Photograph by Whitney Curtis
[Note: This is a web-extra for SLM's September 2009 profile "The Public's Intellectual," about Washingon University professor Gerald Early. This article currently appears only in print.]
On Politics…
The cover of a recent Belles Lettres literary review, published by the Center for the Humanities at Washington University, is a picture of Doris Day; the heading, “The Good Blonde and the Genuine World: Doris Day’s American Century.” In his introduction, Early refers to “a serious and probing article” he wrote just because he loved the idea of the Doris Day cover and realized it had to reference something inside. He’d been chastened, after the previous issue, for a McCain-Palin photo that looked prematurely celebratory.
“So, there you have it,” he wrote, “another issue of Belles Lettres, purified of any taint of conservatism, that we hope will make our readers forget all about our Republican cover, which made them so unhappy. Jian [Leng, his associate director] has decided to banish Republicans entirely from the next presidential election so that we will not have to mention them at all…. I can only hope Jian may fail in her mission. Republicans may turn out to be just like cops—the people, as Raymond Chandler wrote, that no way has yet been invented to say goodbye to.”
— Excerpted from Early’s introduction to the spring 2009 Belles Lettres
On Baseball…
“The real reason black Americans don't play baseball is that they don’t want to. Baseball has little hold on the black imagination. As the sports historian Michael McCambridge points out, baseball sells itself through nostalgia—the memory of being taken to a game by your father when you were a child. But for blacks, going back into baseball’s past means recalling something called white baseball and something else called black baseball, which was meant to exist under conditions that were inferior to the white version. Even the integration of baseball, symbolized by Robinson, reminds blacks that their institutions were weak and eventually had to be abandoned. As the controversies over reparations for slavery and the Confederate flag have shown, it is difficult to sell African Americans the American past as most Americans have come to know it.”
— Excerpted from “Where Have We Gone, Mr. Robinson?” TIME, April 12, 2007
On Miles Davis’ Confidence…
“What instantly struck me about Miles Davis one day after hearing [Sketches of Spain] played for the hundredth time (my sister was pretty passionate about her Spanish phase)…, was that what made Miles Davis special was that he was a man who was not afraid to be himself. For me, as a black boy in an odd world where being black was not such a rigorous disadvantage as to make me either tragic or romantic but was enough of a social and political penalty to make certain passages in life more inconvenient than they should be, this discovery was something of a delight. For my greatest fear as a black boy growing up in a world where I was despised and petted simultaneously because of my blackness as, first, that I could never find out who I truly was, and, second, that even if I did know myself well enough, I would never have the courage to be myself because I already knew that both blacks and whites expected me to be something to please them in their blackness or their whiteness.
— Excerpted from “Miles Davis as Ahab and the Whale,” The American Poetry Review, Jan/Feb 1997
On Race…
“The controversial New Yorker cover of July 21, 2008—showing the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, as a Muslim jihadist and his wife, Michelle, as a gun-toting, Afro-wearing black militant—actually missed its target. It was funny as a kind of political and cultural satire, but only if you view the Obamas as channeling the first generation of black students to attend elite, white universities.
“That was my generation—we're about 10 to 15 years older. We started attending college in 1970, almost as soon as black-studies programs, special black dorms, and special black admissions were instituted. Many of us were secretly, in our imagination, Muslim back in those days, or we adopted certain superficial Muslim pieties. We didn't eat pork, castigating it as slave food, and we sometimes called God ‘Allah.’ Among our heroes were the late, martyred Malcolm X and the living but also martyred Muhammad Ali, both Muslims...
Looking at the New Yorker cover as a middle-aged, black baby boomer, far removed from any of the Orientalism and racial and political romanticism of my youth, reminded me of a certain kind of silliness, but it also, strangely, moved me deeply. The cover told the story of a rite of African-American passage that occurred at a particular time for the generation of blacks who would become the most successful in the history of the group, and the most integrated. The relatively difficult years that my generation endured integrating white institutions—difficult not in any material sense, but in the sense that we were not very well prepared academically or emotionally to cope with our surroundings (we were given more than we knew what to do with, so much that one felt simultaneously intoxicated by the riches and stressed to the breaking point by how alien it all felt)—made us clutch at any sort of feeble identity protection we could muster. We had to ‘act black’ because, after all, that is why we were at the university in the first place: to provide diversity in the only way we knew how.
“The New Yorker cover reminds me how much we have, as integrationists, tried to fit in and how much we may secretly feel (or hope) we haven’t.…It also posed an important question: How comfortable are we with ourselves? Did we, in our desperation, ask race to do more work, support more of a psychological burden, than such a limited concept could ever hope to do because, alas, it was all we had: white people’s crazy, self-serving idea of what human difference means? As Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote: ‘There is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us.” We even hoped it would make us Americans while it would protect us from America.’”
— Excerpted from “The End of Race As We Know It,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 10, 2008
On Infidelity…
“There is an entire history of bitterness and betrayal, from slavery onwards, that both black men and black women must bear, each having, at some critical moment, absolutely failed the other. During slavery, black marriage was never recognized as a truly sacred institution, and after slavery an air of recrimination existed between black men and black women: the men accused the women of being sell-outs, of sleeping with white men, loving a white Jesus, and complaining of the failures and cowardice of black men. In return, the women said that the men were weak, that they cringed before white men, and treated their women violently only because they did not have the nerve to face the real source of their frustration; they contended that, secretly, the men desired white women, the sexual conquest of whom would serve as the political fulfillment of their manhood. Growing up as a fatherless black boy, I felt the weight of this mistrust. No one yearned more than I to fulfill the duties of being father and husband; to show the world—both black and white—that I, as a black man, was not the moral failure so many supposed me to be; to be the father that I deserved as a son and the husband that my mother deserved as a wife. I wanted my marriage to be a statement, clarion-clear, that it was possible in this world that a black person could make another truly happy and would truly want to.”
— Excerpted from “Monogamy and Its Perils,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1995
On His Daughter’s Cancer…
“Returning to Siteman intensified an earlier guilt: when Rosalind was first diagnosed with cancer and some of our friends and acquaintances thought she might die, my wife and I became, for a time, something like heroic figures, suffering parents with a stricken child. There was a certain perverse pleasure in this special regard that I found myself having to fight in order not to find myself taking an egoistic satisfaction in Rosalind’s illness as it showed me off to the world as a wonderful parent. To be reminded of some of my feelings of that earlier time made me flinch with self-loathing.”
— Excerpted from “Fathers and Daughters,” blog on the Center’s Website
Collected by Jeannette Cooperman
