the quest was seriously taken and seriously pursued. Thus I entered the debate not as an artist only nor as an academic only, but as both. I believed that dual position could help expand and deepen the arguments about the validity, necessity, and direction of African American scholarship. Already there was significant work recontextualizing such studies, repositioning their impact in humanistic disciplines. But my interest turned from examining what black intellectuals and artists were up to, to something else. I was unhappy with the possibility of resegregation in African American studies—of driving the scholarship into protected turf where its uniqueness, its exceptionalism, its radical or even traditional characteristics could be interrogated, but where its powerful singularity could render it sui generis: a thing apart, in a class by itself. My thoughts were that African American studies could, but need not, confine itself to itself because the project was like the so-called race problem itself. It was not a neighborhood thriving or struggling at the edge of town, at the edge of campuses, at the outer rim of intellectual thought, nor was it an exotic, anthropologically interesting minority pulsing at the extremities of the body politic. It was and is at the heart of the heart of the nation. No policy decision could be understood without the black topic at its center, even or especially when unmentioned. Not housing, not education, the military, economy, voting, citizenship, prisons, loan practices, health care—name it, the real subject was what to do with black people, which became a substitute term for poor people. Very few disciplines escape the impact of racial constructs. Law, science, theology, medicine, medical ethics, psychiatry, anthropology, history were all implicated. Furthermore, was there any public discourse in which a reference to black people did not exist? As I wrote in Playing in the Dark, “It exists in every one of this nation’s mightiest struggles.” From the framing of the Constitution, to the Electoral College, “the battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, the illiterate…is there in the construction of a free and public school system; the balancing of representation in legislative bodies; jurisprudence and legal definitions of justice; it is there in…the memoranda of banking houses; the concept of manifest destiny and the driving narrative of the Americanization of every immigrant who came ashore.” I was convinced there was no race card—there was simply a deck, each one operating on a terrain much wider than previously thought, echoing its influence in the national culture. The consequences of this inquiry was a series of twelve lectures, three of which became the book Playing in the Dark. In it I tried to articulate the breadth of the project and its complexity. African American studies could interrogate a large area of the cultural production, West and East, and in the process enliven and expand a wide variety of disciplines. That is, after all, the goal of education: access to more knowledge. There may come a time when we—students, faculty, administrators, artists, and parents—will have to fight hard for education, fight hard for uncorrupted science (not the ideological or racist science); for sound social history, apolitical anthropology (not strategies of control); for the integrity of art (not its celebrity).
There may indeed come a time when universities may have to fight for the privilege of intellectual freedom.
Gertrude Stein and the Difference She Makes
I HAVE READ somewhere that there are two responses to chaos: naming and violence. The naming is accomplished effortlessly when there is a so-called unnamed, or stripped-of-names population or geography available for the process. Otherwise one has to be content with forcible renaming. Violence is understood as an inevitable response to chaos—the untamed, the wild, the savage—as well as a beneficial one. When one conquers a land the execution of the conquest, indeed its point, is to control it by reshaping, moving, cutting it down or through. And that is understood to be the obligation of industrial and/or cultural progress. This latter encounter with chaos, unfortunately, is not limited to land, borders, natural resources. In order to effect the industrial progress it is also necessary to do violence to the people who inhabit the land—for they will resist and render themselves anarchic, part of the chaos, and in certain cases the control has included introducing new and destructive forms of hierarchy, when successful, and attempts at genocide when not.
There is a third response to chaos, which I have not read about, which is stillness. Stillness is what lies in awe, in meditation; stillness