Melissa: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris Perry.

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: I believe that Motown and Shakespeare, Motown and great history, the vernacular traditions of African American culture and Richard Day two years before the mass were integral to creating and crafting a vision of the world that would sustain me as a particular person of color in late 20th century American society.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That was professor Michael Eric Dyson, speaking on PBS in 1996. Now throughout his career, Dyson has established himself as a public intellectual who thrives on complicating the lines between what's considered the academy and what's considered public life. This month, he's out with a new book, entitled, Entertaining Race, Performing Blackness in America. It collects essays and speeches he's published and given over the course of his career, examining the intersections between black identity and performance, and he remains committed to the idea that it's worth bringing a heightened level of intellectual rigor to a wide range of subjects.

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: Some have believed you only focus on highfalutin, sophisticated, cerebrally acute expansions of thought that happened in a chapter. Say for instance, like my chapter on Jacques Derrida and his relationship to Black religion, but not, say, in a profile I did of Kathryn Bigelow for L Magazine.

Melissa Harris-Perry: His recently published collection of essays made me want to take a look back with Dyson across his career, but we began by speaking about the one entirely new piece of writing in the book. It's an in depth analysis of Black performance in the US. The essay begins in a disturbing place by recounting Captain John Kimber's 1791 murder of an enslaved Nigerian girl who refused to dance for the ships' crew on a slaving ship.

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: I wanted to begin there because I wanted to set the predicate for performance of Blackness in the new world. That story perfectly encapsulates with this horror tragedy, the refusal of a black girl to perform as the basis of performance for Blackness in our own new world in America, where from the very beginning performance has been forced upon us, thrust upon us. Not that we didn't have performance before then, we did, before being absconded from African shores and extracted from our native haunts and dispersed throughout the new world.

We had so much rich performance, but on that slave ship, that young girl was forced to perform. They used to, as you know, dance the captives to keep the enslaved people, their limbs limber, and to keep them fresh and also to titillate the mates of the ship, sexually at some points, and to entertain them on the long journey. The enslaved people were forced to get up probably daily to dance. On this particular occasion, this young lady had been infected with a venereal disease ironically enough by the doctor of the ship and she didn't feel well and refused to get up to dance and perform.

She was hung upside down by one leg with barely a loin cloth around her middle part, naked for the most part, and beat to death. That trial, Captain Kimber at trial for her death and the death of another young lady, it was discovered that because of her refusal to dance, because of her refusal to perform, she was murdered. That is the basis of performance in Black America in this world that we are constantly forced, constantly pushed to perform for whiteness, to perform an identity that has been thrust upon us, but also resistively to perform our own identity. That story captured so much of what and who we are.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In some ways, the book is a bit of a Michael Dyson reader. You begin there but you also move back and forth across time, mostly the last decade, but a little bit from some of it that's older. You even deep on back into the 90s , congressional testimonies kind of stuff. I'm wondering about where you are in your own life, your own profession right now, that it felt like what you wanted to do in part was to organize your own thinking and speaking and writing in this way.

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: It's fascinating because, look, when I started out 30 some odd years ago, I'd get a PhD. Two years after that PhD I was on the cover of The New Yorker magazine in a story that spoke about by Michael Bérubé, the noted literary critic, a story about this generation of black public intellectuals. I was the youngest by far of those featured. Cornel West, bell hooks, Derrick Bell and myself. That was my entre around '95, into those precincts of privilege of public intellectual discourse with all its controversies and possibilities, conflicts and tensions. Now, recently I've been favored and blessed to have appeared on the New York Times bestseller lists along with, say, a new generation, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others who now reside there.

My journey has been that of a long distance runner, so to speak. When I look around the landscape now and see a Melissa Harris-Perry as one of the prominent public intellectuals in America, I've measured my distance from pole to pole. I wanted to look around and see, given this new fresh powerful generation of thinking and thinkers and reflection on who we are as a people, where we are, where the struggles are, to look at some of the consistent themes that I've articulated that perhaps didn't have as much resonance then as they do now. Writing about Black women when it wasn't a thing of Black girl magic or Black boy joy, speaking about homosexuality or gay identity, or LBGTQIA in a sermon or in a debate when it had not yet come to a particular point of conflict intention that was so visible.

I wanted to look back and see the stuff I've done and where I've been and where I am now, as I reflect on where we are as a nation in a racial reckoning, in a pandemic, and trying to come to grips with yet another iteration, yet another controversy, yet another moment of Blackness. Which is why when I talk about critical race theory in the book or when I'm speaking about particular issues of social dislocation vis-a-vis, say, hip hop culture, I've been grappling with those for a while. It was a way for me to understand myself and to organize my thoughts around themes that have been particularly and especially visible in the culture now that I've been at for a moment.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you talk about that story of getting the PhD and then immediately, within a few years, appearing there on the cover with people like bell hooks, Cornel West, Derek Bell, it reminds me that, across your career, you have been both academic and public intellectual simultaneously really without break. Some folks, they spend a couple decades in the academy and then become a public intellectual, or maybe they come in to the academy from a route more like Nikole Hannah-Jones. Pulitzer Prize winning extraordinary journalist whose work is public and then becomes right part of the academy.

The simultaneity of your public life and your academic life, I'm wondering how that has impacted your performance of scholarship, acknowledging that there is a white gaze both within and outside of the academy.

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: As you well know, having held that heavyweight championship title yourself, that has passed from one to another of us along the way, it is filled with huge potential, brimming with extraordinary access and influence, but also tremendous controversy. Attended by envy, attended by legitimate critique and attended by jealousy all along the path. The irony is, of course, there are those of us who have been gifted or inclined to want to make a public intervention do so out of the interest of bringing to bear the sharpest insight we can manage on problems that are persistent, that are unyielding to surface engagement that we try to then deepen with our analysis or provide a different context for it as a Black public intellectual. On the one hand, we may be celebrated and feated by those who receive that knowledge, who are beneficiaries of it, who don't go to school every day, who don't attend a university classroom, who are nonetheless desirous of hearing the brilliance of a Melissa Harris-Perry on platforms and in arenas where her intelligence echoes. That might not necessarily be the case have they not had access to her school room. Now, on radio or television or in a public speech, you're able to articulate those ideas. You're right, I did them simultaneously. I didn't give one up for the other or sacrifice.

When people make snide comments or arguments about your particular standing as an intellectual, I was like, "Bro, you don't get to be a university professor on American Idol, trust. You got to do some work." Some have believed you only focus on highfalutin, sophisticated, cerebrally acute expansions of thought that happen in those chapters. Say, for instance, my chapter on Jacques Derrida and his relationship to Black religion, but not, say, in a profile I did of Kathryn Bigelow for Elle Magazine. I have insisted from the very beginning that they are uniquely tethered at a certain level.

I'm an old-school intellectual who believes that the division of particular ideas and themes under the rubric of, say, a department, those are crucial. I don't deny that at all, but old-school in the sense that I'm curious about an issue and I follow it as far as I can, as far as my intelligence, or capacity, or training, or ability to read and interpret takes me. It's been tremendous, it's been great, it's been controversial, but I've tried to sustain an appreciation for it because of this. I didn't get my undergraduate degree until I was, what? 25 years old. I didn't go to college until I was 21 and then on to graduate school.

I was quite clear about the purpose of my profession, the vision of my vocation. It was not simply or even primarily to please other scholars. It was to bring as much knowledge to bear upon unyielding and persistent problems that my people confronted, and from there, make an intervention that would justify my existence on this earth.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How is it that you got Cosby right before so many others managed to do so?

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: From the beginning, when I commented in the pages of the New York Times, when they called me after reading me the comments Mr. Cosby made that night. What was it, 2004 or 2005, around there? I said he was a typical elitist responding to the persistent problems of young Black people and those who were poor, and Mr. Cosby called me up, as he is one to do, and said to me, "You're a famous Black intellectual and I'm a famous entertainer. We don't have to do this in the press." I was like, "Yes, sir, let's talk." He told me that basically I had been fed a bunch of lies about what he said that night. I said, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry," and he volunteered to send me a copy of the speech. Not just a written copy, but his delivery of it.

I must tell you, Melissa, when I received that speech, I was gobsmacked. Like, "Bro, not only did they have it right, you were so much more contemptuous of poor Black people than was previously announced." I knew then I had to write something serious and sustained about Mr. Cosby. At the end of that writing, right before the book was about to be published, the occasion of his further controversy around issues of sexual assault and rape and the like emerged. I had about three or four pages even at that late date about the allegations of Ms. Constand against Dr. Cosby. I included them in the book. I wasn't going to take just surface allegation or even just controversial rumors. I wanted to be able to put there what I knew and could substantiate about the issue.

To me, as horrid and as tragic and as utterly terrorizing as the claims and allegations and conviction of Mr. Cosby around sexual assault are, equally offensive are his assaults upon poor Black people that often had the complicity of the poor themselves, not only because of his celebrity and fame, but as you know, the impulse toward self-help, toward self-inventory, toward a harsh self-rebuke that is often present in quarters of Black life echoed in Mr. Cosby's comments. Therefore, it was very difficult to disentangle one from the other, or at least to show that, in combination, those things wouldn't yield the greatest insight possible.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You talk about that impulse towards self-blame a bit in writing about your late brother who died in prison serving time for a crime that you and the family continue to believe he did not commit. Yet you also talk about the ways that he, in talking about himself, at times would say, "I didn't always make good choices, and so I'm living with this." Can you just talk about your brother a bit?

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: Yes. I miss him every day. Everett Dyson Bay, Moorish Society, Temple of America. A committed, religious figure within his own religious belief, a variety of Muslim belief here in America. Look, he admitted as a drug dealer on the streets of Detroit, he was committing crimes. He was wielding his own particular Black of influence in a way that was destructive. I used to cuss him out every day, talking to him back and forth about his family and what he was doing and so on. He admitted that, and he admitted later on that he had done so much wrong.

Yet he knew, as he claimed, having not committed a murder for which he was convicted, by the way, by an all-Black jury. When they say, "Black folk don't send Black folk to jail. Black juries can't be relied upon to adjudicate claims about guilt," that isn't true. I saw it right there in the courtroom. He began his journey in prison. He felt and contended that he was innocent, but also he saw this as an opportunity to deepen his awareness and learn things about being Black or about being a religious figure or being a moral agent of his own destiny. He thought it was tragic that he had to wait to prison to do that, but he nonetheless did so.

We had many conversations. We were featured in in the CNN Part One documentary Black in America with Soledad O'Brien. A typical, at least in some instances, story of one brother, I was then at University of Pennsylvania, teaching one brother at Penn and the other brother in the pen, but we tried to bring texture and nuance and color almost literally to that story and to reflect on the paths we chose, and that were the paths that were in part chosen for us, and what we had to do to make a difference in life.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to pause here for a moment because the next part of our conversation shifts to an allegation of sexual harassment made against Michael Eric Dyson in 2020 by a student at Georgetown University while he was a professor there. In 2021, the student-run magazine called the Georgetown Voice, spoke with the student who remains anonymous. She told The Voice that while taking one of Professor Dyson's classes, he asked her to have dinner with him off-campus, texted her directly and initiated unwanted physical touching, including rubbing her shoulders during a class. The allegation has not been widely reported on, but I thought it was important to address it during our conversation.

Michael, we have known each other a lot of years. I think at this point, maybe even a lot of decades, so this is tough. It's a hard conversation, but I can't be me and cover the things I cover and have some of the experiences that you know that I've had and not ask you about this. There were allegations of sexual harassment from your time as a faculty member at Georgetown University. Do you want to speak to that?

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: Thank you so much for raising that, Melissa, and I'd like to talk to no one better than you about that. These are baseless allegations. I was thoroughly vetted when I went to teach at Vanderbilt University. As you can imagine, they take those kinds of claims seriously. Vanderbilt did a thorough investigation, and I am here standing before you as a distinguished university professor of African-American and Diaspora studies, so thank God for that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you reflect across, I guess three decades now, of public and scholarly career, what have you learned or changed about your own performance of Black manhood or Black masculinity that might be informed part by your encounters and experiences with Black women, Black queer folk, who maybe have shed light on your own understandings of black masculinity?

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: The point you raise is extremely important, and that all of us have to be conscious of the ways in which, deliberately or inadvertently, we participate in a broader culture that victimizes vulnerable people. I've spent an entire career defending Black women, standing up for Black women. As I said earlier, writing a book about Black women when it wasn't a thing, or defending gay and lesbian and transgendered and bisexual people and standing up for victims of all sorts of intimidation and terror. It makes you recognize that, either consciously or unconsciously, all of us may be parts of cultures of hurt and pain that have to be interrogated, that have to be asked questions of.

I'm a 63-year-old Black man in America. I'm a very effusive, loving, embracing Black man. I'm a Baptist preacher and until recently, given the sea change in relations in America around sexuality, I hugged everybody, I think as you know. Man, boy, girl.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I chugged you more than once or twice. That is true.

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: Lord have mercy. That's what I do. Those changes have been put in place because we are now living in a different era, a different time of challenge, a different point of recognition. For me, I'm much more conscious of the necessity of being righteous and engaged with an awareness that certain claims of harassment exist in a universe of heightened awareness, whether intentional or not, or that certain perceptions of discomfort may arise. We certainly have to be aware of that, but ultimately what I'm aware of is the fact that at the same time we live in a world where comfort cannot be the predicate for acts of justice or true recognition of what is and is not the case.

Let's be honest, when we think about the interaction of race and of class and of sexuality, we can't forget the ways in which the criminalization of Black masculinity, or Black sexual identities more broadly, is sometimes clashed with claims of a certain sort made in this country around sex that have to be taken seriously. I've been heightened in my awareness of that, and continue as a professor at Vanderbilt to be engaged in this project as both a scholar within a university setting and as a public intellectual to address these extraordinarily important and complicated matters.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We're almost at a close, but I got to catch you on a couple of musical sonic questions. The first is, come on, man you know we old. I can't even believe you tried to say mumble rap is okay.

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: [laughs] Look, I say mumble rap is okay in this way, that the melodic intensity is a challenge to my old school belief in lyricism and in the intelligence of these rappers out here trying to say what they got to say. I wanted to get the sum of them to say that I get where you're coming from. I get where the foregrounding of melody is, but I'm still old-school standing about a speaker. Certainly, I had a fever. It wasn't me, or either summer madness. I'm still down with that stuff.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I so appreciated that moment though, because, again, we're both old enough that I remember you having to, mount a defense of Tupac, which seems almost silly now. I think there's such a recognition of his meaningful social and lyrical impact. When I saw the mumble rap, I was like, "Oh no, I can't go there." Of course, there is one place where I can go with you. That is, we are both, well you're definitely like a diamond star platinum member of the Beyhive, but I do my best to keep my goal credentials up in the Beyhive. Talk to me about Beyonce.

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: I think she's a phenomenon of nature. I think she's a remarkable artist. I think she's an incredible human being. I do happen to believe she's the greatest entertainer we've seen because of the way in which she's able to do it for so long across a number of venues. As body of work, I think Michael Jackson has an argument in terms of his career from 10-years-old, till he died at near 50-years-old or a little bit older. Maybe eight years old, actually. His extraordinary body of work is a testimony to his undenied genius. Beyonce has been working nearly that long in terms of age. She's now 40, but she started pretty young herself. She's been able to sustain the power of her voice in a way that Michael's changed.

Michael's height was from like 10 to maybe 21. Then after that, his voice changed. He still managed to produce a pleasant dulcet sound, but one that was significantly different than the early powerhouse vocals of his youth. Beyonce has grown from strength to strength. When she performs on stage, I'm reminded of that Frank and Ernst, I think it's right, cartoon that Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did except backward and in high-heels. Beyonce did everything Michael and whoever else could do except backwards and in high-heels with her hair getting caught in the fan and then not stopping. Then they cut the tresses from the fan and she continues to sing.

She's remarkable. For two hours, two and a half hours, nonstop dancing and singing. We've never seen anything like it. That in tandem with her extraordinary theme albums, Lemonade and Beyonce, the genius of her performance is undeniable. It's a wonder of nature that she continues to perform and produce what she does.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For the end here, I just, I love many of the sentences in this text, but just wanted to pull this one. "The fun of Black speech is its elasticity, and its spontaneous combustions of grammar that break wildly along synapsis of logic that capture the meanings formal language often misses." What do you see going forward into our performances on TikTok and Instagram and the new digital platforms? Where will black performance potentially go next?

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: I think that Black is as Black does. The great word in Black creativity is next. What we are able to think, what we are able to imagine, a universe of meaning we're able to conjure. The force of our personalities collectively and individually all reside and resonate with the creative urge that can never be eclipsed by the existential misery we confront. You can never tell. You appropriate the blues, we got R&B. Appropriate R&B, we got rock. Appropriate rock, we got funk. Appropriate some funk, we come up with hip hop. So far, they haven't appropriated hip-hop.

It's been lasting and now is the most, I think, powerful and especially popular music in the world today, having taken over, I think, from country music. Black creativity events in the word next is the relentless quest for self-expression, in ways that find us constantly and creatively looking at the next tune, the next rhythm, the next beat, the next insight, the next lyric, the next stop along the journey of our quest for self-realization and absolutely free expression of the urges and instincts that occupy our minds and souls.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Michael Eric Dyson, author of Entertaining race, Performing Blackness in America. Thank you for joining The Takeaway.

Professor Michael Eric Dyson: Thanks for having me.

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