Farrakhan's Middle-Class Revival Comes to Howard

...Indeed the discourse not only overlooks but outright represses the traditional dependence upon the government for employment, and above all employment in social work, educational, and service professions that have the lower class as clients...

...More to the point is his background as an administrator in a congressman's office and his participation in local D.C...

...In the context of the march he became a potent, nearly dreamlike symbol of agency...

...These images not only speak to the great past accomplishments of Howard but to the damaged confidence and thwarted hopefulness of a class that, like all educatedAmerican bourgeoisies, dreams of dignified marriages and cultivated children for its offspring...

...By far the most moving aspect of these pictures may be the response they have attracted in a museum guest book: page after page of student signatories comment on the beauty, elegance, historical significance, and finally the profound emotional impact of these pictures...

...But the anxious emotional fervor with which the students have enshrined the march points less to valid pride in social, cultural, or legal accomplishments than to a desperate self-healing grasp for an eccentric version of an American dream that each day becomes more ephemeral for the nation's white bourgeoisie, not to mention the black middle class...

...The exhibit includes photographs of such great academics as Benjamin Mays, Ralph Bunche, Howard Thurman, Charles Drew, E. Franklin Frazier, Alain Locke, Rayford Logan, and Charles Houston...

...In a Georgia Avenue Chinese restaurant, the immigrant clerk delivers one's meal with a rude shove that alerts the middle-class Howard student not only to the latest twist of D.C...

...Oversized blue jeans, sometimes revealing white underwear, abound among the men as does the obscene macho discourse of the rappers who dominate not only MTV but on occasion the Sunday New York Times Magazine...

...Lbooks such as William J. Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race, one finds a picture of a rapidly advancing black bourgeoisie...

...And our wonder at these accomplishments is in some sense our wonder at the possibility of newness itself...

...This exhibit is, of course, one of the most imposing visions of black American bourgeois life and its formidable intellectual, legal, political, and cultural accomplishments...

...As even a student might have said, the march was by then history...

...One sees in these black bourgeois voluntary efforts not only social benevolence but an effort to assert the autonomy and perhaps the hegemony of class values vital to an effective African-American bourgeoisie that can mobilize the race as a whole...

...Located in the Howard Museum on the first floor of the Founder's Library, the photo display "Howard in Retrospect" features stunning displays of faculty, visitors, and students in the growing black institutional world of earlytwentiethcentury Howard...

...Students have been shot on campus...

...This desire finds an important echo in the voluntary social efforts—big brother societies, tutoring, and lower-class mentoring—which have sprung up in the wake of the revival...

...At its most moving, such assertions of self and dignity constitute a profound resource of hope...

...To the point also is his mock military uniform, which seems to allude as much to a Beatles' album cover as to any political symbolism...

...They and their black bourgeois customers still tread precariously an increasingly straitened American way...

...A case in point is the feature article in the Hilltop on Malik Zulu Shabazz, a leader in the nowbanned Unity party that sponsored the appearance of Khalid Muhammed...

...A number of photographs recount the Howard presence of Roland Hayes, Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Marian Anderson, Kwame Nkrumah, W.E.B...

...I have been critical of these students, but let me say they are no worse than their cultural betters, such as novelist and Howard graduate Toni Morrison...

...Like other black American adolescents, Howard students have appropriated the styles and demeanor of the black lumpen...

...A purely symbolic and cathartic politics of middleclass benevolence is unable to save the black lumpen...

...The school, its teachers, certain students, and their institutional life therefore inevitably blend into a collective experience in the minds of AfricanAmerican writers and thinkers...

...The Howard students' strikingly American mixture of bourgeois striving and evangelical culture may be only the latest example of this country's culturally ingrained anti-intellectualism and self-serving moral blindness...

...ward politics...

...Students refer to the university— sometimes ironically, sometimes jokingly, often quite seriously—as the Mecca...

...More intangibly, and more profoundly, this sense of centrality appears in the ways that the students signal their middleclass aspirations: the slightly elevated rhetoric, for example, with which they address a speaker at a formal engagement, or their haughtiness with strangers...

...The school, faculty, and students evoke this identity in a number of ways: in the circulation room of Founder's Library one still sees vibrant color posters celebrating the work of distinguished emeritus classicist Frank Snowden and the art of emerita painter Lois Mailou Jones...

...Howard's sense of social centrality is the embodiment of African-American middle-class striving...

...This older generation knew all too well the myriad ironies of what they sardonically termed the "black experience...

...It has become impossible to ignore the realities of lower-class pathology that have insinuated themselves into the institutional embodiment of middle-class black striving...

...Among the professoriate of color, one talks of Howard and its faculty as easily in Dakar, Chapel Hill, or Ann Arbor as one does at the Library of Congress...

...Du Bois, and Leopold Senghor...

...Newspaper accounts of black nationalist speakers coexist casually with features about a victorious debate team and student government elections...

...Anyone who spends any substantial time at Howard eventually acquires the alertness of a ghetto dweller...

...The fervent response of Howard students shows how little different their politics is from that of the white middle-class Protestant mainstream...

...The pathologies of a lower-class environment are accompanied by the now profound dysfunctions of an administration that was never efficient by any standard...

...In many ways the Howard student body shows important aspects of the striving black middle-class: its mobility thwarted by structural economic change, its ethos debased by the dislocations of lower-class black pathologies, and its own integrity under constant scrutiny by a critical white press—which may often seem adversarial...

...The music of Roland Hayes, the legal accomplishments of Charles Houston are images not only of black American hope but of rebirth in the trauma of New World dislocation...

...The aura of Georgia Avenue above Freedman's Hospital is now far closer to that of the southeast urban inferno of far Benning Road than it is to the nearby gentrified Adams Morgan community with its genteel Afrocentric gift shops, Ethiopian restaurants, used book stores, and Senegalese cafés...

...The interim president, Joyce Ladner, began a radical downsizing of the university...

...q 84 • DISSENT...

...And their response to my inquiries was stunning...

...Despite their ethos of "self reliance" and "agency," they are forced to confront Howard's financial dependence upon the federal government and its reliance for its reputation upon a highly critical white media...

...I do not think that the black male derelicts who warm themselves over subway grates have anything more for which to atone in a country where a tenth of the nation's population appropriates 40 percent of its wealth...

...Generations of black intellectuals have acquired a distinctive self-consciousness here: a sense of marginality not only vis a vis the masses but also in relation to the socially striving bourgeoisie, toward an often materialistic, sometimes cynical, student body, and toward a logistically strapped administration with few resources and (one grants the honorable exception of Mordecai Johnson and a few others) little understanding of the demands of serious academic life...

...Howard faculty are a skeptical sort...

...In these venues, one finds not only sleek leather-clad Howard students but elderly hospital patients still in slippers, the urinous mentally ill, angry young derelict men, bearded indigents who spend their days panhandling the wherewithal for a hamburger and a coke or two pieces of dark meat and a biscuit...

...This is a world in which questions of institutional legitimacy, social pathology, and indeed cultural disintegration seem to be decisively answered...

...The newer generation of Howard professors often disagreed about the ultimate value of the march but inevitably returned to their predecessors' paradoxical discourse of symbolism: this time images of self-affirmation and dignity...

...All that has been replaced by the new fast food stores—McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Taco Bell...

...Black (and many white) academics who enter the world of Howard from elite white graduate schools encounter the myths and realities of the institution's central place...

...He is a representative of Howard by virtue of his eagerly displayed adolescent black middle-class striver's ethic...

...In this time of budget cuts, the school has experienced severe reductions in employment...

...In the course of his initial exchanges with students, even the freshman composition teacher finds that their SPRING • 1996 • 79 Race and Politics contentiousness is a form of pride: which is to say that they have high expectations of Howard, make real demands upon their teachers, and are therefore frequently disappointed by a school whose resources do not allow it to honor the expectations created by its idealized history...

...I watched such a line snake its way around the first floor of the Mordecai Johnson administration building for a day or so...

...The black middle class itself depends disproportionately for employment upon the federal government...

...It is to be expected that an insecure striving middle class might experience severe internal psychological conflicts in its casual adoption of ghetto styles...

...And Howard students are initiated early on into the full psychological, social, and economic cost of that dependence...

...Sula provides similar therapeutic celebrations of black female gratification in the face of black male oppression...

...Those who seek cultural exceptionalism or political self-consciousness in black bourgeois politics will have to look somewhere else...

...And the notion of a transformed will, morally purged and rationally disciplined through atonement, certainly represents a powerful therapeutic response to an encroaching sense of lower-class pathology (pathologies romanticized, commodified, and consumed through rap, hip-hop dress, and a socially adversarial lower-class black male demeanor...

...Shabazz shares the ethos of Howard not in any will to revolt but in a quite typical political ambition, in an experimentation with cultural symbols available through consumer consumption, in the sprinkling of obscenity endemic to black youth culture...

...The march's celebration of voluntary male discipline and virtue seemed to promise an idealized social order of civil relationships between men and women, reclaiming the nexus of gender relations and family stability that lay at the heart of the old middleclass order...

...The African-American experience in the New World has been the most profound dramatization of American creativity...

...In this consumer culture it was perhaps inevitable that Madhabuti and Karenga would find their truest vocation as shrewd purveyors of nationalist symbols to a nervous African-American bourgeoisie...

...And that desire on the part of black middle-class students is all the more understandable given their sense of the fragility of the present-day black middle-class world of Howard...

...This book—to be observed and placed on the coffee table rather than read—represents the heart of the march's middle-class ethos...

...Young people in the march, as at the Howard exhibit, defined themselves in images of community, decency, and ethnic solidarity that repressed the deepest realities of the underclass world by which they were surrounded...

...Shabazz's demeanor, offensive as it may be, reflects the now-integrated world of late-twentieth-century American capitalism, speaking to its substantial audience of black teenage consumers...

...And it is now as clear as it was before the march that this underclass will fall through the floor of civilized American life...

...This," he said a little sadly, "used to be an elite institution...

...This sense of social, racial, and class centrality takes a number of occasionally contradictory forms...

...Howard University, like Yale or Harvard, sees itself as a central place: a national black university...

...The student response to the Howard retrospective points to a similar retreat from the threatening realities of present-day Howard to a cathartically fulfilling past...

...An illuminating unpublished survey by two Howard political scientists, Michael Frazier and Joseph McCormick, found that more than 71 percent of the participants claimed to be from households with total incomes between $39,000 and $100,000 per year...

...For the first time, they felt proud of black men...

...The campus on Georgia Avenue, which I still visit in Washington, D.C., became for me, as it does for many, an important crossroads in the black diaspora's life of the mind...

...To be sure, present-day American consumer culture and the identity politics of popular culture obscure this fundamental truth for outsiders, many of whom discerned a broadbased racism at the university in the wake of black-nationalist rallies in the spring of 1994...

...Conspicuously absent from this abstracted vision were the fearful controversies that had swirled for an entire week on D.C.-area radio talk shows like that run by Oliver North...

...In the present crisis of black youth, no black middle-aged bourgeois man can now fail to be moved by the pictures of elegantly dressed sorority sisters, formally suited young black men—their Phi Beta Kappa keys dangling from dark vests...

...This winter I myself was drawn repeatedly to the museum exhibit and particularly to its pictures of faculty: a restrained, smiling Sterling Brown, the youthful Ralph Bunche, urbanely lost in thought, and the luminous Benjamin Mays lecturing as a proud Morcdecai Johnson takes notes...

...Significantly, they have been closely reported in the Washington Post...

...One of the deepest paradoxes of this race pride, of course, is that it is grounded in the hard-won SPRING • 1996 • 83 Race and Politics African-American mastery ofAmerica itself...

...Significantly, two rather pricey books have emerged in the wake of the march...

...These images cannot evoke the terror and dislocation of Sterling Brown's devastated final years—his alcoholism and the difficulties that he caused his friends...

...And the central crisis of his class is the contradiction between this middle-class ethos and the encroaching realities of a disintegrating black lower-class culture...

...Speaking to a political science class of sophomores and juniors this winter, I was struck by the number of students who connected Farrakhan's revivalism with an affirmation of autonomous civic virtue...

...Some of the older faculty, whom I met upon arriving in the late seventies, used to talk of pre-desegregation Howard with a grim smile and a haughty smirk...

...But the most depressed segment of the black American lowerclass— estimated to be 30 percent of the AfricanAmerican population—can only be reclaimed by a radical commitment of the national will to education, health care, and employment policies...

...Georgia Avenue and Le Droit Park no longer retain anything more than a tinge of the bohemian atmosphere of robed young men in converted milk delivery trucks, selling health food and books about black Egypt...

...However, a consideration of Howard's experience in the last few years suggests the psychological and social trauma that accompanies such an advance in the face of a nearby burgeoning underclass...

...And this trauma forms the necessary context for an understanding of Howard's recent looks at its own past...

...Similarly, Howard students have consumed a black, sometimes antiwhite nationalist discourse, which black studies courses have made available in the speeches of David Walker and the poetry of Amiri Baraka...

...No one can miss the idealized vision of gender that pointedly dominates many of the early photos...

...but I soon learned to give it a wide berth...

...However, the dislocations of black urban life have seeped into the world of Howard student life far more deeply than I noticed on my last sustained visit five years ago...

...As the march was described by the students and faculty to whom I talked this winter, the event appeared to have been transformed into a sacred site of racial bonding, primordial feelings of ethnic manhood, and hope for a black middle-class future...

...I was therefore not surprised that student and faculty memories had lost the complexity of day-to-day experience or that the march was now the subject of two rather expensive picture books...

...Russell Adams, the head of AfricanAmerican Studies, describes his recent encounter with a claque of young black Republicans not only with disbelief but some wonder—wonder, I surmise, that the American dream should persist so long and deeply amongAmerica's most oppressed...

...Through many of these pictures weaves the imposing figure of Mordecai Johnson, who gradually emerges as the luminous chief visionary of Howard's middle-twentiethcentury identity: the central university of the African diaspora...

...Students confront long registration lines...

...They said over and over again that the Million Man March created an atmosphere in which they felt safe in Washington for the first time...

...At least one rape took place on campus in the past year...

...The wish-fulfilling aspect of the discourse of agency explains much of Farrakhan's aura in the eyes of black middle-class youth...

...The most critical aspect of this feature is not any discussion of antiSemitism nor the stridency of Shabazz's discourse...

...You," he said with a twinkle in his eye, "are here for the black experience...

...From 1978 to 1983, I taught four writing courses a semester for five difficult years...

...Significantly, both students and faculty recalled these revivalistic aspects of the march (the march was often referred to as a "spiritual" experience) that clearly spoke to the black middle-class anxieties by which African-American students at Howard are torn...

...These developments point to severe problems in the very infrastructure of the university...

...I was at first put off by this style...

...Like much of the American middle-class population, most students at Howard respond to political trauma in a sentimental style that ultimately evades politics in its deepest sense...

...In response thirtynine released employees have sued the university...

...Within the world of the black middle-class, the march's nationalist symbolism has become one more consumer item...

...Pictures of students feature elegantly dressed groups of fraternity boys and girls...

...When I came to Washington, D.C., in early February to research this article for Dissent, it was clear that the Million Man March had become part of that informal institutional memory...

...And although not all of them agreed with Frazier's analyses of black middleclass life, they continued to find in the new "black awareness" the aspect of African-American middle-class life that he had so memorably described: its craving for cathartic fulfillments and symbolic satisfactions...

...Lost in the discourse of voluntarism and agency is the social reality of a deep African-American dependence upon the government...

...Meeting me in the Quonset but to which incoming instructors in the English department had been reduced, the distinguished eighteenth-century scholar Arthur P. Davis greeted me with the vinegary humor that marked his cohorts' view of the brave new integrated world of the late seventies...

...For this," Calvin continued, "is a special place for the likes of us...

...Indeed, in present memory the march came and went with the swift finality associated with religious revivals in rural Arkansas or Iowa...

...In very profound ways, the march was devoid of the intra-racial gender tensions that now define black lower-class life and to an increasing extent African-American middle-class experience...

...Whatever Louis Farrakhan's intentions, his revivalistic language of atonement appealed most powerfully to the black bourgeoisie...

...These students only mimic the literary gestures of their cultural betters...

...The Million Man March was Black America's profound and somewhat desperate statement of commitment to an American dream...

...And the depth with which students responded to the traditional evangelical Protestant as well as Muslim themes of atonement and discipline speaks to a profound desire to overcome this conflict...

...There is, for me, some consolation in this...

...If Howard's cultural orientation does not eventually stimulate radical social movements, then may its ironical self-consciousness— surely the university's finest intellectual tradition—at least give us an African-American equivalent of Melville or Hawthorne—a shrewder critic of the current sentimental fables in which the weak are empowered to outlive the hopeless...

...These characteristics shape the social context in which the student body's response to the Million Man March may best be understood...

...One cannot underestimate the lack of selfconsciousness with which this cultural nexus has been appropriated by Howard students...

...The section of the medical school training obstetrician-gynecologists has lost its accredition—a far more than symbolic loss of a unit that has trained most of the nation's black ob-gyns...

...These culturally attuned students therefore take to the speeches of Khalid Mohammed and Farrakhan quite casually, not so much as expressions of an adversary culture, but as part of the university's and the capitalist consumer world's display of odds and ends from which American adolescents in general and black middle-class teenagers in particular select and arrange the elements of their public self-presentation...

...The social-striving nineteen-yearold accounting student in baggy hip-hop pants negotiates a powerful psychological divide that can only deepen adolescent anxieties over future social success and prosperity—anxieties that are naturally deeper for middle-class blacks in the contracting American economy of the nineties...

...The student newspaper reports fights in the student cafeteria and shows a new awareness of male abuse of female students...

...But no one can miss the fact that these powerfully idealized images ultimately repress the vicious worlds of segregation and black bourgeois pettiness that at once preserved black institutions and kept these men from the cosmopolitan eminence that they so richly deserved...

...racial politics but to a now venerable historical narrative shared by Anacostia, Capitol Hill, and Turkey Thicket: the collapse of 80 • DISSENT Race and Politics civil community, the proliferation of cheap shops run by Hispanic and Asian immigrants, and finally the free-floating armed violence of the black urban ghetto...

...Indeed, the narrow civic sphere of "selfhelp" may be among other things a symbolic site by which to reclaim a badly damaged sense of black middle-class efficacy—an efficacy threatened even more by a radically changing economy, a decreasing commitment to affirmative action within the business classes, and a powerful dissemination of lower-class black values through the media...

...It is too little noticed that much current black rhetoric of "empowerment" and "independence" echoes a traditional Protestant discourse of will...

...The picture book Million Man March/Day of Absence: a Commemorative Anthology, edited by Haki Madhabuti and Maulena Karenga, contains a number of speeches by march participants and public intellectuals as well as pictures of the day's events...

...Thus, black students frequently confront not only the inadequacies of a symbolically important black institution, but also see that institution's weaknesses pilloried in the nation's mainstream media...

...Student admiration for Farrakhan was grounded in his independence and his effectiveness: his ability and will to do what other black leaders at the time clearly could not do...

...To be sure, not all symbolisms are cathartic...

...7 a large extent, this striver's ethic—which is echoed throughout the Hilltop—corresponds to the American nineties' world of self-promotion and free enterprise...

...That experience is also part of Howard's golden age...

...The curator of the Moorland Springarn, historian Thomas Battle, speaks of the students' deep desire to connect themSPRING • 1996 • 81 Race and Politics selves with these pictures...

...The call for repentance implied a regeneration of the will (whether voluntary or God-given), the creation of a voluntary civic commitment, the reconciliation of Christian society, and the reproduction of the social virtues seen as necessary for the continuity of that social order through time...

...No disadvantaged ethnic class has looked ahead so movingly to the individual's possibility in America...

...82 • DISSENT Race and Politics Most of the political science class that I interviewed consisted of women...

...In the deteriorating ghetto of Georgia Avenue and Le Droit Park, no well-dressed black female student can walk down the street without solicitation by lowerclass thugs, hip-hop male students, or derelicts addled by drugs and alcohol...

...As these students looked , they undoubtedly saw the images of the black underclass— whose music, manners, and dress they have casually but unself-consciously appropriated...

...Everyone," meaning every significant black intellectual, "passes through here once or twice," whispered my fellow composition teacher, the poet Calvin Forbes, as we listened in chapel to an emigre Haitian professor question Toni Cade Bambara on African ethnic religions...

...Farrakhan's rhetoric and organizational strategy was a familiar Anglo-American Protestant ritual of revival...