Often shifting from booming discourse to laughing conversation, Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brought his insights about American race relations to a large and diverse crowd at Reynolds Auditorium Monday night.
Beginning his presentation with a reference to Tuesday's five-year anniversary of the Rodney King incident, Dyson next launched into colorful rhetoric laced with personal anecdotes, references to political figures and introspective comments on the construct of race in America. With his vibrant voice and descriptive hand gestures, Dyson alternately elicited uproarious laughter and pensive silence from his audience as he managed to bring humor into even the most disturbing stories of racial injustice.
He told the story of a plane trip during which he sat near a popular hip-hop musician who Dyson vividly impersonated to the delight of his audience. The singer was asked by a flight attendant to "'Sit up-I have to talk to ya'll. I heard there was cussing going on back here.'"
But as Dyson explained, it was not the man's mouth that the flight attendant considered offensive. "It was the representation of the young man's masculinity," he said. "The vulgarity was his very presence."
Such stereotypical ideas are a fact of American society, Dyson emphasized, and should not-can not, for the health of our nation and its people-be ignored. Instead of the United States of America, Dyson went on, the country has drifted toward becoming "The United States of Amnesia," forgetting questionable episodes of its past while proudly proclaiming others.
"Racism often feeds on a facade of being anti-racist," he said. That mentality, he explained, often leads society to blame the victims of racism for racism itself.
For example, he continued a white person might see a room of tables full of people, notice that there is a table of only black people and a table of only Hispanic people, and ask why the minorities are segregating themselves. It would often go unnoticed, Dyson said, that the other 127 tables are full of white people. "Whiteness has been rendered invisible because it is the universal positive," he said.
"That's why Jon Benet ain't even handcuffed, while a brother with a Duke Card gets handcuffed for just looking suspicious," Dyson proclaimed, referring to last week's arrest of Trinity freshman Calvin Harding, which many believe was racially motivated.
Similarly, Dyson continued, while white cultural subjects such as European art and English literature are respected, hip-hop music and black slang are viewed as a "black transgression against the white social norms."
Following Dyson's presentation, author Daniel Wideman, son of author John Edgar Wideman, read an excerpt from the book he is currently writing titled "A Ticket To Morning," which deals with the realizations about racism he encountered while visiting a Native American reservation.
The audience then viewed a "60 Minutes" episode that aired in April 1993 and explored the racial divisiveness present at the University. "We visited a lot of colleges before we found one open enough, brave enough, to talk about it," stated the reporter in the program's introduction, before proceeding to interview several University students on their ideas of race.
The episode dealt with several of the themes Dyson had previously explained, including the blame that white students often place on black students for the segregation evident in campus eateries and residential facilities.
Audience members, primarily students, then addressed comments to Dyson and other members of the audience regarding their feelings toward the University's racial situation, several voicing personal experiences they had and posing questions about how to make their University acquaintances more diverse.
Trinity junior A.J. Thompson, who is white, drew applause when he told white audience members to object next time they are in a situation in which a group of white people make negative comments about minorities. "Just say 'you know what, I'm not going to stand for that anymore,'" he told them.
Audience members left the three-hour presentation impressed with both Dyson's speech and the open dialogue that followed. "He spoke the truth and didn't hesitate about anything," said Trinity junior Max Prempeh.
The program was sponsored by the Office of Intercultural Affairs.
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