• English Site
• >World
• >United States
• >

  Interview with Sociologist Michael Eric Dyson: Race Is a 'Tough Tightrope for Obama'

Interview with Sociologist Michael Eric Dyson Race Is a 'Tough Tightrope for Obama'

Part 2: Kennedy, King, Obama

SPIEGEL: Obama is very popular in Germany and is often likened to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Justifiably so?

Dyson: In my book about Martin Luther King, I also called Obama the "black Kennedy." He has Kennedy's charismatic presence -- tall, good-looking, articulate, Harvard-trained. He has compensated by even harder work for his lack of birth into those august and tony circles. On the other hand, he does have some of the oratorical flair of King. He comes from a black community whose average black preacher has enough rhetorical firepower to light up the nation. Obama wouldn't measure up to the height of those black rhetorical geniuses. But, as a political orator, he has been a master.

SPIEGEL: There is a new generation of black politicians, such as the governors from New York and Massachusetts as well as the mayors of Washington, DC, and Newark. Many of their voters were white. Doesn't that mean that race is becoming less important as a factor in some elections?

Dyson: These four are certainly seen as the central core of a new kind of black politician. It may be their ideal to be post-racial, but I am not so certain that we've gotten that far. Their success means that some of these elections are post-racist, that people vote for these politicians based on "the content of their character, not the color of their skin," as Dr. King preached.

SPIEGEL: In your book about Martin Luther King, you write that Obama is like the early, gentle King and that Obama's former, controversial pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is like the late, angry King.

Dyson: Obama says that we would only have to change a little bit here and a little bit there, and then we are nearly there in terms of the American dream. That would be the early optimism of King. Later, King said that you have to have a revolution in America. But in his coat pocket was the title of a sermon that he was going to preach the Sunday after he was murdered: "Why America May Go to Hell."

SPIEGEL: That sounds a lot like Wright who declared: "God damn America."

Dyson: Obama may have repudiated that later King in the same way he did with Jeremiah Wright. Had YouTube been around in the 1960s, King might have never become this legend. Since the mid-1960s, he was seen as a racial pariah. Many universities did not invite him to speak; no American publisher wanted to publish a book by him. Only his death -- the sweet scent of martyrdom -- resurrected him.

SPIEGEL: In his speeches in front of black audiences, Barack Obama often gets the loudest cheers when he appeals to parental responsibilities: Turn off the television! Read to your kids! Help them with their homework!

Dyson: Right. We know that black people watch more television than anybody else, which makes it legitimate to talk about television. Its anesthetizing effect has been quite real. But that concern isn't new: Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said that 30 years ago. Martin Luther King said it, too.

SPIEGEL: One of your central theses is the black community in America can be divided into two groups. You've said that there is an "afristocracy" made up of the 1.1 million African-Americans who earn at least $100,000 a year. And then there are poor people who live in the ghetto -- the "ghettocracy." Rich black people, you have written, hate poor black people.

Dyson: I know that that's a harsh statement. But no other group has internalized its self-hatred as much as blacks have. It would be difficult to find other groups who behave similarly in that their most esteemed members berate its poorest members. The entertainer Bill Cosby is the most obvious example.

SPIEGEL: Cosby argues that you cannot fault racism for the fact that 60 percent of black children grow up with only one parent. What is so wrong with saying: Study hard, work hard, shun the culture of despair?

Dyson: There's nothing wrong with that. I am the last one to say that poor blacks should not behave. But Cosby said that since girls become mothers so early, you are going to have to have a DNA card in the ghetto to avoid making love to your grandmother. I find that an example of black self-hatred.

SPIEGEL: Your experience of growing up was different than Obama's. You were born into black culture.

Dyson: We lived in the inner city of Detroit, and my parents saw themselves as striving black people who wanted to do better and who worked very hard. When my father was laid off after 33 years at the wheel-brake drum factory, he didn't cry into his beer. He started a gardening service the next morning.

SPIEGEL: You quit high school yourself.

Dyson: I went to a suburban, rich, private school for a year and a half. There were very wealthy heirs, such as Lee Iacocca's daughter. There were tremendous difficulties there culturally, and it was a mismatch. So, I got kicked out after a prank. I became a father, married the mother and got divorced because she didn't love me. I was on welfare, got jobs as an emergency substitute janitor and as a worker in factories. It was like that for four years. My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more complex and that the truths of their suffering have to be told honestly.

SPIEGEL: How did you manage to turn your life around?

Dyson: I wanted to go to school to get a better education to be able to take care of my son and also to fulfill whatever early promise there was in me. I finished night school and got my diploma. A member of my church had gone to Knoxville College, a historically black college. I called them and told them my grades. The next day, I took a Greyhound bus.

SPIEGEL: Today, at 49, you are a university professor at Georgetown. You are a model story of black success. But your brother's life sounds more like a model story of black failure.

Dyson: My brother Everett has been in prison for 20 years for a murder we believe he did not commit. He wasn't a Boy Scout; he wasn't an angel. He slung crack and heroin in the streets of Detroit for a while, and so he lived a life that helped bring destruction to portions of black communities. But he is an extremely transformed man, and he has been able to reflect upon his circumstances and condition.

SPIEGEL: You were raised in the same family in similar circumstances. How did you end up on such vastly different sides of life?

Dyson: That is the $64,000 question. I was encouraged in ways that he was not, perhaps because my talent was more apparent. I also think it has to do with skin color, light versus dark.

SPIEGEL: Is it really that simple, that terribly plain, that the shade of your skin can make such a difference?

Dyson: I think it certainly is that real. Light-skinned black people are seen to be closer to white people. The allegiance to lighter-skinned people has operated in a very destructive way that we have internalized ourselves inside black communities. You look at many of the prominent black people in this society who have been able to do well. Many have been lighter-skinned. Some would even say that that has to do in part with the adoration of a figure like Barack Obama.

SPIEGEL: You talked about the great progress many blacks have achieved in this society and also about the desperate conditions many poor blacks find themselves in. What predominates now: the successes or the failures?

Dyson: It is a Charles Dickens' reality: It's the best of times, it's the worst of times -- but at the same time. Black people like me are able to see our pathway to success largely unblemished and unblocked by the most vicious forms of racial discrimination. But for poor black people and working-class black people, it is a much more difficult way to go. The over-incarceration of black people is just intolerable. When you look at the disparity in terms of education and access to fair schooling, it is horrible. If this would happen to white people in this country, it would not be tolerated.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Dyson, we thank you for this conversation.

Interview conducted by Cordula Meyer.