Stigma and Culture

Last-Place Anxiety in Black America

J. Lorand Matory

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226297873
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

In Stigma and Culture, J. Lorand Matory provocatively shows how ethnic identification in the United States—and around the globe—is a competitive and hierarchical process in which populations, especially of historically stigmatized races, seek status and income by dishonoring other stigmatized populations. And there is no better place to see this than among the African American elite in academia, where he explores the emergent ethnic identities of African and Caribbean immigrants and transmigrants, Gullah/Geechees, Louisiana Creoles, and even Native Americans of partly African ancestry. Matory describes the competitive process that hierarchically structures their self-definition as ethnic groups and the similar process by which middle-class African Americans seek distinction from their impoverished compatriots. Drawing on research at universities such as Howard, Harvard, and Duke and among their alumni networks, he details how university life—while facilitating individual upward mobility, touting human equality, and regaling cultural diversity—also perpetuates the cultural standards that historically justified the dominance of some groups over others. Combining his ethnographic findings with classic theoretical insights from Frantz Fanon, Fredrik Barth, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu and others—alongside stories from his own life in academia—Matory sketches the university as an institution that, particularly through the anthropological vocabulary of culture, encourages the stigmatized to stratify their own.

1

Three Fathers: How Shall I See You through My Tears?

Reared in Cambridge, Massachusetts, my then-eighteen-year-old daughter Ayọ and then-fourteen-year-old son Adu once told me a joke that Adu’s middle-class, biracial friend had told them. Unusually, the boy’s father, rather than his mother, is white:

“What’s the difference between a black man and a large cheese pizza?”

“A large cheese pizza can feed a family of four.”

Though I had grown up in the shadow of Howard University, I cannot say that I found the punch line incomprehensible, but for me the humor lay not in the truth of the scenario but in the joke’s verbal embodiment of willful white ignorance. It rests on the same American Dream, or Fantasy, as a hundred-odd television shows that use the imagery of laborlessly rich white Los Angeles and of self-induced Black ghetto desperation to cajole millions of poor and middle-class white people into complacency about the system.

Nonetheless, I feared that, having grown up in the shadow of Harvard and with fewer Black professional role models than I had had, my children were laughing only at the irony of the wordplay and might not be well enough anchored in the reality of Black accomplishment to recognize the lie embedded in this joke about Black men’s (in)capacity as breadwinners. The subjects of this chapter made their own way, against the odds—sometimes by enlisting networks of Black male allies and despite their potential marginalization, as dark men or as ethnic outsiders—within those networks.

I begin with this story because it is where I began, with an awareness of the complex humanity of what I learned only later is the world’s constituent other—black people; in the United States, especially Black Americans; and, among Black Americans these days, especially Black American men. Just as the “Welfare Queen” was Reagan’s most memorable campaign image and slogan, the “absent Black father” is President Obama’s wink and a nod to white voters that he shares their common sense about what really ails the world. In truth, our fathers and the fathers of my childhood buddies are complex characters who have applied careful reasoning and hard work to exploit the opportunities that our forebears often sacrificed their lives to create. No person who grew up as I did could mistake Black men for a suitable punch line to a joke congratulating white American men for their unique or uniform competency and dignity as husbands and fathers. I have intimately known too many white fathers and their children to imagine them a collective paragon for any virtues that my fathers lacked. The only difference is that, all other things being equal, their place in the light-dark hierarchy made it a lot easier for them to do the same amount of good for their children.

This chapter is rooted in the felicitous accident that three recently deceased Howard affiliates—one African, one African American, and one Caribbean—have acted as fathers to me. Theirs is also the generation that led the black national independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean and desegregation in the United States. After World War II, they experienced at Howard the largest and most international convergence of Western-educated black people that had ever occurred in history. And they shared a mission to redeem their peoples from political subordination and from the European racial “science” that justified it. For nearly a century, Howard had been a unique, US government–subsidized haven for the most ambitious African Americans within a nation-state where whites were committed to keeping Blacks out of their typically state-subsidized elite-producing institutions.

And even today, no one who grew up in Howard’s orbit will find it strange that I love and was loved by a circle of outstanding black men from multiple geographical origins. During the Cold War and until the large-scale desegregation of US universities in the 1970s, Howard became a showcase of the United States’ newfound fairness for audiences in the anglophone Caribbean and Africa as well. The Peace Corps and development aid might have impressed the general population of these nations, but Howard is what most impressed the aspiring professional elites. In the race to win the hearts and minds of the newly independent black nation-states, the United States was competing with the Soviet bloc and, consequently, outpaced England, thus both Americanizing the black Atlantic elite and accidentally spreading among them the racial-uplift vocabulary of the civil rights movement.

Yet, as the greatest culturally Western university of the West’s most stigmatized population, Howard provided ample opportunity and motive for the stigmatized to “stratify their own.” The “color complex,” or complexion-based discrimination among people of African descent, was still rampant during the post–World War II era at Howard. In my parents’ day, color-coded sororities marked status in a pecking order that spanned virtually all HBCU campuses. Moreover, Howardites, like the personnel of other HBCUs, remain highly conscious of verbal and sartorial signs of class status, which today range from “ghetto” to “bougie” (from “bourgeois”). It is perhaps symptomatic that fashion shows—which showcase and ironically remorph these sartorial signs—are now among the most popular student events at Howard, at other HBCUs, and among the Black students at Harvard as well. Moreover, particularly at Howard, stratifying articulations of ethnicity are as omnipresent and powerful as are the unifying, egalitarian discourses of Black nationalism.

In its subject matter and authorship, this book parallels Frazier ([1957] 1997) and Graham (1999) in documenting the combination of self-love, self-loathing, and ambition that characterizes the Black bourgeoisie. However, the scope of this study extends beyond African Americans and locates these struggles in circum-Atlantic context, identifying the multiethnic character of this class dynamic. These phenomena are also brightly illuminated by Fanon’s studies ([1952] 2008, [1961] 2004) of the ambivalent psychology of the colonized and of recently independent national elites—a psychology deeply penetrated by the European colonizers’ ideology of black inferiority and by whites’ psychological projections of their own sexual and social conflicts onto black people. Like Graham’s work, Stigma and Culture documents the centrality of university education in defining this the black bourgeoisie since World War II. Beyond the aims of these authors, the present work documents the role of ethnicity and transnationalism in the recent transformation of this class of actors. My aim is neither critique nor encomium but, instead, a fair account of a dilemma. How do people understand themselves when powerful others classify them as collectively worthless? It is often as difficult to embrace and defend one’s ascribed collective identity as it is to escape from it.

This chapter offers intimate stories about how three men navigated the symbolic and material shoals of ethnoracial identity in pursuit of benefits for themselves, for their people, and for me. In common, the stories they told to their wives, to their children, and to me reveal their reliance on a class-specific sense of legacy to keep them strong against discouragement and temptation. As dark men in a creole world, though, they faced challenges to their own accomplishments and self-esteem. It is perhaps symptomatic that they all, at least by the end, married light-colored women. Perhaps as a sign of the times or of their relationships with me, the sense of legacy that I heard from them was not coded as ethnic. By contrast, my current research has revealed a present-day population with a disposition to code their past sources of hope and success as “cultures” that allegedly distinguish them from the African American referent of Adu’s biracial friend’s joke.

My biological father’s college and medical-school classmate at Howard, the late Olubadejọ Olurẹmilẹkun Adebẹnọjọ, MD, introduced my parents to each other. When he died on March 3, 1996, his family and friends, in keeping with the tradition of the Nigerian bourgeoisie, took out large ads in several national newspapers commemorating his nearly seventy-two years of life and accomplishments. The several ads that spoke most vividly to me both upset my native conceptions of the dead and either named or created a conviction in me that I now find inescapable. They described my deceased uncle Badejọ as having become òrìṣà àkúnl

bọ—a “god whom we [now] kneel down to worship.”

In life, he had frequently visited my childhood home in Washington, DC, at a time when I did not even know what a Nigerian or a Yoruba was. Since then, I have become a specialist in the study of this West African population and of its influence on the religions of Brazil, Trinidad, Cuba, Haiti, and their immigrant diasporas in the United States. This culture has also become a classical reference in African American cultural nationalism. Uncle Badejọ’s readiness to facilitate my professional career and spiritual itinerary might seem serendipitous unless you believe, as I do, that the universe has a habit of paving my way—far beyond anything that I have earned or deserved. His most active role in my life began in 1982, when Nigeria became my second home. As my foremost guardian and guide east of the Atlantic, Uncle Badejọ stood in for my father in the traditional wedding that united me with my Nigerian wife, Bunmi.

The late Dr. Elliot P. Skinner, PhD, was the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, but he also frequently served as a visiting professor in the History Department at Howard University, where, during the course of research for this book, I would later do the same. In this regard, he also resembles his most famous compatriot, Trinidadian scholar and politician Eric Williams, who taught there from 1939 to 1948. Elliot and I first met during the Columbia Anthropology Department’s unsuccessful efforts to recruit me to its faculty in 1991. However, he never stopped lobbying for me to succeed him as Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology. Since he somehow made my father’s acquaintance in the 1990s, I often heard from each of them secondhand accounts of their discussions about and plans for my future.

My biological father, the late William E. Matory Sr., MD, contributed half of my genes, as well as much of the love, labor, and values that have made me who I am. Since his death in 2009 and Professor Skinner’s in 2007, they have joined Uncle Badejọ as òrìṣà àkúnl

bọ (gods whom I kneel down to worship) in my effort to discover and refine who I am, to mobilize at the right times the parts of me that come from them, and to know when the mothers in my life—such as my birth mother Deborah, Aunt Ruth, Aunt Arnzie, Aunt Bette, and Ms. Davidson—set the better example.

This chapter represents my efforts to “see through a glass, darkly” the most intimate embodiments of Howard University in my life. The vale of tears before my eyes is both salty and bitter. The salt would preserve the memory of their love and of their accomplishments. They all modeled the forms of excellence that I then took for granted, and they moved mountains to support my growth.

The subtitle of this chapter is the title of a mournful song from the opera The Gospel at Colonus (1985), which retells the story of Oedipus at Colonus in the idiom of African American gospel music. The original play by Sophocles narrates the last days of Oedipus and the fratricidal battle among his sons to inherit his kingdom. Like much that happens at Howard and other postslavery or postcolonial universities, The Gospel at Colonus re-presents Black dilemmas and cultural diacritica in a Western narrative frame.

Within this frame, the accomplishments of these late fathers are undeniable cause for celebration, but there is also bitterness in my tears. These were dark men who made voluntary and involuntary compromises in a creole world. Indeed, some of my New Orleans Creole interlocutors consciously compare the pale-skinned “Old Washington” Black elite to themselves and to the Charleston Browns. And the nonbinary color world they share is in many ways comparable to—and a part of—the Caribbean racial and cultural world known by the term “creole,” albeit in its lowercase form. As they struggled for their own and their people’s progress, what fears did they have to conquer, what forms of restraint and self-restraint did they adjust to, how did color affect their sense of self-worth, and how did their inner struggles affect their children?

The Boy in the Man

In 1972, when I left Shepherd Elementary School, there were few ideal educational choices for African American children of my class background. The balance of verbal repartee and fisticuffs that characterized Shepherd’s playground differed radically from that balance at the more class-integrated Paul Junior High School; hence my quick departure for the almost equally undesirable Congressional School of northern Virginia, where my white homeroom teacher, Mrs. Crenshaw, asked, “Where did you learn to speak that way?” Apparently, my diction—though hardly rare at and around Howard and other HBCUs—knocked uncomfortably against her expectations regarding people of my age and color.

The Maret School suited me well, though I have never managed to outgrow my annoyance at the initial insistence of my white male peers that I play football and basketball for the school. I once expressed my annoyance to a white classmate at an alumni reunion, and he assured me that the pressure had had nothing to do with race. It was just that the school was so small that, without me, they could not have fielded a team. The stigmatized are always on the lookout for slights. But our instincts are not always incorrect. My recollection is that there were always plenty of players on the field, even after I promptly broke my wrist during a preseason practice and became wedded to the bench.

Hindsight might not have led me to interpret my classmates’ pleas in racial terms had I not experienced other similarly ambiguous situations, as when the same classmate who denied the role of racial stereotyping in the sports recruitment efforts also expressed surprise that I had outscored him—and indeed everyone else in the class—on the SATs, the main standardized college admissions examination in the United States. After two and a half years in a closely overlapping set of courses, I would not have been surprised had he slightly outperformed me, but I failed to recall any aspect of our respective performances in class that would have made my higher score a surprise to him.

Twelve years ensconced in a predominantly Black world of physicians, dentists, lawyers, accountants, intelligence officers, ambassadors, undertakers, administrators, congressmen, and their children had caused me to think of myself consciously as “the smart one,” “the dark one,” “the chubby one,” or “the child of divorce,” depending on the occasion, but never as “the athlete,” “the inarticulate one,” or “the middling student.” Five years in predominantly white secondary schools (I skipped the eighth grade) and four more in a traditionally White undergraduate institution trained me to anticipate at every moment the often-demeaning and sometimes dangerous disjuncture between who I am and what my skin color leads my white interlocutors to expect.

My own double consciousness derives most forcefully from the fact that I come from a medical family (that includes two of my “fathers,” my late brother and sister, two biological aunts, two biological cousins, and an army of fictive aunts, uncles, and their children) and from the fact that my education has been divided more or less evenly between the nation’s preeminent historically Black university and the nation’s preeminent TWI (traditionally White institution). The clinic, the university classroom, and the university clinic are all sites where supposedly objective measures of the self are the most professionally and objectively articulated, intensively monitored, and immutably recorded. For the class of people who normally attend college, the university clinic is the first setting where the young adult encounters official definitions of his or her personal biology and psychic health unmediated by the presence and the decisions of parents.

As a Harvard College sophomore in the winter of 1979, I developed itchy, hyperpigmented bumps on my calves, which a white physician at Harvard University Health Services (HUHS) quickly diagnosed as a sign of lice. On his instructions, I dry-cleaned all of my clothes, at great cost, and applied toxic lice-killing Nix cream to my whole body—but to no avail. On my next visit to Washington, a Howard-trained dermatologist immediately diagnosed folliculitis, caused by winter dryness. Correctly, he predicted that it would go away if I applied urea-based lotion after every shower until the acute inflammation subsided and plain lotion thereafter. This was the first of many occasions when I felt that my family or I had been misrecognized by white physicians at the nation’s premier TWI. Over the years, I developed the sense that, when faced with my medical problems, white physicians tended to leap for the most exotic and acute diagnoses and the ones requiring the most radical interventions. I am grateful, though, not to be one of the more statistically representative Black patients who are undertreated when their ailments are actually extreme and life-threatening.

On another occasion, after I joined the Harvard faculty, my excellent white male primary-care physician accepted a job elsewhere, whereupon I chose the next available primary-care physician, who happened to be female. My pediatrician, Aunt Betty, had been an African American woman and the mother of my best friend. During every office visit, however, my new white female physician at the HUHS seemed to tremble with anxiety. She stumbled over her words and often dropped things. When, by the third visit, she had not calmed down, it dawned upon me that something about me was making her nervous, and I could not help but wonder if she feared people of my race and gender. I don’t know, but both personal experience and historical evidence made it seem wise for me to seek a new physician.

Years later, and a few months before my tenure decision was announced, I developed a pain in my face that was diagnosed alternately as trigeminal neuralgia and as a migraine. The HUHS physicians prescribed oxygen inhalation, pepper-based capsaicin ointment in the nostrils, and self-injected Imitrex, each prescription failing to resolve the problem more than once or twice. I received tenure at Harvard in 1998, whereupon these excruciating attacks seemed to stop, which led us all to infer that the headaches had resulted from intense psychological pressure. However, another attack came a few years later. As I lay weeping helplessly in the emergency room of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, I called my father, just to let him know where I was. Whatever his long-distance suspicions, he had always hesitated to second-guess the opinions of the physicians who were treating me in situ, but on this occasion, he asked if I had been examined for sinusitis—an inflammation of the sinuses, which usually results from infection. Indeed, the Harvard clinicians had neglected this possibility. I had not been so evaluated. A simple course of antibiotics resolved that attack, and I have now been free of this problem for over a decade. On such occasions, I wonder if physicians who have been trained at the most high-powered of urban medical centers aren’t looking for the exotic when the ordinary is right in front of their eyes. I wonder if “urban-looking” patients like me don’t reflexively reinspire a certain sense of exoticism and experimentalism in such physicians, even after these physicians have practiced medicine for years among college students and professors. I also wonder if the Black and Black-trained physicians at Howard aren’t simply less mystified or frightened and are therefore, all other things being equal, more competent in the treatment of a Black patient like me. Moreover, I doubt that Howard-trained or African American physicians gen...