He Talk White:: The Scholarly and Artistic Works of a Writer

Contents

Section I: White Man’s Fame, Black Man’s Shame: The American Textual Canon’s Negatve Depiction Of African Americans Within Mass Media

The Establishment Of Racist Discourse In The American Textual Canon

Early 20Th Century African American Anti-Canonical Rhetoric Of Racist Discourse In American Textual Canon

Contemporary African American Textual Response To Mass Media

Section II: Rainbows And Lilacs (Rainbowsandlilacs.blogspot.com)

INTRODUCTION

I Am Hip Hop: Rap Music’s Peculiar Impact On Society

On Race

Don’t Call Me ‘Nigga,’ Honkey: Should Certain Whites Deserve A Pass On Racial Epithets?

Klansmen Need Love Too

That Damn Django!

The Civil Rights Movement: The Sequel Or ‘To Be Continued’

The Presidential Trilogy

The Passion Of The (Negroes’) Christ: Why America Will Never Elect Another Black President

Obama Is Not Your Nigga

Them Niggas Got Shot: The Disturbing Idolatry Of

King And Obama

Defying/Defining Gender

Bitches Ain’t Shit But Hoes And Tricks: Fear Of The Black Female Voice In Hip Hop And How Dream Hampton May Have Single-Handedly Emasculated The Black Rapper

Black Hair And The Single Mom: America’s Fascination

With Gabby Douglas

Happy Father’s Day: Have Rappers Replaced The Black Dad?

Sex And Sexuality

Don’t Ask And Don’t Tell God:

The Quandary Of Homosexuality

In America

Is Gay The New Black?

’Til Sex Do Us Part

Religion

American Ministers: Preachers

Or Pimps?

Blacks And The Black Church; Monkey See, Monkey Do

State Sanctioned Violence

Hey, Nigger. You Look Like A Nigger.

The Lamb That Was Slain: The Killing Of Trayvon Martin

A Broken Rose Giving Bloom Through The Cracks In The Concrete

Georgey Had A Gun: One Woman’s Thoughts On Race

And Racialized Thinking

Section III: The Curious Case Of The Hog Hair

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everyone whose interest or intrigue led them to read the following text. I am eternally grateful to the scholars and artists who have contributed to this anthology in any facet, be it a critique, a brief reading, an illustration, editing, or rhetorical contribution. It has been a dream of mine to write and have my compositions, be they scholarly or literary, disseminated to the masses. I write for me first and for an audience whose third eye is not blind. Though this is my second work, I feel like it is the first time all over again. The following people have a major stake in this work coming to life: Giovanni Dortch, Kenneth Farmer, Mustafa A. Shakur, Rev. Earle J. Fisher, Emahunn Raheem Campbell, Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti-Myers, the Joyner family, and the omnipotent and omniscient Creator. Read, digest, and enjoy, people. Peace to the Righteous. Much love to The Pastor & The Professor and, our one man production/wrecking crew-in-and-of-himself, John Hamilton, my beloved LeMoyne-Owen College (‘I love my HBCU’). My mother and father who, for 46 years (49 if you count their courting), have crafted their lives and love to be models for myself and my sisters and always instilled in us that our duty as people was to be good citizens. Germelle, Kevan, Leonard, Gerald, Travis, Jacquice, Keno, Sean, Fremar, Rocheryl, Toya—Madea’s grandchildren. My brother for life, Miller. And to Mrs. Thompson, my fourth grade teacher that made us write a story, fiction, I might add, at the end of every week. Lastly, my two C’s—Like Tupac Amaru Shakur stated, I ride for you. I roll for you. It’s all for you. Peace to the Righteous.

Foreword

When Gee Joyner asked me to write the foreward for his new book, I was both pleased and concerned. My hesitation stemmed from the fact that I am not a literary theorist. Indeed, my background is not in English at all, but in History. And while I specialize in African American Studies, my focus is on the history of black women, particularly in the Old South. Given the differences in our work, both chronologically as well as in terms of disciplinary expertise, I wondered if someone else might not be better positioned to introduce this collection of Joyner’s writings.

After having read the final draft of the manuscript, however, most of my concerns were alleviated. He Talk White: The Scholarly and Artistic Works of a Writer is a volume of work that contains a wide variety of materials. Its contents span the range of writing from that which could be considered solely academic, to the more purely creative, to that which might be dubbed political and social commentary. Of course, anyone who writes for a living understands full well that none of the aforementioned vehicles of prose is ever truly divorced from any of the others.

Given the breadth of the writings collected in this volume, it is fair to say that He Talk White will appeal to a broad cross-section of readers. Section One, White Man’s Fame, Black Man’s Shame: The American Textual Canon’s Negative Depiction of African Americans within Mass Media, will certainly be of interest to literary scholars as well as those in media studies. From Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson and Nella Larsen’s Passing on the one hand, to television shows and movies such as Good Times, The Cosby Show, and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled on the other, Joyner weaves together materials ranging from nineteenth-century literature to twenty-first century film in order to argue that, such culturally-produced texts sculpt an ideology that attempts to establish and maintain an ethnic hierarchy through the assignment of certain human characteristics or attributes to specific races, colors, and or ethnicities. The negative and socially subordinate portrayal of African Americans in the American textual canon has successfully established and maintained society’s perception of the subordinate African American. He concludes that this same canon, simultaneously established the superior qualities of ‘whiteness.’ In short, white superiority was established by juxtaposing literary ‘whiteness’ with literary ‘blackness.’

Section Two, a series of political and social commentaries that have appeared in Joyner’s blog, Rainbows and Lilacs(rainbowsandlilacs.blogspot.com), will be of interest to academics as well as the general public. Although a handful of the pieces are the offerings of guest contributors, including one by yours truly, the majority are written by Joyner and take us on a multi-faceted journey into his thoughts on a variety of current issues. Grouped thematically and written to have mass appeal, the pieces touch on topics as diverse as the impact of Hip Hop on modern culture, the use of the N word in contemporary society, the controversy over the film Django, Unchained, Gabby Douglas and the debate over good and bad hair, gender tensions in the black community, homosexuality, the black church, and a series of articles on state sanctioned violence in the wake of the murder of Trayvon Martin. Ranging from posts on sex to politics and race to Rap, not only is this section sure to ignite interest, it will also generate intense, perhaps even heated discussion. Written in Joyner’s direct, some might say confrontational style, the blog posts leave no stone unturned and will force readers of all stripes to rationally defend why they believe(d) that President Obama was/is the Messiah, as well as explain why our preachers are not Pimps.

The third and final section is an offering of fiction that showcases Joyner’s short story, The Curious Case of the Hog Hair. Told from the perspective of a black teenaged girl, whose first name we never discover, the piece highlights a number of issues that pepper earlier sections of the book, from skin color and passing, to sex, self-hatred, and black gender dynamics. At the heart of the story, however, is the matter of hair. As we discover in the opening lines of the story, the protagonist and her sister quite literally lost their parents because of their bad or nappy hair. As the main character takes us through the last day of her mother’s life, there is no reader who will not understand the girl’s desire to be liked by the cutest boy in school, no reader who will remain unaffected by the shocking and violent loss of both her parents, and few readers who will not understand, even if they may not agree with, her lifelong decision to process her hair. Coming on the heels of Joyner’s blog post on Gabby Douglas, as well as his analysis of Clare in Nella Larsen’s novel, Passing, readers will be forced to think long and hard about the racial hierarchy established by the literary canon, and our continued participation in upholding it.

In this collection, Joyner has presented us with an opportunity to not only understand how he, as a black man, sees America, but how America sees him, really, and how it sees black people. He presents us here with much food for thought. Readers may not all, or always, agree with him. They may not see James from Good Times as a bit of a joke, emasculated by his own wife. They may be outraged by Joyner’s portrayal of ministers as hustlers and pimps who are more interested in acquiring cash and Cadillacs than in saving souls. They may be highly discomforted by how he wields his pen to illuminate not only racism amongst whites, but classism, homophobia, and misogyny amongst blacks. One thing is for certain, however, and that is that regardless of how Joyner’s work makes you feel, it will certainly make you think.

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Ph. D.

Associate Professor of History

Indiana University

Bloomington, Indiana

August 2013

SECTION I: WHITE MAN’S FAME, BLACK MAN’S SHAME: THE AMERICAN TEXTUAL CANON’S NEGATVE DEPICTION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS WITHIN MASS MEDIA

The Establishment of Racist Discourse in the American Textual Canon

Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson 1894), a textual example of how the American literary canon uses the presence of blackness to define whiteness, rhetorically personifies the necessity for contrast within the white man’s understanding and defining of himself. The white American author needs the black character, whether present or absent from a given text, in order to juxtapose the white man’s morality and overall characteristics against that of the socially inferior African American, allowing the white Man to be perceived as the superior of the two races. The notion of a socially inferior race was an index created by white, male America as a tool of self-preservation. In an attempt to take advantage of a fledgling nation, white males used written rhetoric as well as orality to distinctly define those of African descent as naturally inferior. The idea that blacks were intellectually lagging, licentious, indolent, and savage encompassed all that lacked civility and served as a discourse that along with slavery, would aid in substantiating the white man’s as well as the Negro’s position in America’s social hierarchy.

Susan Gillman, author of Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America, explores the meaning of racial identity in Pudd’nhead Wilson and the regulatory codes involved in classifying an individual within a specific race.

Twain’s novel implicitly reminds the reader that racial codes regulating miscegenation and classifying its mixed offspring did not appear after Emancipation but rather were reenacted or reaffirmed, with even more rigorous definitions of whiteness, during the nineties (l890s), when anti-black repression took multiple forms, legal and extralegal (Gillman 55).

The author is suggesting that the discourse of race became more prevalent after the abolition of slavery, which previously was an institution that encapsulated black people as the other under the umbrella of enslavement. This clearly defines the color lines that became skewed once the mulattoes were just as free as their identical white counterparts, or rather, their social twins.

The focal point of Twain’s text is the fraudulent act, the benefits, and the consequences of impersonation. Though Tom initially knew nothing of his true racial identity that served as his first act of identity fraud, the presumed son of white privilege often constructs identity in order to remove himself from unfavorable circumstances such as debt and the crime of murder. Gillman addresses the character of Tom Driscoll as both conscious manipulator and victim of false identities (71) because of