Trials and Tribalizations

Out in Punditland, where Time magazine covers grow, they're calling it "the retribalization of America." Jew against black, black against Asian, Asian against Hispanic, Italian against WASP, and all against gays. It's the world of Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, the experts say. And they claim, with the utmost solemnity, that all of this ethnic assertiveness is simply the latest evidence of a terminal breakdown in the American whitebread consensus, and perhaps even of Western Civ as we (they) know it.

A dissonant politics of unilateral, unconditional demands and exclusivist appeals on the basis of ethnicity -- that is what the pundits hear. And, like rap and rock, it's racket to their ears. Reared on the Mills Brothers, or the tempting Temptations, the mainstream poohbahs prefer harmony from the lower orders. But I don't think that the neo-tribalism picture they paint is as simple as all that, for a number of reasons.

First off, Megalopolis-bound pundits extrapolate too much from recent events in New York City. All these retribalization stories trot out the same few incidents -- Bensonhurst, the black boycott of a Korean-owned Brooklyn store, the Public Enemy anti-Semitism row, and the Central Park gang rape.

It's true that the Big Apple has serious, and even deadly, problems. Ethnic strife is one. De-industrialization and displacement are even bigger ones. And they all started at the top in the Ed Koch years, but you rarely hear about the latter in the newsmags.

Trigger-happy police is another social problem Ed Koch helped give to New York. But the name of Eleanor Bumpers, the black, elderly, and innocent victim of a NYPD shotgun blast, is rarely invoked by the trend-mongers. It's worth noting that a decade of assaults on New York's black and Hispanic populations passed for business as usual. But when the darker folk got rude and restless it became "tribalization."

So the Apple is going rotten. Boston and post-Harold Washington Chicago have seen some nasty incidents, too. But that still leaves a lot of America out there unaccounted for. And even in those Northernmost tension-pits, there are still a lot of regular folk of every stripe down on the corners and in the schools and shops quietly trying to get over, together, and with precious little help from their "betters."

Which brings us to point two: Ethnic friction is an essential part of the dialectical process that made, makes, will make, and is making America what it is. It's right there on the money: e pluribus unum. "One from many." And that gets tense. It always has. Sometimes the tension is creative. Sometimes, as in many of the highly publicized incidents cited above, it is destructive.

Ethnic tensions most often grow destructive when the economic circumstances of ordinary all-colored Americans are most constricted. That's been true for 200 years. You can chart the rise and fall of racist and nativist movements with a map of the business cycle.

These days the old economic squeeze play is definitely on. The Reaganauts bled the bottom two-thirds of our pear-shaped economy so hard for so long -- with lowered wages, hidden taxes, and disinvestment -- that even Democratic politicians have started to notice the mess. When the economic downward pressures are this heavy, the miracle is that the multicolored and multicultural urban working class of, say, the Apple, Bosstown, or Chi-town hold it together as well as they do from day to day.

NOW FROM SUBSTANCE TO STYLE -- mass media alarmists often make the quintessentially suburban faux pas of confusing assertiveness with hostility. Take rap ("please," they might say). Rap often comes into these "tribalization" beefs because of the pathetic anti-Semitism in some of Public Enemy's work or, more unjustly, for the depictions of violence and anti-police sentiments in the music of LA-based Ice-T and NWA. There is also the genuinely despicable misogyny and homophobia all too common among all of the "hardcore" rappers, especially the unfortunately infamous 2 Live Crew.

Rap sexism and anti-gay hysteria is one thing. It's clearly evil and the hip-hop community needs a serious housecleaning from within on both of those counts. But all of the white media babble about violence and that hoary old mythical beast "reverse racism" is just more old-styled paranoia Caucasus, the pathological condition that Public Enemy calls "Fear of a Black Planet." What the nattering nabobs fail to point out is that even the most assertively "Afro-centric" rappers also have a huge, and growing, white audience.

2 Live Crew campaigns for itself under the slogan "2 Black, 2 Strong." But when the Florida legal heat was hottest it was Too Much Joy, a white, barely post-teen, punk band from the New York suburbs who traveled down to Broward County and played a show of 2 Live Crew covers in the club where the rappers were busted. The members of Too Much Joy are now out on bail awaiting their own trial date. But whatever the outcome of the case, their point about anti-racist unity is made.

Within the hip-hop nation, the party line on the 2 Live case is that, nasty as the Crew might want to be, it is not sex that "the Man" ultimately fears, it is black-white unity. The Crew themselves struck this chord when they borrowed the music from Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" (with the Boss' blessing) for a rap -- "Banned in the USA" -- protesting their incarceration.

The nightmare of America's cultural establishment is that white kids (i.e. the baby pundits) will find common cause with black folk. After all, the nipper hip-hoppers point out, that same thing happened once before, about thirtysomething years ago, and it turned the world upside down. The last thing our white, male, and wealthy ruling class wants to see is that kind of creative interracial disruption happening again.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.