The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Read Online Free PDF Page A

Knowledge is never just knowledge, it can never simply be pursued without regard to context, and its results are just as likely to upset as to unify us. All of which is to say that the black intellectual, without even trying, is a threat to a society that subordinates his people. There is little choice as to whether the black intellectual is involved in the struggle of black folk; to be alive and black makes one a candidate for social animus, and thus, a player in the theater of race.
    I learned this lesson in Mrs. James’s classroom and in the factories where I worked before eventually going to college when I was twenty-one. My longest tenure came in the wheel brake and drum factory where my father labored for more than thirty years before being laid off and forced into maintenance work and odd jobs, from painting houses to cutting grass and laying sod, all of which his five sons joined him in. My father worked long, long hours. He got as much overtime as he could to feed seven mouths and to tamp down the criminal allure of the ghetto streets for his boys. Detroit was then known as the “murder capital of the world,” and the grisly homicide rate rode largely on the decimation of black flesh in drug deals and acts motivated by severe privation. Both of these forces loomed in the lives of our neighbors, and eventually, struck our own house when, after our father’s death, my younger brother got sent to prison for second-degree murder, accused of killing a fellow drug dealer. My father andmother waged soul-depleting war against the violence that surrounded us, holding out the prospect of hard work as the antidote to the devil’s temptations.
    Taking note of, but not completely understanding, and hence, not unqualifiedly supporting my intellectual bent, my father nevertheless brought home encouragement in the form of factory laborers he discovered were also attending college or liked books like me. They were usually young, black (sometimes African) male workers who saw the factory as a means to a larger end: enjoying upward mobility, bettering the lot of their family, financing college, and, in some cases, bringing the worker’s revolution closer to fulfillment. These men were usually active in the same United Auto Workers (UAW) union where my father was a member. This was in the late sixties and early seventies, when the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) and Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) were agitating for social change in the Detroit automobile factories that were the bloodline for the big three car companies: General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford. I picked up some of their fervor during impromptu political lessons taught by my father’s co-workers on the lunch breaks they often spent at our house during the afternoon shift. At other times, I caught dramatic glimpses of the social agenda of black laborers when my father and his besieged co-workers walked the picket line outside their company to demand higher wages and better benefits.
    Later, when I went to work in the factory as a teen father fending off welfare, and with the hope of saving money for college, I got provocative instruction from workers who drilled the point in my head: learning is for liberation, and knowledge must be turned to social benefit if we are to justify the faith placed in us by our forbears. In between unloading brake drums, and welding and balancing them, I got a strong dose of Marxism, but a homegrown version attuned to the gritty particularities of black working life. That didn’t mean there wasn’t high theory; there was theory aplenty, though it was tailored to our needs and driven by our aspirations as a degraded and oppressed people—but a people who resolved to rise up from their suffering through self-determining struggle. I was awed by these grassroots intellectuals who stood their ground and defended their lives with their brains and words. There wasn’t even a hint of anti-intellectualism among them. They