The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Read Online Free PDF Page B

ripped through the academy’s upper ranks. (That’s largely not the case for the thousands upon thousands of part-time teachers whose plight is barely distinguishable from any group of maligned workers, and the battalion of non-unionized graduate students who are depended on to teach vast numbers of American undergraduates.)
    It was Jesse Jackson who once remarked to me, “If you say something I can’t understand, that’s a failure of your education, not mine,” and he was right. Nosloppy thinker or lazy rhetorician himself, Jackson knows the intellectual effort it takes to understand an idea so well that one can explain it to the learned and the layman alike. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time and place for every academic language under the sun—and for the jargons, obscurantisms, esoterica, dialects, glosses, and inside meanings that attend their path. But there is also the need to write and speak clearly about important matters for the masses of folk who will never make it to class.
    There is in the academy today something akin to hip-hop’s vexing quest for the rapper who can “keep it real,” that is, the rapper who best matches his lyrics with a life of crime or ghetto glory, depending on which version of reality wins the day. Many academics are caught up in trying to prove who’s more authentic, who’s more academically hard core, who’s the realest smart person around. That usually ends up being the scholar who is most “rigorous,” and in academic circles that’s often the thinker who is least accessible or who eschews “public” scholarship. But these debates break down on their own logic: academics and scholars who are rigorous don’t have to do work that panders to the mainstream in order to be effective (after all, devoted students can carry their former professors, or their work, with them to the State Department or to Newsweek ). Work that can be widely understood or that is relevant to current affairs shouldn’t be automatically suspect or seen as second rate. As Jackson understood, our failure to make our work accessible may be as much the fault of intellectuals as it is the problem of a dumbed-down society.
    These are the beliefs that guide my vision of the intellectual—the American intellectual, the black intellectual, the engaged intellectual, the public intellectual (and in a way, aren’t all of us intellecuals in the academy public intellectuals, since universities are among the biggest public spheres in the country?). Relieving suffering, reinforcing struggle, and rendering service are not bad ways to live the life of the mind.

PART ONE
DYSONOGRAPHY
    Although I have yet to write a memoir, I have at times written about my life as it relates to my work. I do this, in part, because I believe that intellectuals and academics who have been poor or working class must testify to our experiences and struggles, and perhaps inspire others to emulate, even exceed, our efforts. I also find that the personal voice, when its tones rise above grating narcissism, can emphasize truths that sound needlessly abstract in the academic’s mouth. When enough of these stories get out, perhaps folk who, on first blush, might seem unlikely to succeed in higher education will get a fair chance.

One
NOT FROM SOME ZEUS’S HEAD: MY INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT
    Of all the books I have written, Open Mike, a series of interviews conducted with me over the past decade, best captures the oral traditions that have nurtured me since birth. This interview sketches my intellectual evolution, personal odyssey, and vocational development. It charts my path from ghetto youth, teen welfare father, factory laborer, and street hustler to ordained Baptist pastor, Princeton graduate student, and Ivy League professor. I hoped in the interview to underscore not only the racial character of higher education, but to draw attention to the class dimensions that are often obscured, even in some black academic circles. This