulated or controlled by the members of traditional homes and neighborhoods and do not follow their values. What Dyson is telling us is that the adults are no longer in charge in these minority communities.
In Dyson’s view, since black youth are such frequent targets for home, school, and neighborhood violence, they organize themselves into groups that offer both social bonds and protection. He recognized that such groups also cause much destruction. Without justifying such violence, Dyson argued that it is understandable. Since black youth face terrible poverty and violence, their responses make sense under such conditions.
Dyson also argued that there are important mythologies and social trends that contribute to black youth violence. For example, a key American myth related to frontier traditions is that of regeneration through violence. More generally, Dyson argues that violence in America is quite mainstream and hip-hop’s violence is not exceptional. The amount of violence that young children watch on television is staggering. Writing at the end of the 20th century, Dyson noted that by the time kids turn 18, they have been exposed to almost 18,000 representations of murder on television. And poor, black children watched more TV than other children on average.
The crack economy was another important structural factor that accounts for the increased power of minority youth. The selling of crack cocaine brought money to poor black and Latino youth living in areas whose legitimate economies had collapsed. Manufacturing jobs that had provided a livable wage for the less educated were either lost or replaced by low-paying service ones as American companies either relocated to countries where wages were low or used labor-saving technologies. An additional factor is the prevalence of guns. At the time Dyson was writing, he mentioned that 65 Americans were killed by handgun fire every day and that there were one million automatic or semiautomatic weapons in the country.
What Dyson was saying is that black youth were both the perpetrators and victims of violence and they reflected American traditions of violence as well as contributed to the perpetuation of such violence. They should not be singled out as innately predisposed to violence or as exceptionally violent. Why single out African American culture for its pathological aspects or its nihilism? Such problems exist in all ethnic and racial communities, although crime may be more concentrated in the poor areas which have a larger percentage of black inhabitants. But the greater incidence of crime in these communities is more the result of poverty and material deprivation than of defects in moral character. It is also the result of juvenocracy, since such groupings are organized to maximize their profits regardless of the legality or morality of the means used.
Dyson maintained that notions of black pathology or nihilism are class-based. If we examine behavior in corporate America or American universities, we find many people who will do whatever it takes, no matter how immoral or how much suffering is caused, in order to make more money or make themselves look better. Therefore, he concluded that the concepts of pathology and nihilism give a stigma to the people who are the least equipped to stay away from the immoral and destructive actions which people in high positions routinely indulge in without censure.
The Educational Value of Dyson’s Work
Coming in contact with Dyson’s work was an eye-opener because Dyson was a highly articulate voice of the black ghetto, of the people who have no input in intellectual or media circles. I could recall that Hillary Clinton in 1996 while campaigning for her husband’s re-election called black youth “superpredators.” She said that they were without empathy and conscience and, regardless of why they became that way, they should be brought to heel. Her intention was to instill fear in white people and to show that her husband was not soft on crime, would emphasize law-and-order, and would protect white people from such predators. She also indicated that her husband would not waste any effort or money on improving the conditions that made such violent criminal activity more likely.
Dyson enabled me to detect the hypocrisy of white liberal politicians who said they believed in the universal values of freedom and justice yet used racist appeals to improve their political prospects. He gave me a way to understand and deal with the issue of young black male’s criminal behavior. Behavior that greatly harms others is morally wrong and must be criticized, regardless of the influences of class, political economy, and cultures of violence that make it more likely to occur. But if we understand the origins of such behavior, it is more likely that we can find a way to deal with it. Dyson rejects the idea that such nihilistic and pathological behavior is a cultural problem whose solution is telling people to do better and to love. He wants us to examine why such problems have become so widespread within the culture. Since its origins can be found in complex economic, political, and social factors that are interrelated, the need is to come up with new policies that can help to eradicate racial and economic injustice. The culture of violence and the political economy of crime and drugs is a symptom of this broader social problem. As long as we do not address these fundamental issues, the situation is not likely to improve.
For me, Dyson said much that needed to be said about hip-hop culture and the problems of black youth. Clearly, black youth were not the driving force behind the negative trends in American culture, such as attraction to guns and violence, misogyny and sexual objectification of women, hypermaterialism, and extreme consumerism. But his picture of hip-hop culture showed a very mixed bag of regressive and progressive trends. For every rapper who critiqued American racism and hierarchies there appeared to be many rappers whose outlook reflected some of the worst aspects of American culture.
Hip Hop Culture
I gained further insights into hip hop culture through watching the documentary Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006) in which Dyson and other leading commentators participated as talking heads. At BET’s Spring Bling weekend in Daytona Beach, the level of consciousness of hip hop fans with regard to gender, racial, and sexuality matters was very low. It may be true that violent masculinity is at the heart of American culture as Dyson maintains, but the fans’ unthinking conformity to societal and subcultural norms was disturbing. The desensitization to sexism and misogyny was extreme. Even women fans appeared to consent to their own sexual objectification. There were expected to dress in a sexually provocative way and did so, but were upset when male fans crossed the line between flirting and sexual assault. Male fans said these women dressed like bitches and whores, not sisters. So it was open season on them.
If hip hop culture embodies some of the worst aspects of traditional American ways, it is fair enough to ask how it became like this. In the documentary, commentators mentioned that white males control the record labels and urban radio and that when the large corporate entities bought up the independent labels, there was a quick shift to gangsta rap. Since the major record companies are only interested in profit, they go where the market is and 60 to 70% of the buyers are white. The dominant record companies believe that the consumers of hip hop want to see hard-core thugs with booty shaking in the background. The result is that a caricature of black masculinity is on display, and rappers have to assume the thug persona in order to get a record contract. Chuck D spoke about how these rappers pretend to be cool and to stand up to the white power structure but actually serve their financial masters. When the corporate executives put out stuff which hurts people and has a negative social effect, the rappers meekly follow their direction like robots in exchange for money.
Darnell Hunt on Raced Ways of Seeing the O.J. Simpson Trial
In his study of the O.J. Simpson trial, Darnell Hunt pointed to the importance of race as an influence on how people judge the innocence or guilt of the accused. He also noted that our accounts of events such as a trial are presented through the media. But different races do not put the same trust in media accounts, since their members have the choice to either accept or doubt the media presentation. Hunt was not interested in the actual innocence or guilt of Simpson; instead, he wanted to know how people formed their views of his innocence or guilt and their motivations for doing so.
Hunt believed that a dominant perspective on the case was constructed. This dominant perspective was based on the police and prosecution presentation of the “facts.” This dominant perspective was given a privileged status in the leading media such as Newsweek, Saturday Night Live, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine, and Time. The dominant perspective was that “O.J. Simpson, an enraged, jealous sociopath committed the final act of an obsessed wife-abuser by murdering his ex-wife and her male friend.”
In order to study the reactions of blacks and whites to the dominant perspective on the trial, Hunt selected the show Primetime Live, an ABC news magazine as a representative example of this dominant perspective. He then asked people who identified themselves as either “white” or “black” to tell how they would describe what they saw to a family member or friend. A black group of ten people and a white group of ten people were set up. Each group had an hour to discuss their responses before the moderators came and asked them some standard questions.
The white group accepted the news presentation on Primetime Live as it was. They saw it as an unbiased presentation of the facts, not as a construction of reality. Their own reflections on the show basically affirmed the views presented in the show. They saw Simpson’s jealousy and rage, Brown-Simpson’s fright, or the successful police handling of the murder at the scene as the key news items.
In contrast, the black informants viewed the news presentation critically. They talked about how it was put together and what was included or left out. In their view, the story line was one-sided, and they questioned just the points that were emphasized in the Primetime account. They suspected the white officer of planting evidence, whereas the dominant account made it seem that there was incontrovertible evidence against Simpson.
Hunt proposed that these very different responses were evidence of “raced ways of seeing.” Race, but not class or gender, affected the way that media presentations of the trial were interpreted. Blacks tended to be suspicious about the fairness of a criminal justice system that in their experience and knowledge had often been biased against them. In contrast, whites believed the system was fair since they had few personal experiences of its working against their interests. Therefore, audience members cannot be conceived merely as passive viewers of media, since they do not accept the views presented by the media unless such views harmonize with their own.
Hunt’s account of the O.J. Simpson trial gave me a clear response to the question of whether or not white and black people view media from the same perspective. They usually don’t, and the reason is that they often have different experiences related to the dimension of life that is being covered by journalists, reporters, and newscasters.
Television Representations of African Americans
In his two articles in the volume Channeling Blackness that he edited, Hunt also provided me with some perspectives on African-American representation in the television industry. His major claim was that there is black content on television but white control. Despite the increase in positive black characters on television at the end of the 20th century, white supremacy remained a constant.
Why do media representations matter? Hunt’s answer is that media representations do not merely reflect some objective reality that exists in the world. What we experience as reality is constructed through the representations that are circulated within popular culture. Media popularizes, transmits, and transfers the familiar ideologies of our society so that audiences will embrace them as part of our shared culture. Over time, these representations shape our judgments and expectations, how we evaluate people, and what we consider to be fair. They provide us with a sense of what social reality is and what it is not.
I appreciated that Hunt was giving me an update on African-American media representations in the process of answering some of the questions about race and media that my reading of bell hooks had raised. He provided data and a detailed theoretical analysis using the same framework that hooks had relied on, that of Stuart Hall’s cultural studies. For example, he agreed with hooks that despite changing media representations of black Americans, white supremacy was still intact. The reason is due to the persistence of differential treatment of black and white characters and the variety of ways in which meanings are given to the changing representations. As Hunt demonstrates, programs oriented to white and black audiences are kept separate.
The offerings aimed toward white audiences dominate prime time, and in these shows white characters are center stage and the nonwhite ones occupy the fringes. The people of color in these shows are shown to be affluent and happy to blend into the social order even if it requires leaving family and community behind. Ghetto characters that appear are portrayed in terms of negative stereotypes and viewed as threatening. The role of the central white characters is to ensure that the social order remains intact by containing such characters thereby pleasing the white audiences.
Black-themed shows, mostly sitcoms are presented on the margins and here black characters take the lead and white ones follow. The audiences are almost entirely black, and content creation and presentation is largely in the hands of blacks as well. But there are almost no shows in which serious issues concerning the racial order are presented for a diverse audience. As a result, the potential of television as a forum for re-imagining the racial order is left unrealized.
The multiple ways in which audiences can give meanings to media offerings raises a complex and subtle problem. Although Hunt laments the relative absence of black control over prime time television programs, he recognizes an important exception to this pattern, the Cosby Show. At a time during the mid-1980s when the United States was moving toward the right and President Reagan opposed all civil rights initiatives, Bill Cosby and his team designed a popular television series that presented a highly favorable portrait of an upper-middle-class black family. Since the Cosby Show was top-rated for all of its eight years in existence, it is not easy to second-guess. Yet, some critics noted that the virtues of the Huxtable family were also those of the typical white American family. And, surprisingly, the family did not have much contact with less affluent blacks.
Of even greater significance, though, was the tendency of white audiences to attribute meanings to the show beyond those intended by its creators. Cosby and his staff set out to provide positive images of black people that diverged from the old stereotypical representations of blacks as stupid, inferior, uninterested in work, and engaged in shady undertakings. But, as Hunt points out, it appears that many white viewers interpreted the show as freeing them from any blame for racial inequality. Such a reading was aligned with the conservative notion of a colorblind America that prevailed in the 1980s. The reasoning was that if black Americans were not prospering, they themselves were to blame. Affirmative action was unnecessary. If the Huxtables could make it, so could other blacks.
There was something very troubling about the picture of African American life that I was getting from the most influential black critics such as Dyson and Hunt. Hunt taught me a lot about the representation of African Americans on television. His notion of black content, white control was a useful starting point, but he showed that even black control of television programming did not achieve the desired goal of bringing about a more complex or enlightened understanding of the African-American experience. The Cosby Show was produced and controlled by blacks, yet it contributed to the white perception that they were living in a postracial and color-blind America. In order to lessen the ill effects of white supremacy, Hunt recommended the production of shows that honestly grapple with racial issues. He also favored less ghettoized programming and giving minority-produced shows greater access to desirable prime time slots. But there didn’t seem to be a whole lot that black people themselves could do about the situation.
I felt that there was something missing in the writings of the leading figures in black cultural and media studies. Weren’t there positive trends in black culture that demonstrated not only resistance to the dominant and hegemonic narratives of American society but also a willingness to tap into the richness of African-American culture and extend that culture into new and creative directions? When I came across Herman Gray’s Cultural Moves (2005), I found much of what I was looking for.
Herman Gray on Racial Identity
Gray’s approach to the production and reproduction of racial identity in media is highly sophisticated as well as flexible and dynamic. Although it took me quite a few years before I fully appreciated the range and subtlety of his critique, I knew from the beginning that Gray was a cultural critic of great theoretical acuity. His ability to make sense out of the staggering complexity of the media world impressed me, even though his reluctance to indulge in sweeping generalizations frustrated my quest for easy answers. Still, it wasn’t until I carefully read Cultural Moves again in 2018 that I could accept his message on the need to give up an outdated civil rights movement perspective on cultural politics.
Since Gray explores cultural politics in a very nuanced way, it is hard to accurately convey his position on key issues such as the political economy of media, media effects, audience reception, media as a site of ideological struggle, and the relevance of media representations for cultural politics. Gray’s analysis is critical in the sense that he questions conventional interpretations of the role of media in order to imagine new cultural and political possibilities for black identity. A critic of the cultural and political status quo, he recognizes the negative impact of commercial culture on black American well-being. Like hooks, he is well aware that black culture has been commodified in the interests of gaining maximum profit for the global conglomerates that largely control the mass media. In addition, Gray recognizes that black self-representation can only be achieved within the limiting structure of global capitalism. Given such constraints, the challenge is for black cultural politics to find ways to use the economic and technological structure of media rather than for blacks to have their culture appropriated and to suffer exploitation at the hands of global capitalism.
Gray departs from the civil rights movement’s focus on representation of blacks in mass media. Instead, he directs much of his attention to creative arts such as jazz, music influenced by technology, and the visual art of Kara Walker. He shows that the reinforcing of white supremacy is not the sole effect of the production and consumption of media. Since, in Gray’s view, cultural politics includes the ways in which cultural resources and practices affect the production of culture itself, he investigates the cultural moves by which blacks construct musical genres such as jazz. The commodification of black culture by the white people that largely control the culture industries is not the only game in town. There is much creative black cultural work that eludes such control while making positive contributions to the construction of black identity.
Jazz: Tradition and Innovation
Gray’s first example is the successful campaign waged by Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center to gain for jazz institutional recognition, increased visibility, and legitimacy. Marsalis used racial awareness as one resource for his project by viewing jazz as a central expression of black identity in America. For Marsalis, jazz is “the nobility of the race put into sound; the sensuousness of romance in our dialect; it is the picture of the people in all their glory.” In taking this perspective, Marsalis clearly opposes those jazz critics who perceive jazz as an instinctual music played by untutored and unsophisticated musicians. And this aesthetic standpoint in which jazz is viewed as high culture has helped Marsalis to institutionalize jazz at Lincoln Center with all the cultural influence, prestige, and financial resources which that implies. Keep in mind, though, Gray is not claiming that Marsalis’s particular type of cultural politics is the only reason for his success. The political economy of the recording industry must also be taken into account. Nevertheless, through his cultural project, Marsalis has played a major role in raising jazz to an unprecedented level of public prominence and status.
Gray describes Marsalis’s approach to jazz as one of canon building, that is, an attempt to define a jazz tradition as serious art and to defend it from cultural contamination. But there is another cultural project within jazz, that of what Gray calls the “jazz left.” These cultural workers are active at the local level and engaged in teaching music, organizing and leading singing and instrumental groups, and performing in the communities. They too are caught up in the struggles to secure resources and gain recognition for black music while training new musicians. But they do not seek to protect and codify an existing tradition.
The aim of these innovators is to build on tradition so that new possibilities can emerge from it. In so doing, they transgress the old norms in favor of innovation. So the jazz left is an advocate for jazz just like Marsalis but it presents an alternative vision of jazz. This discussion of competing jazz visions makes clear that culture is a contested site. Interestingly, those who are contesting the meaning of jazz in this case are not mainly the whites who run the record companies and the cultural establishments but black cultural workers themselves, those who perform, theorize, and promote the music.
Kara Walker
The visual artist Kara Walker’s work is concerned with the depiction of the black American past and especially slavery. Until quite recently, black popular and expressive culture often featured the telling of stories about the collective past with the aim of keeping control of this past out of the hands of white people. But in the mid-1990s, the culture and history of black people was brought out into the open in full public view by black people themselves within the popular culture. The conflicts among different groups of black people were often humorously portrayed, and the black middle class which was securing greater social acceptance and wealth sometimes tried to regulate and control such cultural expression. Within this context, Kara Walker’s art has been particularly controversial.
For Gray, the value of Kara Walker’s art is that racial stereotypes are used to stimulate audiences to think about the nature of representation and to realize that such imagery is produced within history rather than merely being a reflection of nature. Her art enables those who take her work seriously to confront the era of slavery as the foundation of American racial terror. Yet, her lack of shame in dealing with racial stereotypes as well as with slavery and sex offended many black people. In addition, she was criticized for tracing the link between white fantasies and black degradation and for her unblinking look at the realms where race, gender, desire, sex, and pornography come together.
Black Identity and Digital and Information Technologies
The final area in which Gray discovers great potential for the production of new black identities is that of music in relation to digital and information technologies. His claim is that these technologies provide black performers and composers with resources for imagining blackness in different ways as they extend and develop black cultural traditions. This claim challenges the notion that the outcome of the new information technologies will be to reduce racial and cultural difference to mark off sectors of consumer markets. Another way of putting it is that Gray does not view culture as a reflection of trends in political economy and technology. Through the use of the new technologies, black artists play an active role in exploring what blackness can mean and how it can be experienced. These artists produce the new meanings that African Americans give to their experience rather than merely reproducing the ideologies of economic elites.
In making a persuasive case for his relatively optimistic view of the potential of the new technologies, Gray first confronts the conventional views that stand in the way of accepting his position. Foremost among these views is the idea that black people are technologically illiterate and lack the ability to master the new technologies. In his discussions of the work of the Afrofuturists and George Lewis, Steve Coleman, and Pamela Z, Gray shows the creative ways in which computer music-making takes African-American cultural practices and traditions in new directions. Through their sounds, they are constantly inventing and making over notions of blackness. The impressive manner in which these black artists have carried out their cultural projects should put to rest the idea that African-Americans cannot avoid being left behind in our technological societies.
A related and equally limiting view is that digital and information technology are the vehicle through which poor minorities attain economic advancement and the consumption patterns of the middle class. Blacks are supposed to achieve this goal partially through the assistance of government and the private sector in gaining greater access to the new technologies. But they must also equip themselves to take advantage of these opportunities by adapting better to the modern world. Such adaptation requires them to let go of their traditional ways of life and racial identities.
Gray rejects the widespread view that these technologies are neutral; he likewise takes issue with the notion that their creation and use have nothing to do with race, gender, and social structure. He emphasizes that the way in which these technologies are structured and defined is influenced by the perspectives of their creators and of those for whom they have been designed. Gray believes that the culture of the American suburbs has influenced how cyberspace is constructed, including its rules and etiquette and the ways in which people participate. He emphasizes that users have to deal with technologies whose forms, logic, and means of engaging with them have already been determined, since they are part of the hardware and software of the new technologies. They can be used in culturally creative and imaginative ways, but the new technologies must be encountered within certain social, economic, and political conditions that define them. They are not neutral products of the free market.
What some avant-garde jazz and experimental music composers and performers have done is use their own perspective on race, gender, and identity to challenge assumptions such as whiteness that are built into the technologies they use. They engage in cultural politics by opposing both the racial conceptions of the creators of the technology and the notion that the technology itself is just a tool unconnected with such racial conceptions. These artists use identity to confront the racial, gender, and social assumptions that are embodied in the digital technologies.
Television and Race
Although Gray is obviously comfortable dealing with the high cultural form of jazz, he is no less at home in the world of popular culture and television. Gray’s history of the ways in which television has dealt with race and his analysis of the early 21st century television approaches to race are compelling. Right from the beginning, television was conceived as an electronic means of bringing Americans together in a national community. After segregation was legally ended, television promoted integration and assimilation into the white mainstream. Separate racial and ethnic identity was conceived as an obstacle to belonging and identification within this allegedly colorblind society.
With the rise of the black power movement in the late 1960s, the issue of difference became more pressing. The ideal of a homogeneous middle-class American society put forward on network TV was shattered by black demands for visibility and recognition of their distinctive history, culture, and struggles. For the networks, the challenge was to commodify racial and ethnic differences in the most profitable way while not alienating whites. As Hunt pointed out, the result was the creation of parallel television universes in which black and white families were portrayed as living their own separate lives.
In a global age, television can no longer control difference and ensure cultural homogeneity as it attempted to do in its early days. Active audiences of color are seeking out programs to their liking so the challenge of the global media companies is to make use of difference as well as attempt to control it. For these huge conglomerates, profit is to be pursued by meeting the preferences of different audiences rather than by assimilating and homogenizing them. But they must deal with active audiences “who register their desire and identities through refusal and retreat, cynicism, inattention, and suspicion.”
The focus on active television audiences is crucial because Gray demonstrates that black consumers as well as black producers are finding ways to utilize media to construct black identity in positive ways. Such cultural politics enables African Americans to achieve a certain degree of autonomy. Of course, as Gray points out, mass media are controlled by a small number of giant corporations whose search for profit leads them to focus on whites as the most desirable consumers and to put white viewing interests first. It is also true that the artists and musicians whose work Gray describes are largely outside popular culture. Nonetheless, the critical accounts of the American media landscape by Hunt and Dyson seemed to me to pay insufficient attention to the more creative and relatively autonomous dimensions of African American culture.
Cultural Politics
As I have already mentioned, the importance of cultural politics is that it recognizes the crucial function of media in the establishment of one’s own identity and in the creation of images of members of groups different from one’s own. With this understanding, I was motivated to become more self-reflective and self-critical about the effects of media consumption on my images of African-Americans. In particular, critical media and cultural studies helped me to better understand the place of African-Americans within American society.
I was faced with a dilemma. If I saw African-Americans as the passive victims of media culture that transmitted the values of white supremacy, I might be buying into the view that black Americans are not capable of gaining greater equality through their own agency and by resisting the dominant media messages. On the other hand, if I accepted the view that the media system controlled by whites played no role in the maintenance of white supremacy, then I was subscribing to the widespread white view that racism no longer exists.
Cultural studies gave me a way of navigating this dilemma by viewing media culture as a contested site in which the predominantly white producers with their economic clout had the advantage over minority consumers. But such consumers are by no means condemned to passivity nor are they incapable of seeing through the ideological messages put forward by the dominant media. Hunt’s study of the black American response to the press coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial clearly illustrated this point.
I appreciate that Hunt, Dyson, and Gray have all given me a valuable part of the total picture. Hunt’s study of television production can be summed up in the formula of “black content, white control.” But Gray sees this formula as too simple to explain all the goings-on within the television arena. The role of active audiences cannot be ignored, and with new developments in technology, it can be argued that the global scope of the communications media and the availability of greater consumer choice promote greater audience activity. Gray also demonstrated that blacks did exert significant control in some contexts over cultural production within jazz and the visual arts. However, it could be countered that Gray is talking mainly about middle-class cultural producers and audiences rather than the lower-class audiences that have less control over how they are viewed by media.
Above all, Gray has taught me to observe what is going on in the cultural world rather than relying on broad theoretical generalizations. Culture is a process that is the outcome of conscious awareness as well as unconscious motivations; it is continually in motion and you need to be close to it to really take its pulse. It would be very easy for me to see African American culture as monolithic and to attribute its rich and varied phenomena to simple causes such as racism or white supremacy, the pathology of the ghetto, or an increase in social mobility since the 1960s. But Gray reminds me that it is real people in fluid situations with complex motivations and often much ambivalence who create African-American culture and black identities within the larger social context.
