This article from PopMatters, authored by Mark Anthony Neal (Associate Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Program in African and African-American Studies at Duke University), represents an absolutely fascinating look at race and American popular culture. Between the Terrell Owens/Nicolette Sheridan skit leading into Monday Night Football, the doings at the Vibe Awards, and the Pacers/Pistons dust-up in Motown, the young “black buck” has been very visible in the eyes of White America of late, and Neal offers a thoughtful examination of these events that goes way beyond anything you’ll encounter in the popular media.

I did find myself wishing that Neal had gone one step further, though. My complaint about (my fellow) academics has frequently been that they do a fabulous job of telling you what’s wrong without even hinting at what you might do about it, and the dynamic Neal articulates is one that begs for some “proactive engagement” by whites and blacks alike. I’ve been very impressed, for instance, with recent attempts by Bill Cosby (actually, let me correct that – Dr. Bill Cosby) to focus Black America on a cultural crisis that is in part self-inflicted:

“Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day. It’s cursing and calling each other ‘nigger’ as they’re walking up and down the street. They think they hip — can’t read, can’t write — 50 percent of them,” he said.
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“The more you invest in that child, the more you are not going to let some CD tell your child how to curse and how to say the word ‘nigger.’ This is an accepted word. You are so hip with ‘nigger,’ but you can’t even spell it,” an impassioned Cosby lamented.

Whatever happened to ‘Black is beautiful?’ Well, it was replaced with ‘nigger please,'” he said to laughter.

Clearly, Dr. Cosby and Dr. Neal are working two pieces of the same great big puzzle, and I would very much like to hear them get together for a public discussion of how these issues might be addressed.

Of course, there’s a lot more to the problem than this, and if Cosby can call out other blacks I can call out whites, a lot of whom are probably made pretty uncomfortable by this conversation. Let me say it out loud: large parts of White America enjoy it when blacks act like uneducated punks. There are way too many whites who need the minstrel show because it’s the only thing that lets them feel superior. I can take you places where white people still use “nigger” as the default term to describe blacks (as long as there aren’t any blacks within earshot, that is, because deep down black people scare the shit out of them – Bubba might talk a good game, but not for a second does he think he can actually whip an actual black man one on one), but these same people also cheer their hillbilly butts off for sports teams, professional and college, comprised largely of black athletes. They watch movies and TV shows starring black actors. They have CDs by black recording artists. They buy products pitched by black celebrities.

Forgive my overgeneralization, (we’re talking about macrocultural dynamics, so you have to do so to a degree), but there’s a tremendous degree of cognitive dissonance eating away at White America, and so in some bizarre fashion we might view the blacks Dr. Cosby talks about and the whites I’m talking about as being engaged in a twisted, symbiotic dance of racial dysfunction, where each side gets what they want – that being the worst the other side has to offer – and in return all they have to do is occasionally act like the caricature the other side needs to justify its own part in the self-fulfilling downward spiral of race in America.

Dr. Neal does a lot better job conveying his thinking in a manageable, coherent fashion than I’m doing here. I need to think about this some more, clearly. But for the moment, let me applaud those who are willing to speak honestly about one of the most important issues of our age. If we can all get out from behind our posing we might get somewhere….