Analysis of White, an Essay by Richard Dyer

"/The perversity
of separation, isolation,
after so many years of trying to enter their kingdoms,
now they suffer in tears, these others, saxophones whining
through the wooden doors of their less than gracious homes.
The poor have become our creators. The black. The thoroughly
ignorant.
Let the combination of morality
And inhumanity
Begin."
From "Short Speech to My Friends"
- Amiri Baraka

It is from the poetry and prose of Amiri Baraka along with the lives of those jazz artists and poets from 1950's New York City that Richard Dyer's essay White takes its breath. Though disconnected superficially in content, Dyer is indirectly supported by a close past that no doubt lines the interior of his own white skull. Using texts, poetry and prose surrounding Baraka's Beat movement - and, yes, I do with fervor feel that the movement sits in his satchel - alongside the more recent essays: The Question of Miles Davis by Jim Merod and Camping the Dirty Dozens: The Queer Resources of Black Nationalist Invective by Marlon Bryan Ross I will elucidate Dyer's purposely stimulating contentions.

Investigations.

Dyer refuses to produce a 'rounded conclusion (RD)' for White seeking instead to 'open up an area of investigation (RD)' In the spirit of this 'wish (RD)' let me begin the discussion of 'whiteness' with Amiri Baraka. One of the first statements from White emphasizes the need to '[grasp] whiteness as a culturally constructed category (RD)' but problems arise in and around that 'single-mindedness.(RD)' Isolating and analyzing those 'non-dominant groups (RD)' simply inflicts again the 'sense of oddness, differentness, [and] exceptionality (RD)' that they were trying to escape and produces the feeling that the individuals are 'departures from the norm. (RD)'
Baraka succeeds in promoting a white culture that borrowed from the new hip black jazz as acting mediator between the musicians, poets, and artists who then becomes piper publisher of the harvest of that mediation in his literary magazines - Yugen and later The Floating Bear along with Diane Di Prima. He is the one who, because of his color and connections, is in the clubs and hears people and knows people like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk. It is to the clubs like the Five Spot that he drags his new white friends that he has slipped in with. In his autobiography Baraka describes the change from being with a 'primarily black' group to 'being in a racially mixed group, then from racially mixed to an all-white coterie (MBR).'

The King.
At that time, before his connection with the Black Nationalist movement directly following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, in the 'downtown beat scene of Manhattan from 1957 to 1963 (MBR)' Baraka is LeRoi Jones. He found 'white compatriots' in poets like Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg who were '[rejecting] the organization man conformity of the 1950's Eisenhower-McCarthy establishment (MBR).' It was his connection with the poets that signaled his first connection with his search for and 'identity within the actual marginality of his black inheritance (MBR).' Baraka works alongside these poets and notices the similarities as he discusses in his essay Blues People:

The feeling of rapport between the jazz of the forties, fifties, and sixties with the rest of contemporary American art is not confined merely to social areas. There are aesthetic analogies, persistent similarities of stance that also create identifiable relationships...The writers who have been called the "Beat Generation" have gained much notoriety because of their very vocal attachment to jazz (BP)

Baraka fails to mention that it is he who introduces most of these white poets to the jazz that would influence and act as artistic vehicle to their desire for the new. He is creating the 'minority group patterned explicitly on the experience of African Americans,' but Baraka, like Miles Davis, wanted to 'empower the black man (JM).' Instead he empowers the white man.

The End?
Spurred by the death of Malcolm X and soon following the success of his play Dutchman, a play in which a young black male is teased and stereotyped by a white woman to the point of exasperation wherein he lashes out at her but she stabs him and other white people on the train throw him off the train to his death (D), LeRoi changes his name to Amiri Baraka and breaks with as much as the beat culture as possible. He is confused and feels like the outsider in this group and longs for the black brotherhood that the Black Nationalism would provide. This 'entry into blackness (MAP)' is discussed in his collection of poetry Black Magic. Eventually Baraka would refuse the Black Nationalists calling them fascist and racist and became a Third World Socialist - calling his experience one in a time of reactionary movements.

White Death.
Baraka thinks that he has lost his blackness and given more power to the whites in the process, but I feel that he has actually succeeded in killing whiteness among his peers and making real change. A poem of Baraka's says:

We want "poems that kill."
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
Guns.

Amiri, you have these - and you have created an army of poets who do the same. O'Hara, Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Diane di Prima - just to name a few - these are poets who shout from the rooftops and have changed the poetic form and the 'whiteness' the 'emptiness (RD)' that controlled previous poetic form. In State/Meant Baraka says:

We are unfair, and unfair.
We are black magicians, black art
s we make in black labs of the heart.

The fair are
fair, and death
ly white.

The day will not save them
and we own
the night.

It was not Baraka alone who inspired these powerful poets and he was inspired by others, of course, people like William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein were groundbreakers - but I believe that it was the jazz and the new connections that he instigated - the New American Bohemianism linked with the jazz culture that set loose a force not yet again matched in contemporary poetry.

Baraka fails to realize, also, that as a member of the beat force he succeeded in helping the black man. As a mediator between the new black jazz artists and the poets searching for holiness in a Whitmanic sense - Baraka succeeded. The jazz musicians had a new following and while the musicians and record labels promoted the musicians - suddenly it was hip to go to a club and listen to music when before it was almost unheard of. There appeared places like the Five Spot which became meccas for happenings and suchlike. White people felt the black 'otherness" and killed the stereotypical square white man inside. Y

In order to help the black man Baraka gave the white man a little more power than he had before. He helped spread his black 'spirit' to people who did not have access to it thereby killing the white man in his circle of friends. So in the end he wasn't really surrounded by the whiteness that he saw. His subconscious racism led him to the Black Nationalists but his clear head would lead him away in later years to a more democratic lifestyle. As Dyer describes in White, it was his single-mindedness which blinded him to his own success in killing the white men around him and it was Baraka's support of the white 'category' which acted against his true integrationist feelings.

Whiteness.
Dyer uses contemporary cinema to support the 'representation of white as white' for the 'white spectator' in films in which non-white characters play a significant role: Jezebel, Simba, and Night of the Living Dead. Three professedly different films yet embodying the characteristics required for analysis: Jezebel, Simba, and Night of the Living Dead. They discuss, respectively, the defiance of white female protagonist who lives through her colored help because she is trapped and comes to accept the rigid society and rules of conduct required of her in the society, the sorrow of white rule and black responses to it, and whiteness as not only rigidity but the 'living dead.'
The filmmakers use black heroes in each of these films to encourage the white people to see whiteness as a cultural category that they belong to. Dryer discusses the absence of white identity in the mind of a white person and the subsequent creation of subcategories (British, middle-class, ugly). Because Baraka was the only black man among his peers he was able to recognize and react to his difference. Dryer even confesses to his own doubt, being a white man, and questioning of a subject that 'seems not to be there as a subject at all.' This is possibly placed purposely so that the reader has a solid example from a trusted prophetic voice of whiteness - which helps to support his later claims of blindness. The purpose of this recognition is to change the way in which we create otherness. To stop marginalizing people because of their skin tone and to realize that the white person is privileged because of their skin tone - and in many cases by skin tone alone. To realize that it is the wrong way to look at people and marginalization can only stop when the white people realize that they are privileged unjustly and when 'colored' people stop punishing white people hypocritically for their skin tone.

Night of the Living Dead
An especially pertinent connection lies in the film Night of the Living Dead and Baraka's play Dutchman. Night ends with the killing of Ben, the black male hero, by the white 'dead.' There are just to many of them surrounding Ben and there is no hope for survival (RD). Similar to this is the ending of Dutchman wherein Clay, the male protagonist, is thrown off the train by white passengers after being stabbed (D) - here again the black man is surrounded by whites and is powerless after all of his struggle. This can either mean that there is no sense to the black struggle - or a message to both groups that says that something has to change. What is happening is wrong and no one is fixing it with present methods. Try something else - get to the root of the problem and stop killing each other.

Emptiness.
Dyer ends his White by saying that he will not create a solid conclusion to grab on to - he has no answers for us. He wants discussion, discourse, and deliberation. The life of Amiri Baraka aids in the discussion and further texts support and initiate new discourse. What is left is deliberation and the great question left for all is: What Now? We know that something is wrong but no one is providing us with any answers. We are being guided back to the beginning and the recognition of racism. It is only when we have looked into the eyes of the beast that we can see what is inside. Kill it, quickly, and then 'grow strong through this moving (SM)."
Baraka listened to Coltrane's Meditations right after 'Trane died. In his poem AM/TRAK Baraka passes on the message - one that speaks of his and Richard Dyer's hope and drive for change and reactionary movements and rings in rings my mind as a holiness. "It told [him] what to do:

Live you crazy mother
Fucker!
Live!
& organize
yr shit
as rightly
burning!

Works Cited.

RD - Richard Dyer. White, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation. London: Routledge, 1993.
MAP - Modern American Poetry. Internet: www. English. uiuc. Edu, December 7th 2001. Miscellaneous information on Amiri Baraka.
JM - Jim Merod. The Question of Miles Davis. Duke University Press, 2001.
MBR - Marlon B. Ross. Camping the Dirty Dozens: The Queer Resources of Black Nationalist Invective. Charles H. Rowell, 2000
BP - Blues People, The Modern Scene, Amiri Baraka.
SM - State/Meant. Amiri Baraka.
D - Dutchman. Amiri Baraka.