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YOMAMA'S 01S f u N KTIONAL!

Fighting

the Culture Wars

in Urban America

ROBIN D.G.KELLEY BEACON PRESS · BOSTON

Beacon Press

25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachuwts 02108-2892

http://www.b<acon.org

eacon Press books are published under the au.spices of the Unitarian Uni versa.list Association of Congregations.

" Hom of Plenty" from Colleaed Poems by Langston Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.. 1994). Copyright

1994 by Langston Hughes . Reprinted by permiuion of Alfred A. Knopf. Inc.

Chapter 2appeared in a slightly revised form as " Playing for Keeps: African American Youth in the

Postindustrial City," in The House that Rau Built: Black Americans/ U.S. Term in. ed. Wahneema Lubiano

Portions of chapters appeared in a revised form in Robin D. G. Kelley, "The Proletariat Goes to College,"

Theepilogue first appeared as " Introduction: Looking B(l)ackward: African American Studies in the Age of Identity Politics," in RauConsciolUll<SS: African-American Studiesforthe N<W Century, eds. Judith Jackson Fossett

OJ 02 01 00 99 98 8 7 6 S 4 3 2

Text design by (sic) Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kelley, Robin D. G.

Yo' mama 's disfunktional!: fighting the culture wan; in urban America/ Robin D. G. Kelley. p. cm.

151>1 0-8070-0940-7 (doth) u,,. 0-8070-0941-s (paper) 1. Afro-Americans-Social conditions. 2. Urban poor-United States-Soc:W conditions. 3. Inner

cities-United States. 4. Afro-American families-Social conditions. 5. United States-Race relations. 6. Afro-Americans-Civil nghts-Govemment policy. I. Title.

£185.86.x.is 1997

305.896'073- dca1 97-20067

INTRODUCTION They rung my bell to ask me. Could I recommend a maid. I said, yes, your mama.

-LANGSTON HUGHES

"Horn of Plenty"

I grew up in a world in which talking about somebody's mama was a way oflife, an everyday occurrence. For all of us, boys and girls, it was a kind of game or performance. Whether we called it "capping,"

"snapping," "ranking," "busting," or simply "the dozens," most of

it was ridiculous, surreal humor bearing very little resemblance to

reality: "Your mom's so fat she broke the food chain"; "Your mama's

skin's so ashy she was a stand-in for Casper the Friendly Ghost";

"Your mama's so dumb she thought ring-around-the-collar was a children's game." More than anything, it was an effort to master the

absurd metaphor, an art form intended to entertain rather than to

damage.

Of course, during those rare moments when our insults moved

beyond wild abstractions and drew on our real-life circumstances,

we had to be prepared for a fight As rare as those moments were, it is hard to forget the teary-eyed kids wielding cake cutters (metal

2 ,. vo· MAMA'S 01sfUNKnoNAL!

Afro combs) or rocks, the "sucker punch" from behind, the artless

refrain of the "F" word shouted in frustrated, chant-like cadences.

L.You would think that as a kid growing up in this world I could

handle any insult, or at least be prepared for any slander tossed in

the direction of my mom-or, for that matter, my whole family, my

friends, or my friends' families. But when I entered college and be-

gan reading the newspaper, monographs, and textbooks on a regu-

lar basis, I realized that man academics, · ournalistsJ)olicymakers,

and politicians had taken the "dozens" to another level. In all my

years o p aying the dozens, I have rarely heard vitriol as vicious as

the words spouted by Riverside (California) county welfare director

Lawrence Townsend: "Every time I see a bag lady on the street, I

wonder, 'Was that an A.F.D.C. mother who hit the menopause

wall-who can no longer reproduce and get money to support her-

self?' •>1 I have had kids tell me that my hair was so nappy it looked

like a thousand Africans giving the Black Power salute, but never

has anyone said to my f~ce that my whole family-especially my ., ( mama-was a "tan le o atholo . " Senator Daniel Patrick Moyni- han has been saying it since 1965 and, like the one about your mama

tying a mattress to her back and offering "roadside service," Moyni-

han's "snap" has been repeated by legions of analysts and politi-

cians, including Dinesh D'Souza, the boy wonder of the far Right.

D'Souza has snapped on black people in such a vile manner that

his version of the dozens dispenses with all subtlety. In The End of Racism, he says in no uncertain terms that African Americans have ushered in "a revival of barbarism in the midst of Western Civilization."2

Then again, should we be surprised? It seems like the very

people often identified as the inventors and masters of the art of

"snapping" are also the prime subjects of a cruel, high-tech game of

the dozens that has continued nonstop since the first slave ships

embarked from West Africa to the New World. Perhaps "jungle

bunny," "darky, " "coon," "sapphire," "jezebel," and "mammy"

INTRODUCTION « 3

have gone by the wayside, but certain images of the lazy, irresponsi-

ble Negro endure in the form of "the underclass," "matriarchy,"

"welfare queens," "criminals," and " dysfunctional," to name a few.

We have been consistently marked as dysfunctional: ironically, dys-

functionality is both the source of the slander directed toward us as

well as a source of attraction. Our dysfunctionality fascinates; it is al- luring. Black people are different, the true rhythm of the street; the

Aunt Jemimah who knows more about white folks than they do; the exotic African; the conjure woman and root doctor; the jazz musi-

cian (or basketball player) who plays from his soul rather than his in-

tellect. We have been the thing against which normality, whiteness, and functionality have been defined.

While much of Yo' Mama's Disfanktional! critiques the critics,

it also attempts to give voice to those urban populations under seige

right now. In some respects, the title represents what I imagine the

very subjects/objects of reactionary social science and public policy

might say if they could speak back to the critics and analysts. Charles

Murray, Dinesh D'Souza, even William Julius Wilson would find

themselves in a position to have to defend their own mamas and their own behavior, not to mention their research.'! _piow that

somewhere, sometime in urban America, when an ethnographer.,!_ social worker, or sexologist asked a wayward ghetto youth ifhe had

any "illegitimate children," he came back with the classic retort: r .

"Ask your mama." And why not? Some of the claims advanced by

people with Ph.D.'s have about as much basis in hard evidence

as anything coming out of the dozens, but without the subtlety,

irony, and humo~ In his defense of Charles Murray and Richard

Herrnstein's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in Ameri- can Life, for example, Richard Lynn wrote, "There is one thing the underclass is good at, and that is producing children. These children tend to inherit their parents' poor intelligence and adopt their socio-

pathic lifestyle, reproducing the cycle of deprivation from genera-

tion to generation. " 3 Whether we are short on cognitive ability or

4 » vo· MAMA'S 01sfUNKr10NAL!

long on sexual drive{It all adds up to a merciless attack on black :-:-,

mothers specifically, and black families more generall . I wrote this book quite literally in defense of my own mother

and my two sisters, all of whom have made valuable political con-

tributions to the world we inhabit, and all of whom had spent a brief

moment of their lives on welfare. It is a defense of my grandmother,

a brilliant and proud Jamaican woman who had my brilliant and

proud Jamaican mother as an unwed teenager (and both completed

their high school education as adults). I tis a defense of many, many

mothers, daughters, sisters, sons, brothers, and fathers-the name-

less masses whom we rarely see beyond the statistics or news foot-

age.@ is not the sort of defense that turns the discourse on its

head, "flipping the script" in order to paint a noble , unblemished

portrait of the black urban poor. nstead, I see this book as a defense

of black people's humanity and a condemnation of scholars and

policymakers for their inability to see complexity. art of the book

attempts to recognize the importance of pleasure and laughter in

people's lives, to see culture and community as more than re-

sponses to, or products of, oppression. Hence, when we reflect on

the dozens as the book's underlying metaphor, we have to acknowl-

edge the artistry, the fun , the gamesmanship that continues to exist,

if not thrive, in a world marked by survival and struggle.

In particular, Yo' Mama 's Disfunktional! is concerned with the

cultural and ideological warfare that continues to rage over black

people and the "inner city" as social problems. I am especially inter-

ested in how various scholars, activists, policymakers, and displaced

urban working people themselves have made sense of the crisis,

what solutions they have proposed or strategies they have adopted,

and what kinds of social movements have the potential for trans- forming the city and thus the whole nation.

On another level, Yo ' Mama's Disfunktional! is an attempt to

make sense of the world of my childhood, the vast urban jungles we

know euphemistically as the inner city, from the early 1970s to the

INTRODUCTION « 5

end of our millennium. Unlike most writers these days, I am not

claiming absolute authority or authenticity for having lived there.

On the contrary, it is because I did not know what happened to our world, to my neighbors , my elders, my peers, our streets, buildings,

parks, our health, that I chose not to make this book a memoir. In-

deed, if I relied on memory alone I would invariably have more to

say about devouring Good & Plentys or melting crayons on the radi- ator than about economic restructuring, the disappearance of jobs,

the resurgence of racism, and the dismantling of the welfare state.

After all, the Temptations opened the 1970s with their hit song

" Ball of Confusion," an apt description of the state of the world-

particularly the ghetto. Urban rebellions and police-community vi-

olence continued to be a source of tension in several cities during

the 1970s. The issue of school desegregation was hardly settled, par-

ticularly after court-ordered busing was proposed as a solution to in-

tegrate public schools. Throughout the country, white opponents of

school integration frequently turned to violence to defend all-white

schools. And the ghetto schools, like my own P. S. 28 on 155th and

St. Nicholas, had their own problems. Besides the whole question of

whether black and Latino communities would control their schools,

I recall marching around the block with my mom chanting "Over-

crowded! " to protest the fact that fifty students were being squeezed

into classrooms designed for thirty-five. ~ est we forget, Richard M. Nixon was in the White House, at-

tacking welfare mothers and blaming the black poor for their own

poverty. Nixon's domestic advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan,

passed on a confidential memo proposing that "the time may have

come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of 'benign

neglect.' " 4 Much of the white middle class agreed. They believed

that African Americans received too many government handouts.

They were tired of "paying the bill," especially now that r~cism had

allegedly been eliminated with the Civil Rights movemen!. Sounds a lot like the nineties, with one exception: twenty-five

s ,. vo· MAMA'S 01sFUNKnoNAL!

years ago black people still had reason to be optimistic. The Civil

Rights movement had made remarkable gains, and many people be-

lieved that the Black Power movement might achieve for African Americans the ~If-determination they had been seeking for the past three centuries. The black middle class expanded, as corporate

boardrooms became slightly more integrated and black college- educated professionals moved to newly built suburban homes. And

there were some stunning victories, especially in the arena of elec-

toral politics. In 1969, 994 black men and 131 black women held public office; by 1975 the number of black elected officials had

grown to 2,973 men and 530 women. Black politicians won mayoral races in several major cities, including Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, Newark, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Thus, amid

recession, white flight, and rising inner city homicide rates, black

communities marched into the 1970s with at least some hope that black political power would bring a brighter day. We heard it loudly

and proudly in Parliament's "Chocolate City," the 1975 recording penned by band leader and musical genius George Clinton:

There's a lot of chocolate cities around.

We've got Newark; we've got Gary.

Somebody told me we got L. A.

And we're working on Atlanta ....

Hey C. C. [Chocolate City],

they say you're jive and game and can't be changed.

On the positive side,

you're my piece of the rock and I love you C. C.

Can you dig it?

We didn't get our forty acres and a mule,

but we did get you, C. C ....

God Bless C. C. and its Vanilla Suburbs.5

We did get our "piece of the rock," but at what cost? For many urban residents left behind in the nation's "chocolate cities" while the up-

INTRODUCTION « 7

wardly mobile fled to "vanilla suburbs," once the victory parties

were over they had a difficult time obtaining city services, affordable '\ housing, or improved schools. In some cases, local politicians con- , sciously tied their fate to big business and growing downtowr(~

trepreneurs. Some black citizens began to questio~ whe~ having an African American in city hall even made a ·ffet nee. But those black mayors committed to the communities at put them into office had not counted on massive reductions in federal spending on cities and white and black middle-class flight to the suburbs. The decade ofhope was marked by the disappearance of heavy industry, the flight of American corporations to foreign lands and the sub- urbs, and the displacement of millions of workers across the coun- try. Permanent unemployment and underemployment became a way oflife. A few years after the War on Poverty had been declared a victory, the number of black poor grew dramatically. And despite the growing presence of African Americans in political office, affirmative action programs were dismantled, blatant acts of racism began to rise again, and the U.S. economy appeared to be in a per- manent crisis.

Actually, it was the working class that experienced the crisis, not the wealthy. For the past sixteen years, at least, we have wit- nessed a greater concentration of wealth while the living conditions of working people deteriorate-textbook laissez-faire capitalism, to be sure. Certainly the Reagan/Bush revolution ushered in a new era of corporate wealth and callous disregard for the poor. Income in-

equality is staggering: the riches I e n of American families have nearly as much wealth as the bottom~ percent; between 1980

and 1993, salaries for American CEOs increased by 514 percent while workers' wages rose by 68 percent-well behind inflation. In

1992 the average CEO earned 157 times what the average factory worker earned. And as a result of changes in the tax laws, average

workers are paying more to the government while CEOs and their companies are paying less. Sweatshops and the slave labor condi-

-0 .~

s » vo· MAMA'S 01sf UN Kr10NAL1

tions that accompany them are on the rise again. Corporate profits

are reaching record highs, while "downsizing" and capital flight

have left millions unemployed. Between 1979 and 1992, the For- tune 500 companies' total labor force dropped from 16.2 million

world-wide to n.8 million. Yet, in 1993, these companies recorded

profits of $62.6 billion.6

P 'f/ Among other things, Yo' Mama 's Disfanktional! begins to ex- :C,). plain why so many people can believe that barriers to black progress ~ have been removed while conditions for the urban black working

../' ..,, Jlif) class continue to deteriorate. If racism is essentially a thing of the

' b / past, as conservatives and many neoliberals now argue, then the fail-

~ ure of the black poor to lift themselves out of poverty has to be found 'J>l) in their behavior or their culture. In short, the problems facing the ~- vast majority of black folk in today's ghettos lie not with government

.., , policy or corporate capitalism, but with the people themselves-our

1 , criminally minded youth, our deadbeat daddies, and our welfare-

?, dependent mamas. Indeed, it is precisely the prevalence of these J. .l<inds of images that allow writers such as Charles Murray and · li'• Dinesh D'Souza to be taken seriously in spite of deep and obvious

flaws in their scholarship. Stereotypes and sweeping generaliza- jr

tions stand in for serious analysis and complexity. The dozens stand in for fair and impartial intellectual engagement.

I deliberately used the popular phras culture wars i the subti- tle of this book because all of these essays, in one way or another, explore the ongoing battle over representations of the black urban { condition, as well as the importance of the cultural terrain as a site of struggle. Some readers might find the term culture wars inappro- priate since it is generally associated with curriculum debates, "po-

litical correctness" on college campuses, or the politics of arts and humanities funding. However, there is more to the culture wars than whether or not Cleopatra was black, or if multicultural educa-

tion constitutes a new form of academic tyranny. The culture wars •. continue to rage each day in the streets of urban America, in the

INTRODUCTION « 9

realm of public policy, in the union halls, and at the workplace. Thi~

book is premised on the idea that culture and questions of identity

have been at the heart of some of the most intense battles facing Af- rican Americans at the end of the century. And as the global econ- omy grows, the terrain of culture becomes even more crucial as a

terrain of struggle. Not only has globalization continued to trans-

form black culture, but it has also dramatically changed the nature

of work, employment opportunities, class structure, public space,

the cultural marketplace, the criminal justice system, political strat-

egies, even intellectual work. The "ghetto" continues to be viewed as the Achilles' heel in American society, the repository of bad val-

ues and economic failure, or the source of a vibrant culture of resis-

tance. Depending on who is doing the talking/writing, ghetto resi-

dents are either a morally ba krup underclass or a churchgoing,

determined working class living in fear of young riffraff. Whatever l the narrative and whoever the source, these cultural and ideological

constructions of ghetto life have irrevocably shaped public policy,

scholarship, and social movements.

Chapter r sets the stage for the cultll{_al construction of the

ghetto. Focusing primarily on a group of well-meaning liberal social

scientists active during the heyday of ghetto ethnography, I reflect

on how their understanding of culture has severely impoverished

contemporary debates over the plight of urban African Americans.

While some aspects of black expressive cultures might help inner

city residents cope with or even resist ghetto conditions, most of the

literature ignores what these cultural forms mean for the practitio.-

ners. Few scholars acknowledge that what might be at stake here are

aesthetics, style, and visceral pleasures that have little to do with rac-

ism, poverty, and oppression. Nor do they recognize black urban

culture's multicultural roots. Conceiving of black urban culture in

the singular opened the door for the invention of the "underclass."

Once culture is seen as a static, measurable thing-behavior-that

is either part of an old African or slave tradition or a product of dire

10 ,. YO' MAMA'S oisFUNKTIONAL! --,

circumstances, it is not hard to cast black people a pathological

products of broken families, broken economies, an /or broken

communities. The next chapter proposes an alternative to the social science

approaches I critique in chapter r. I, too, examine so-called street culture, but through a framework tha onsidex: t e lobali:z;ation of

~e multinational roots of African American culture, and is- sues related to aesthetics and pleasure. I examine the ways in which

some urban youth have turned certain forms of"play" into a source ofincome or a vocation, and how these kinds of opportunities to es-

cape low-wage labor are gendered. This is also a tale about capital- ism's contradictions, or the same global economic structures re-

sponsible for expan mg ove ty and a shrinking labor market also

created space for young cultural workers to produce their art and -market their talents. The ironies do not end there. As chapter 3 points out, the same

black neoconservatives and conservative nationalists who have dis-

missed this geRera~on of urban youth are also the biggest propo- nents of ,::.Sel£h~ as the latest panacea for America's ghettos. A

growing number of voices call on black people to break the grip of government dependency and take "p sonal responsibility" (not co- incidentally, the phrase used in the 1996 federal welfare reform bill).

Chapter 3 not only argues for the. futility of s~f;Iielp strategies in the age of global capital and multinati6t1aic?rporitions, b~so insists that strong government supports and affuma'tive action are necessary to improve the life chances~rican Amer1ca.n:s and to

challenge a living, vibrant racism. We often forget that s~p- ports have been essential for the creation of suburbia and the suc-

~fbig capital, ~arely are those subsidies described as "hand- _ outs" or "welfare." In defense of the welfare state, I argue that

government supports should not be seen simply as entitlements but as a matter of rights. •

INTRODUCTION « 11

~, " ..Jc, tf.€. S ( r • I 1 , \J' While the Right blames personal behavior, weak morals, and a

pathological culture for the current state ofblack urban life, a grow- ing posse of white self-proclaimed "progressives" blames the Black Liberation movement, along with other movements seeking to emancipate oppressed ethnic groups, women, and sexual minori- ties, for destroying the Left. With the implosion of the Left went our only opportunity to challenge three decades of conservative rule and deleterious social policy. Why did this happen? Because, ac- cording to critics such as Todd Gitlin, Michael Tomasky, Eric Hobs- bawm, and others, the Left has lo!i~ch with its Enlightenment ~ the source of its universalism and radical humanism, and in- stead has been hijacked by "identi movements" that have led us into a blind alley where universal demands are cast aside in favor of narrow battles around race , ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Thus, whereas black neocons find inspiration in the late-nineteenth- century ideas of Booker T. Washington, these white neo-Marxists/ liberals reach way back, to the Enlightenment thinkers Jefferson, Lock~. and Rousseau. In the name of radical universalism, these guys repackage the old socialist idea that class, unlike race, gender, or ethnicity, constitutes the only basis for "true" progressive poli- tics-one that unites rather than divides.

Chapter 4 takes issue with the neo-Enlightenment Left's vision of emanci_pation. Besides questioning the relevance of Enlighten- ment \Uliv salism for the twenty-first century, I argue that so-called identity politics has always profoundly r haped labor movement_9 and has been the glue for class solidarity. The Gitlin/Tomasky school of thought fails~ how class is lived through race and gen- der. Their failure to see social movements focused on race, gender, or sexuality as essential to the emancipation of the whole remains the fundamental stumbling block to building a deep and lasting class-based politics and a new multiracial, grassroots movement in

our crisis-ridden cities. 1 r ~ V ..I' '

Despite the pronouncements of neo-Enlightenment liberals

J )

12 ,. vo· MAMA'S 01s FUNKnoNAL!

or neoconservative Negroes, new multiracial working-class move-

ments are emerging in cities across the country. Chapter 5 surveys a few of the key movements and attempts to assess their impact on

the current and future political landscape. Focusing on several black

and multiracial grassroots movements at work and in urban com-

munities, I suggest that struggles against class-based racism are lay-

ing the basis for new emancipatory social movements that have the

potential to transform the nation. After demonstrating the importance ofidentity and culture in

the key political and economic struggles of our time, 1 end the b_ook

with a parody that explores the limitations of identity politics in some of the scholarship coming out o rican Atnerican stu ies.

Based loosely on Edward Bellamy's 1887 classic Looking Backward, the final essay imagines where Black Studies might be 100 years

from now and creates an imaginary dialogue between the represen-

tatives of various schools of thought. While cautioning against

trends that overly romanticize the African past, ignore political

economy and the state, or engage in unnecessary moralizing, the

parody also imagines what life and scholarship might be like if the

neoconservative (and liberal) social scientists working on the urban

underclass had their way. Whatever one might think about the vari-

ous battles taking place within the realm ofBlack Studies, it should

be clear to all that these battles have profound implications for deal-

ing with race, the urban crisis, and the culture wars that continue to

rage in the streets, the workplace, and the groves of academe.

In writing this book, I not only set out to defend my mom and other

victims of racist and sexist social science, social policy, and social disinvestment, but also to make the case that women and men like

my mom-working or not-can and must save us all. The hope and

future of America lie with the very multicolored working class that for so long has been seen as the problem rather than the solution.

The new "wretched of the earth" are rebuilding the labor move-

INTRODUCTION « 13

ment, reinventing civil rights, and reconfiguring scholarship in ways that radically challenge the status quo. I don't expect many vic-

tories in the near future , but if we believe that our cities are worth

saving and the world is worth remaking, we need to look in different

places with new eyes. This book is but one tiny, incomplete step to- ward clearing the dust so that we might see more clearly.