Holloway: Stay tuned next for UNC-TV's new weekly series Black Issues Forum. I'm Jay Holloway. Join me next as we talk about family dreams and realities.

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Jackson: What will happen if we change our minds and don't show up. If we don't show up for the dope dealer, if we don't show up to buy the guns, if we don't show up in statistics to make the baby but not raise it, suppose we start buying laptops rather than boom boxes, suppose we don't shut up. Suppose we go for a whole week and don't kill each other, just suppose there's a whole month because you got in the habit of not killing. They have to start turning jails into museums.

Holloway: Good evening, I'm Jay Holloway and this is Black Issues Forum. It's a new weekly version of a program that many of you have followed over the past ten years. We'll be here every Friday night at 11:00 on UNC-TV. We'll provide analysis and ask the hard questions, take you to the important events in our state of North Carolina, give you statistics, suggestions on how to get more involved and get information on this topic and others. The program is a part - this is part two of a 1 3-part series. We hope it will help you discuss these serious issues with your family and civic and community groups and most importantly in the classroom.

The program is not only for blacks but to encourage an increased understanding across racial lines. So we'd like to hear from you about your suggestions and comments on helping to make this program the best it can be because it's here for you. Call us at 919-549-7167 or write to us at Black Issues Forum, P.O. 14900, Research Triangle Park, 27709, or send us e-mail at the address on your screen.

In this evening's program we'll explore three important issues focusing on the African American family. Why have many people been burying the black family for more than three decades now? Predicting its decline and ultimate demise. Second why do the facts show about the strengths and the challenges and what can we do about that? And finally what leadership responsibilities do these facts present for African American families? We'll also talk with noted writer, minister, and professor Michael Dyso n. But first researcher and writer Milton Jordan took a look at the whole race relation piece and this is a transition from our part one series to part two. Let's take a look at what Milton had to say.

Jordan: For more than 375 years, lies and absurdities masquerading as race relations in the United States defined struggles and aspirations for the nation's citizens. Historical examples range from discovering land on which people lived to ignoring countless contributions because to acknowledge them would invalidate the notion that race is synonymous with superiority. To see clearly maybe for the first time the utter absurdity of race and race relations consider this: superior beings don't need laws and regulations to govern inferior beings. Just as we don't legislate the behaviors of mosquitoes and flies. Superiority is its own law; you need nothing else. But as silly as the lies have been over the centuries the most befuddling absurdity is the fact that the people lied to and about most often become the strongest defender of those lies. Consider observations about affirmative action from the state membership chairman of the North Carolina NAACP.

Wilkins: I think we're mostly concerned about affirmative action, gains that we have made and seem to be losing through social pressures from some people and I think it puts us in danger of losing many of the gains that we have already attained.

Jordan: Now, as a practical matter, just how do African Americans lose gains already made? Or, for example, how can welfare reform be such a threatening proposition to people who have always thrived against tremendous odds? So when will we engage each other across the gaping divide of lies and absurd claims about race and race relations. Frankly, I think we need a new initiative, a new approach to bridging the gap. The most often those who should initiate the new approach opt instead for tra ditional perspectives. Consider, for an example, Mr. Wilkins again and his response to a question about the frequency of race relations discussions.

Wilkins: We seldom talk about race. It seems to be some kind of a hidden agenda that we just gloss over and act as if everything is all right when it's the most needed discussion - it's needed more than any other discussion that I know of.

Jordan: Then why won't Mr. Wilkins and others engage that discussion if it's so needed? On the streets of Durham where I grew up we called that one scared and the other one's glad of it. Jesse Jackson, in a speech we will explore more fully later in this program, sounded a clear warning against the reactionary rhetoric of disengagement.

Jackson: You beware of vices, of black reactionary non-engaging conservatism wrapped up in Kente cloth made in Indonesia. Black conservatism is not just Clarence Thomas, there are far more less obvious forces: withdrawal, non-engaging rhetoric, pride as a substitute for power. They laid the groundwork in 1896. Today there's a lot of focus on faith and pride, esteem, anointment, atonement, praise music, the bell is not mine, it's the Lord's. These are themes of reaction and non-engagement.

Jordan: Here, as they say in business, is the bottom line. Throughout most of this nation's history race relations have been both the tie that binds and a great divide that has defined the struggles and aspirations of the nation's citizens. As we approach a new millennium, we must each decide which of the two dreams represents the most logical and most effective reality. At Black Issues Forum, we believe the reality of engagement in which we learn to laugh at and most importantly to forgive t he absurdities that characterize our historical view of race relations is the best approach. For Black Issues Forum, I'm Milton Jordan.

Holloway: Now, let's move on to our discussion with someone I believe you need to listen to. An expert on the legacy of Malcolm X, Michael Eric Dyson is a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and prolific author and writer and an ordained Baptist minister. He is also a cultural critic. He is the author of three widely acclaimed books: Reflecting Black, African American Cultural Criticism, and this one, The Making of Malcolm X: The Myth and the Meaning of Malcolm X. And most recently this book Between God and Gangster Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture. And his next book will be out in October. It's entitled Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line.

Dr. Dyson has written for several publications such as The New York Times, Vibe, and Rolling Stone. He has appeared on several national television shows like the Oprah Winfrey Show, MacNeill-Lehrer Report, Charlie Rose, National Public Radio, the Today Show, and Good Morning, American. He currently has five other books in progress. And finally, if that's not enough, here's what the Revered Jesse Jackson says about our guest today: "Michael Eric Dyson is emerging as a young and powerful black intellectual who is giving strong voice and clear perspective to the African American experience in American. Such a flame can light the way for a new generation of resisters and freedom fighters." I've heard it said, Dr. Dyson, that instead of complaining about all the problems if everyone would just take care of the members in their family who weren't right, maybe that would make the world a better place. What do you think?

Dyson: Well, certainly there is some wisdom to that. What we have to ask is that what kind of condition do those families exist in to be able to take care of themselves? You know, it was instructive to me during the recent Republican convention where Mr. Dole, Senator Dole attacked ostensibly Hillary Clinton by saying, "It doesn't take a village, it takes a family. We don't need the larger community, we need these nuclear families." What he didn't realize is that that statement from Hillary Clinton was indeed an African proverb, which talked about the relationship between the communities in which we live and the families that we nurture and sometimes we find family ties beyond blood or biology. This is what's known in African American communities as extended families, where we reach beyond the branches of the immediate networks that nurture us to embrace other people, whether they're our play uncles.

What Carol Stack, the sociologist, calls fictive kin. You know, you got a play uncle, you got a play dad, you got a play momma. Because those people we discover, as Jonathan Bach said, that members of the same family rarely grow up under the same roof. You find who you relate to and love. Now in terms of nuclear families, of course, it's important that if we could resolve some of the more pressing moral problems, teach people how to do right, teach people how to act right, teach them how to love one another. And the black family has been under assault, as you know. I mean there have been various marks along the trajectory of attack on black families and one of the most infamous of course was the '65 report - the Mornerhan report that talked about the coming matriarchy of black families and the pathology of black families. What he meant by matriarch, that's a big word to just talk about how women were supposedly running these families and as a result of them pressing black men out of the picture they were domineering over them, which is rather ridiculous in a narrow, reductive view of the black family.

And the pathology of the black family, the big old word simply talked about how there was some kind of disease of the spirit and morality that was being perpetuated in black culture. It was no longer the social structures, political, economics, and so on. It was the very culture of the family that continued to perpetuate itself. It doesn't make a difference what's going on out there. It's the disease and pathology of the black family. That has been rebutted and rejected as well. But the problem is that we live in a culture that looks at the black family and sees the negative things and not the positive things. Sees the escalating rates of teen pregnancy not knowing however that teen pregnancy is not only escalating among black youth, it's escalating across the board. And so what we have to examine are the ways in which the black family is a real index of the health of the American economy, an index of the health of African American communities.

And Andrew Billingsley, an expert on the black family, has written that there are 16 or 17 different kinds of structures and forums in the black family that people don't even talk about. You got some people with the single female head of the household families, which have done a tremendous job against the odds in providing nurture for our children. There are some who where children live in families that are gay and lesbian who are head of the household. Black folk don't like to talk about that, right? We don't like to talk about what Jocyelynn Elders talked about in terms of talking about sex education and masturbation. Everybody's doing it; nobody wants to talk about it.

So what we have to deal with are the realities that we have a tremendous diversity of forms in the black family and most of them are healthy. Most of them are productive. There are some lethal forms of expression that we have to attend to and talk about. And we have to talk about how our young children are being nurtured by other young people. As Jesse Jackson and others have said, babies having babies. We don't want to celebrate that; we don't want to valorize it. But we certainly want to say that there's nothing inherently diseased or pathological about the black family.

When you think about the larger culture in which we live, the incredible history of white supremacist ideology in America, black people being born into a culture that told them they were nothing, ne'er-do-wells that were rootless and ruthless, when you think about all of the messages represented in pop culture against black families, it's a wonder that people are still sane and still willing to be sanctified and spiritual and go to church and praise God and get up in the morning and feed their children against the odd bullets whirling about their head and buzzing throughout their communities and in their projects. And yet they maintain a semblance of dignity against the odds. And this is one of the insults to the black family about welfare.

Most black folk that we know want to get up, want to do well, want to have the capacity to feed their children. But if we live in a culture, as a study in New York said, that it will take 21 years to get all those people off of welfare jobs that President Clinton has signed. This will transfer money upwardly. The redistribution of wealth, fifty-some-odd billion dollars, which a minuscule part of our American gross national product and our budget.

So it's really a debate about the representation of skin and about the representation of those demonized others. And those demonized others happen to be black, poor people.

Holloway: Well, how do you balance that when you say, "When President Clinton signed this bill he had black faces and when people talk about welfare you get the image of that, but the statistics are different." How do you balance between these negative statistics of the black family and some of the other realities of that the black middle class is growing, there are more in college now, but yet you have the prison rates going up. We've got the whole thing that we're going to talk about too, ab out the whole prison and dealing with the tension. How do you deal with that?

Dyson: Well, you know, the show's like this. You have to bloom where you plant it. You have to begin where you are. And what we have to do is to rebut the viscous representation of our families as, you know, people who are not concerned about work, who are not concerned about doing well. I mean most black communities are culturally conservative even if they happen to be politically progressive. Black people are some of the greatest conservatives in terms of social values and morality in this country.

When Bill Bennett talks about virtue and the necessity for stories to communicate moral ideas, that ain't nothing new to black folk. We been telling each other those stories from gitty-up, as they say. So this is nothing new to us. Black people have talked about imbibing the Protestant ethic in the spirit of capitalism. We've been trying to work the Victorian, puritanical ethic. All that stuff is rife in our culture. So what we have to do then is rebut those vicious stereotypes. We have to argue to argue with those representatives of American pop culture and say, "That's not what black culture is about."

And we have to encourage our people to be more educated, not only black, but white people. I mean one of the real things that came out of the O.J. Simpson situation is the enormous and colossal ignorance that we have about one another in this country. Black people and other minorities who have been forced to live in a white majority culture have to learn the ways, the folkways, the mores, the predispositions, the idiosyncrasies, the ideologies, the intellectual preoccupations of white folk. But they have not, in turn, had to, as a survival need, had to learn about black people, had to learn about what our particular byways and folkways and mores are. They don't have to learn about what we like and what we don't like.

So partly what the O.J. Simpson case showed is that we have an enormous ignorance out there in American society about black folk and about Latino folk and about white folks. So what we have to do is bridge that gulf by having shows like this, by talking about these issues and about willing to be honest about needing to educate ourselves. We just don't know what's going on.

Holloway: Well, you talked about O.J. Simpson and you were interviewed on many national programs about that. And one of the things that many people brought out is that early on in that case, initially the black community was saying, when it first came out, "That's what he deserves for marrying a white woman." And it happened. And then at the point of the allegement of the wife abuse then it kind of changed. The whites were behind O.J. initially and then it changed around.

Dyson: Sure, sure.

Holloway: And then even when the cameras show what happened here in North Carolina at the law schools and the difference between the black and the white reactions and the black families supporting O.J., touch on that.

Dyson: Well, that's a tough nut to crack but you know that O.J. Simpson, of course, was made an honorary white in American culture. Here is a man who for nearly the 50 years of his life, has been granted access to the central institutions of white culture. That is, he was seen to be a safe Negro. He wasn't out there speaking against the issues that were affecting black athletes. He wasn't like Jim Brown, an up-in-your-face buck who was willing to speak truth to power no matter the consequenc es. He wasn't Hank Aaron, who with his mellow, quiet thunder was willing to bring the judgment and criticism of black culture in a very powerful and yet quiet way. O.J. Simpson made a life away from being somehow inoculated against the disease of blackness.

And now at the moment of his need, like Clarence Thomas, he calls upon other black folk, who with knee-jerk loyalty, respond to O.J. Simpson, of course some for some very legitimate reasons and some for some not so legitimate reasons. So O.J. Simpson as a litmus test of our authentic blackness is really troubling. As a metaphor for how black people are attacked, most black men - by the justice system - most black men can't afford high priced lawyers and the dream team to defend them, can't even watch the dream team on TV hardly, 'cause there's too much static.

So the reality, then, is that O.J. Simpson is an exception, an exceptional Negro made by white people. So their anger against O.J. is precisely because they had an enormous investment in him as a safe Negro. Colin Powell has kind of been a nice Negro substitute for many white Americans. Now that's the kind of Negro we want you to be, that's the kind of man we want you to be. Not challenging, not charging, not rebutting, not criticizing, not engaging, speaking truth to power with the King's English to the Queen's taste, but this kind of Negro who was quiet, pacifistic, who was not able to really bring the fire and the rhetoric - rhetorical power against the forces of white supremacy. Now O.J. is going to church and claiming he is a born again black person, that he's been revived in the gospel of blackness and he's going to be the foremost exponent of the evangelical thrust of black, you know, stability and dignity. Please!

What we have to say to Mr. Simpson is that that's utterly ridiculous, that you have to deal with the consequences of your actions. And those of us in the black community have to say to many of our white friends, "The reason you're so angry at O.J. is because he's the kind of Negro you wanted." And now that he's been turncoat and come back into the black community he's really uncomfortable on both sides of the vine.

Holloway: So that's another situation that blacks have to deal with within the community too. And let me ask you, maybe personally, as outspoken as you are,

Dyson: Certainly.

Holloway: And the UNC-Chapel Hill system presents another situation. And you talked about the O.J. Simpson analogy but there are many African-Americans in public and private general institutions that have to balance that. How do you balance that and how do you recommend others to deal with it?

Dyson: Well, it's a difficult balancing act because we live in a culture where we have to be both self critical, we have to look at our own culture. Jesse Jackson was talking about that, Kente cloth made in Indonesia. And you talking about how bad and black you are and you're smuggling in through rhetoric conservative discourse. He was too gentle and kind to name, perhaps, people like Minister Louis Farrakhan who has received an enormous amount of attack and rhetorical hatred because of the f act that he's willing to, without regard for consequences, speak his truth. On the other hand, we have to be severely critical of Minister Farrakhan and say that some of the most deeply cherished values that he has are deep conservative ones that really rebut the strong tradition of liberation within black communities.

So I think that what we have to do then is to balance both self criticism, that is, willing to speak about the negative inferences and the negative realities of black culture among and to ourselves as willing, also, to speak against white racism in our larger society. And as a UNC professor, in classes taught - and most of my classes are populated by white students - it is my responsibility as a professor both to reach - we've long ago demythologized the notion of objectivity, but we strive to be balanced and equitable and fair. So my class is not about being black one-on-one. That ain't the thing. We can't be black by osmosis. And black folk who come to my class have to study as well as white folk, and I teach a range of subjects.

So my responsibility is to be a paid pest for both black and white students, to try and articulate things that they may be disturbed by but also to force them to come to grips with issues of race in America. And we know we're living in a very conservative state. Jesse Helms, the fight against Harvey Gantt. We're living in a very conservative state that doesn't want to see articulate, intelligent black people speak truth to power in ways that are disturbing. But it is part of my job and the job of other African Americans and other enlightened white folk to do the same.

Holloway: You mentioned in your book, and I saw in the preface here, you open up in the preface about an analogy in your classroom and it deals with what we just talked about, about what we have to struggle with within our race. And one of your African American male students challenged you. Can you deal with that? Because we have to deal with that whole problem within our race and within our families with this conflict.

Dyson: Sure. Well, part of it is, to make a long story short, I'm teaching a class at Brown University on Malcolm X. The black male students thought that they had a better insight into Malcolm and a more legitimate one, other than my white students, other than my mixed race students, other than my women students. And my point is, that is not good enough. Blackness is not a passport for legitimacy. Neither is it a kind of automatic imprimatur that you're good and that you know something abou t black. One of the worst effects of racism is to make black people believe that they don't have to study to know their culture, that because you're born black, you know black.

There's no relationship between what we, in high-falutin' terms, call epistemology, that is knowledge about black culture, and ontology, being. I know those are $20 words, but this is UNC public TV, we know we can handle it. So there's no relationship between what you know and what you are. So what I do is force people to think and read clearly about this. These black men thought because they were poor like Malcolm were, although many of them weren't - they were faking, they were upper middle class people from Westchester who were trying to act like they were homeboys.

And one of the real other consequences of racism is that it forces black people to think that we have to do certain things to be real, to be authentic: we've got to be poor, we've got to sharp, we've got to be nationalistic, we've got to be this, that and the other in order to be legitimate black people. And one of the things I have to do is constantly remind my students that blackness is broad, it's deep, it's an ocean. Howard Thurman said, "You can go to the Atlantic ocean, you can dip your glass in the Atlantic ocean, it may be full of the Atlantic ocean, but it ain't all of the Atlantic ocean."

Blackness is the same way. You may be as black as black can be, but there's no such thing as a pure Nubian African Kimet inspired black person. All of us have an angle upon what it means to be black. You can be rich, you can be poor, you can be wealthy, you can be uneducated, highly educated, all of that and a lot more is what it means to be black.

Holloway: You know, there are so many things we could deal with. We've got less than two minutes. And I was going to deal with the whole skin tone within the African American race. I don't know if we have time. But, the bottom line that I want to move back to - I want to move back to the whole bottom line of wealth and economics within the family. And one of the things that I have noticed is that when there's a death in the family, especially in the black culture, when you don't have a lot to give in wills and so forth, it creates a lot of tension and fighting and you end up with nothing and so you lose. Can you comment on that?

Dyson: Well, it's a difficult thing. I mean, partly what you're talking about is an index of the poverty of black people, or even if you're making a decent salary, you don't have wealth because wealth is about accumulated money over space and time, about capital - about money making money. And unfortunately, most black people don't have that to pass on.

But what we do have to pass on - this is not a kind of palliative in the face of our own misery, and a kind of substitute for really trying to figure out ways in which we need to pass money on to one another, because we need to do that. We need to pass on wealth. And if we don't have that to pass on, what we can pass on are good instincts about this culture - about the proper ethics and the proper morality, to pass on the willingness to work hard to make sure that the next generation gets further ah ead than the previous generation.

And if we can pass that on to our children, if we can give them a will indeed to work hard, think sharply, criticize broadly and also work in a way that will benefit the future, then we've got something, a legacy and a final word in deed that will be more powerful than money can ever claim to.

Holloway: Well said. Thank you, Dr. Dyson. We really appreciate that. We hope to have you back again soon.

Dyson: Look forward to it.

Holloway: Dr. Michael Dyson, thank you so very much. We encourage you to continue to discuss these important issues facing the African American family. Do a self examination. Are you promoting the decline of the family through negative discussions? Are you now better informed about the facts relating to the strengths and challenges of the African American family? And finally, what leadership responsibility do you have, especially after viewing this program, to help make things better?

Thanks for watching another episode of Black Issues Forum and join us again next Friday evening at 11:00. We'll discuss the relationships with each other within our community. I'm Jay Holloway. Have a blest and peaceful evening. Good night.