Reduced to the Small Screen
Incident, Reaction, Forget, Repeat: Formulaic Entertainment Replaces Serious Discussion on Race

By DeNeen L. Brown and Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 11, 2007; M01

Has racial conflict become amusement? Is the conversation about racism mere entertainment, dialogue rendered for show, inflammatory words tossed back and forth over a racial divide to excite an audience?


Thousands of black people are marooned after Hurricane Katrina amid government paralysis, and the race debate on TV kicks into overdrive. A black woman accuses some white men of rape at a Duke University party and the inflamed rhetoric flies.

Comedian Michael Richards shouts the N-word at a black man in a comedy club. Radio host Don Imus calls the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos."

Shouts of injustice fill the small-town streets of Jena, La., after white teens are suspended from school for hanging nooses from a tree while black teens are charged with attempted murder for a schoolyard fight. Nooses are found at the University of Maryland, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Columbia University.

Fox News's Bill O'Reilly has his turn on the stage of race after dining at a famous soul food restaurant and musing at the surprising civility of black people. Then comes James D. Watson, Nobel Prize winner and head of one of the world's leading genetics research institutes, questioning the intelligence of black people.

And with each episode in the long-running Saga of Race in America, a string of characters lines up to react to the latest eruption. The media records them as they take up positions in the Great Race Debate. The media stokes the discussion as self-proclaimed black leaders scream outrage while opponents -- often white, sometimes black -- scream counter-outrage. The "colorblind" wonder why we all just can't get along. And the rest of us watch from ringside, rooting for one camp or another, sometimes in silence.

Then inevitably, the media turns away. The outrage fades. The talking heads go silent. The curtain falls, and the debate recedes to wherever it goes until the next eruption.

Which raises the question: Has the debate over race become a melodrama? A bad television soap opera? A theatrical stage play with complex issues boiled down to a script? Entertaining words thrown around simply to satisfy the 24-hour news cycle, the blogosphere?

Are we doomed to debate racism over and over -- stuck in purgatory, a cycle of skirmishes, of shock and awe, with nothing gained, nothing learned?

Or is there a way to change the ritual, to go deeper into our national consciousness and get off this merry-go-round?
'Putting On a Show'

There it was on television one afternoon, another episode in the Great Race Debate. A perky commentator moderated the banter between two intellectuals discussing the Jena 6 case and the debate over racial injustice.

Even with the sound off, it looked like entertainment, says Alan Bean, executive director of Friends of Justice, a Texas-based criminal justice reform organization that began probing the Jena 6 case long before it became big news. Bean was watching the show while sitting in an airport. That's when it occurred to him: The race debate had become theater.

"When I looked at the woman who was the correspondent refereeing the fight between two talking heads, I didn't get the impression she was concerned about enlightening the audience or coming to a meeting of the minds or shedding light on inequities in the criminal justice system," says Bean, who is white. "Her primary concern seemed to be putting on a show."

The talking-head debates about racial conflicts "exert a kind of car-wreck fascination," says John McWhorter, senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

The debates are like a "recreational source of psychological policing," McWhorter says, "which reminds me of the place that religious faith held in medieval society. Being charged with racism today is like being charged as a heretic in medieval Europe. One must indulge in all kinds of gestures which one may or may not feel because to not do these things is to invite condemnation as a moral pervert."

The debate dissolves into a routine, "where all good thinking people are supposed to condemn that person," he says.

An example: Michael Richards's racist tirade at a comedy club in Los Angeles, where he even evoked a lynching. His words were caught on tape and played over and over. Black leaders demanded an apology. Richards issued a statement and apologized again and again.

Then there was silence. Episode ended.

"And now here we are today and the whole humbug over that looks like the formulaic cartoon that it was," says McWhorter, who is black. "We know now and we knew then that what Michael Richards said some night in some club, in the grand scheme of things, was utterly insignificant. But there is a ritual that America has been going through for 40 years where we grab on to all and any opportunity to show we are morally pure in not being racist."

The Rev. Al Sharpton knows about this pattern, of course. Those accused of racism often go to him or to Rev. Jesse Jackson seeking absolution. Sharpton has carved out a leading role in racial matters. He defines himself, Jackson and others as strategists with a goal. But he is aware that some people define him as a demagogue.

"Don't assume that because a lot of us are screaming and hollering in the middle, we don't have a strategy," he says. The media "try to reduce us to being performers on their stage rather than thinkers in our studies."

Of his penitent radio show guests, such as Richards and Imus, Sharpton says, "I think that they want to appear like they want absolution, but I really don't think that's what they want."

But he plays along, hosting them on his show as part of an orchestrated trap. In the case of Imus, Sharpton wanted him fired, and he wanted his employers to change their policy regarding racial language.

"I wanted to make it very clear to people why it is that I'm going after them, and to let them trap themselves with their own language," he said.

On the Sharpton show, Imus complained that he just could not win with "you people." Sharpton and many other African Americans find that phrase offensive. More fuel for the Great Race Debate.

In April, Imus was fired. The punishment didn't last. He's set to return to the airwaves next month.

And the race show goes on.
'A Public Conversation'

If the debate over racism has indeed become entertainment, many say the media and the entertainment business are to blame for encouraging searing sound bites and rhetorical racial skirmishes instead of forums for intellectual discussion.

Most of the infamous episodes of late have been white on black -- except for the ongoing anti-immigrant rhetoric, which many view as discriminatory against Latinos, and not just by whites.

Whether it's about blacks, Latinos, whites, whatever, the race rhetoric has transfixed audiences on television, in blogs and in newspapers for months. Often it is covered as if the debate was simple enough for soundbites. And that, some say, is the problem.

"I think the media's contribution is to make racism an entertainment issue," says Ted Morgan, professor of political science at Lehigh University, whose upcoming book is about the media culture.

"Television makes politics entertaining by turning politics into polarized conflict between two sides," he says. "The audience sympathizes with one side or the other because they are basically getting entertained. It leaves the public with no place in the conversation."

The media treats racism the same way, says Morgan, who is white.

"A public conversation isn't what you get when you tune into the nightly news," he says. "TV is trying to give us a lot of drama, conflict, pictures, basically to entertain us, keep us there watching that channel. That is not a venue that is compatible with public conversation."

Pueng Vongs, diversity committee chair for the Society of Professional Journalists, one of the largest associations of journalists in the country, says racially charged comments -- much like shootings and fires -- have become "big clicker stories," that drive up traffic on news organization Web sites.

News has been molded to fit the short attention span of viewers, Vongs says.

"With the Internet there is a constant hunger for something new and exciting to get hits or with broadcast media to get the viewers," Vongs says.

While the media provides context for events and a frame of reference by which people understand each other and the broader culture, they also perpetuate stereotypes and fuel sensationalism in the race debate, says Doreen Loury, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Arcadia University outside Philadelphia, where she teaches a course called "African American Images in the Media."

"I think it needs to do what it was charged to do," Loury, who is black, says of the news media. "It was charged to look at a situation and report . . . with some accuracy, not to look at racism as the flavor of the month."

"Objectivity is the key," she continues. "I know not every white person in Jena is a racist, but most of us think that now. The [media] objectivity isn't there. It's all about getting the story and not about getting the angle of the story to enhance the dialogue.

"Racism is a rough thing and it's real," she says. "I'm tired of people treating it as entertainment."
How White People Might See It

Racism. Isn't that the real rub here? Isn't all the shouting and hyperventilating and finger-pointing in the Great Race Debate about racism, its presence or its absence?

Let's put racism on the couch for a minute. Analyze it, get it to explain its tendency to persist despite attempts to kill it.

Often, whites don't see it -- or don't want to see it. Often, blacks know it is there -- or are primed to believe it is. That is the deep divide in how black and white Americans see racism, says John Dovidio, a Yale psychology professor.

That perception gap is complicated by the evolution of racism into a more "quiet" phenomenon, often viewed "as an exception, not typical," he says.

"From the perspective of the majority group, racism is not a big issue. We don't see it often. When we see it, we can explain it away," says Dovidio, author of "Prejudice, Discrimination and Racism."

"In surveys, 60 to 70 percent of white Americans say racism is a thing of the past," he says.

"From a white person's view, when certain incidents occur that are blatant, it is easy to recognize them, but the outrage is more localized. If you don't believe racism is widespread, you think once you take care of that little event, you can go back to business as usual. . . .

"Like Michael Richards: People were outraged. We have the debate. But because these are seen as rare and atypical events, they become like entertainment."

The problem in solving racism lies first in seeing it, says Dovidio, who is white. As with any process of healing, one must acknowledge the injury to get better.

The inability of many whites to acknowledge racism has a deep impact on the way race is discussed in society, because white people "control the discourse on what constitutes race in this country," says Paula Rothenberg, a senior fellow at City University in New York and author of "White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism."

"The reality is [in] every aspect of life -- economic, social, political -- white people benefit from the way the system is organized and black people experience deficiency," says Rothenberg, who is white. "The system is constructed so that it appears to be fair and just and neutral to all, when in fact white people inherit white supremacy and benefits. . . .

"White people are more likely to be hired. More likely to be paid higher salaries. Treated fairly. More likely to be assumed good people and kind people. . . . Every aspect of the system is rigged to benefit whites and to criticize or challenge people of color."
How Black People Might See It

For black Americans, the experience is the mirror opposite of whites. The eruptions do not appear to be merely isolated, but become more dots in the picture providing evidential clarity that racism is indeed real.

"Sixty to 70 percent of black Americans see racism as a continuing problem in America," Dovidio says. "Events will occur and minorities will see it not as an isolated event, but the tip of the iceberg of what they have been experiencing."

There is a genuine reaction not only to one offending event but a whole series of events in the past, says Dovidio.

"It confirms racism is out there and becomes a great way of pointing out racism is out there."

Because black people are aware that the broader society is often deaf to allegations of racism, "We get mad and feel like we have to express that we are mad," says Camille Z. Charles, associate director of the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Some black people then want to force society to hear their sense of grievance, thinking, "You have to acknowledge there was a wrong. I'm going to make you acknowledge that," says Charles, who is black.

But some argue that racism has been perpetuated, kept alive by people who benefit from the show. Benefit from stoking white guilt. Benefit from encouraging victimhood.

Robert L. Woodson, founder and president of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, calls such people "grievance merchants whose purpose in life is to racialize every situation conceivable without finding out what the facts are."

"Race is an intimidating issue," says Woodson, who is black. "If you want people to back off, all you have to do is inject race, and all the rules of dialogue, all the rules of comity are set aside. You are either for the people who are charging racism or you are for injustice."

Racism gets boiled down into inflammatory words, thrown like swords. Woodson argues that of course racism still exists, but people of color, particularly those with lower incomes, are hurt by perpetuated notions of their victimization.

Woodson, who worked in the civil rights movement, contrasts the marches of today with those of that era and its goal of fostering unity. "In today's world, the purpose is never to unite," he says. "The purpose is to make cheap headlines in the name of being champions of injustice. They are entertainers. I call them civil rights reenactors. Just like Civil War reenactors dress up and act like we are in still the Civil War."

Black people, as a group, are still beset by intractable problems, says Shelby Steele, who is black. He is author of "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era."

Steele lists poverty, single-parent families, high school dropout rates. "But what do we do? Talk about Don Imus and Michael Richards and do nothing to explore the 70 percent illegitimacy rate." Yet, when it comes to race relations, he says, the country has made remarkable progress.

"White America has undergone a marvelous if unremarked moral evolution in the last 40 years and racism is no longer the barrier that it used to be," says Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "That doesn't mean it no longer exists, that it is no longer present. But it no longer stunts the life of black people.

"We have come to the point where we can entertain ourselves with it," he says, adding sarcastically, "Isn't that wonderful?"
And the Cycle Starts Again

And the Great Race Debate goes on. Nooses still appear, roiling the racial landscape. In the category of contrition, Duane "Dog" Chapman, TV's "Dog the Bounty Hunter," issued an apology late last month for using the N-word to describe his son's girlfriend. (His reality show was canceled.)

There's never a shortage of fodder for the race debate. And no shortage of people to comment, whether to enlighten or just to stir up the rancor.

Steele often is asked to participate in televised discussions. But sometimes the format is "racist," he says.

"I will not be in a situation where we have a white moderator and two blacks screaming at each other. That is profanity. It is gladiatorial, where blacks fight for the amusement of whites. And the white moderator never takes a stand, never tells you what he or she thinks. . . . Whites can say we are having a discussion on race. And whites will not tell you what they think. They come to blacks to get statements because only blacks have the moral authority to speak about race. That is how the formula gets established. I've always resented it."

Abigail Thernstrom, a white member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, says the race debate is one-sided because white people are afraid of revealing their thoughts in a climate of anger and accusation.

"People are afraid of saying the wrong thing, something that can be labeled as racially questionable," says Thernstrom. "It stifles the debate and lessens our public lives because there's much to be debated."

So the show goes on. The debate over racism becomes as predictable as reruns on basic cable. The audience watches the Great Race Debate for a while, then changes the channel -- until the next episode.

Realty Times

Census, Labor, Fed Show Earnings Gap For Race, Gender, Beauty
Mar 18, 2007, 12:05 pm PDT

While it shouldn't be a surprise that advanced degree holders earn four times more money than high school dropouts, the earnings overall are lower than might be expected, particularly for women.

Education

According to tabulations just released by the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2006, adults 18 and older with a master's, professional or doctoral degree earned an average of $79,946, while those with less than a high school diploma earned about $19,915.

The "2006 Current Population Survey's Annual Social and Economic" supplement, which is conducted in February, March and April at about 100,000 addresses nationwide, also showed adults with a bachelor's degree earned an average of $54,689 in 2005, while those with a high school diploma earned $29,448.

Other highlights from the tables found:


86 percent of all adults 25 and older reported they had completed at least high school. More than one-quarter (28 percent) of adults 25 and older had attained at least a bachelor's degree.

High school graduation rates for women 25 and older continued to exceed those of men, 86 percent and 85 percent, respectively. However, a larger proportion of men held a bachelor's degree or higher (29 percent compared with 27 percent of women).

Non-Hispanic whites had the highest proportion of adults with a high school diploma or higher (91 percent), followed by Asians (87 percent), blacks (81 percent) and Hispanics (59 percent).

Minnesota and Alaska had the highest proportions of people 25 and older with a high school diploma or higher (around 93 percent).

The District of Columbia had the highest proportion of people 25 and older with a bachelor's degree or higher (49 percent).
Gender

A sizeable gender earnings gap still exists, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, across nearly every occupational category. Overall, full-time working women earn 80 cents to every dollar earned by men. African-American women are paid an average of 67 cents and Hispanic women an average of 56 cents for every $1 earned by a white male.

Surprisingly, the gender penalty widens with education. Those women associate's and bachelor's degrees earned 75 cents to men's $1; those women with master's degrees earned even less -- 72 cents per dollar. Female doctorate degree holders earned 75 cents to men's $1, while those women with professional degrees earned 60 cents to men's $1.

A study by the Association of MBAs found that the average basic salary for all the male MBAs was $120,130, while women earned $97,700, a 20 percent differential. With bonuses, stock options and other incentives, the difference was nearly 25 percent, squaring with the Labor Bureau's numbers.

Beauty

In related news, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis conducted a study with researchers that found beautiful people tend to earn five percent more an hour than less attractive colleagues. Worse, the Fed found that plain or unattractive workers were penalized for their lack of looks, earning as much as nine percent less an hour.

Heavy white women were penalized for being overweight earning 17 percent less in 1981 and 1988 than women within the recommended body mass index range, while short men suffered similar discrimination. Those taller than the national median earned 1.8 percent increase in wages for every additional inch of height.

The Brown Man's Burden

By Henry Labouchère

Truth (London); reprinted in Literary Digest 18 (Feb. 25, 1899). 

Pile on the brown man's burden
 To gratify your greed; 
Go, clear away the "niggers" 
Who progress would impede;
Be very stern, for truly 
'Tis useless to be mild 
With new-caught, sullen peoples, 
Half devil and half child. 

Pile on the brown man's burden; 
And, if ye rouse his hate, 
Meet his old-fashioned reasons 
With Maxims up to date. 
With shells and dumdum bullets 
A hundred times made plain 
The brown man's loss must ever 
Imply the white man's gain. 

Pile on the brown man's burden, 
compel him to be free; 
Let all your manifestoes 
Reek with philanthropy. 
And if with heathen folly 
He dares your will dispute, 
Then, in the name of freedom, 
Don't hesitate to shoot. 

Pile on the brown man's burden, 
And if his cry be sore, 
That surely need not irk you-- 
Ye've driven slaves before. 
Seize on his ports and pastures, 
The fields his people tread; 
Go make from them your living, 
And mark them with his dead. 

Pile on the brown man's burden, 
And through the world proclaim 
That ye are Freedom's agent-- 
There's no more paying game! 
And, should your own past history 
Straight in your teeth be thrown, 
Retort that independence 
Is good for whites alone.

from amazon.com:
THE RISING TIDE -- John M Barry
Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
When Mother Nature rages, the physical results are never subtle. Because we cannot contain the weather, we can only react by tabulating the damage in dollar amounts, estimating the number of people left homeless, and laying the plans for rebuilding. But as John M. Barry expertly details in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, some calamities transform much more than the landscape.
While tracing the history of the nation's most destructive natural disaster, Barry explains how ineptitude and greed helped cause the flood, and how the policies created to deal with the disaster changed the culture of the Mississippi Delta. Existing racial rifts expanded, helping to launch Herbert Hoover into the White House and shifting the political alliances of many blacks in the process. An absorbing account of a little-known, yet monumental event in American history, Rising Tide reveals how human behavior proved more destructive than the swollen river itself. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal
In the spring of 1927, America witnessed perhaps its greatest natural disaster: a flood that profoundly changed race relations, government, and society in the Mississippi River valley region. Barry (The Transformed Cell, LJ 9/1/92) presents here a fascinating social history of the effects of the massive flood. More than 30 feet of water stood over land inhabited by nearly one million people. Almost 300,000 African Americans were forced to live in refugee camps for months. Many people, both black and white, left the land and never returned. Using an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, Barry clearly traces and analyzes how the changes produced by the flood in the lower South came into conflict and ultimately destroyed the old planter aristocracy, accelerated black migration to the North, and foreshadowed federal government intervention in the region's social and economic life during the New Deal. His well-written work supplants Pete Daniel's Deep'n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi Flood (1977) as the standard work on the subject. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
-?Charles C. Hay III, Eastern Kentucky Univ. Libs., Richmond
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Exiles from a city and from a nation

Cornel West
Sunday September 11, 2005
The Observer


It takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we saw among the poor black people of New Orleans to get America to focus on race and poverty. It happens about once every 30 or 40 years.
What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: 'You are on your own'. Well, they really were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and it was Darwinism in action - the survival of the fittest. People said: 'It looks like something out of the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was Third World long before the hurricane.
( Read more... )

http://match.com/matchscene/article.aspx?articleid=1307&sid=DF75811B-DDCF-46
5A-BAA5-004A0C9CAB92&theme=215&trackingid=0&lid=0
Interracial dating: Who wants what?
by Randy B. Hecht

People say love happens when you're not looking for it, that it takes you by surprise when and where you least expect it. But what happens when the surprise includes the added dimension of discovering yourself falling for someone of another race? And what do you risk losing if you're not open to that possibility?

Is love a numbers game?
Statistics show that most people are open to dating someone of another racial background; singles who limit their dating entirely to people of their own race are the distinct minority.

Only 36 percent of whites and 24 percent of African-Americans restrict themselves to same-race dating. After that, the numbers plummet — only 17 percent of Asians, 13 percent of Indians and Middle Easterners, 9 percent of Hispanics and Native Americans, and 4 percent of Pacific Islanders.
( Read more... )

Alan Cumming: "There was quite a lot of gallows humor. Halle and I, we did a lot of me rubbing my tail up against her. I had a little stub. We have little tender moments. We said if we had babies they'd be bruised, because she's black and I'm blue."

The Ballad of Crowfoot -- Willie Dunn
( Read more... )

Prose-Poem-Drama: "Proemdra" -- "Black Aesthetics" versus "White Aesthetics" in South Africa
Author
Zander, Horst

As is well known, blacks in South Africa were not only at odds with political and economic colonialism right from the start, but also quarreled with white concepts of writing from the very. moment the colonialists imported them into the country. These Western views of literature differed considerably from those the blacks were familiar with in their oral tradition.

It has often been pointed out that in traditional African communities there are strong holistic tendencies. Various fields of social activities are not separated from each other, nor is there any apparent division of labor. A similar situation exists among the discourses in such communities. The political discourse, the historical discourse, the religious discourse, the literary discourse -- all these are intimately interwoven, or actually one. In addition, there also seem to be no clear-cut boundaries between different types or genres of texts, not even a real distinction between verse and prose (see, e.g., Finnegan 74-76, 361-68, 390-91, and Opland 33). This tendency towards an homogeneous, integrative discourse is particularly intensified by the orality of all communication in such societies, since a division of discourses is largely connected with literacy and print. It is true that studies on the African oral tradition regularly subdivide their corpus into various forms of literature, but then this kind of classification seems to represent primarily an effort of Western or Western-trained black scholars to organize their research material rather than a reflection of the actual features of traditional literature.(2) As it is, blacks in South Africa and in other parts of the continent regularly emphasize that in their tradition "art like life is whole" (Dathorne 5). This also means that literature is not regarded as performing a function differing from other discourses; instead, it serves definite social goals.

Up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European societies shared many features with traditional African communities. There, too, no clear distinction existed, for example, between religious and secular activities, between work and spare time, between a private and a public sphere. Similarly, no distinct borderlines were drawn between different types of discourse. And as far as a particular discourse was -- either at that time or subsequently -- identified as a specific literary discourse, it exercised apparently social and political functions.

All this changed, however, during the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century, when many comparably autonomous spheres emerged, affecting the discourses as well. Now, for example, a news discourse was separated from a "novels discourse" (on this issue, cf. Lennard J. Davis) and from political, religious, and scientific forms of discourse, all of which achieved relative independence; from them the literary discourse was delimitated as well. Gradually, an increasing number of literary texts abstained from producing political or ecclesiastical propaganda, and they no longer served primarily to convey social information; instead, they aimed at entertainment and at providing literary experiences in their own right. This emergence of literature as an "autonomous" sphere was accompanied, moreover, by various efforts to differentiate within the field of literary texts, for instance between different genres -- especially in the wake of neoclassical orientations.

Subsequently, the "autonomous" literary sphere became the object of a similarly "autonomous" metadiscourse, initiated primarily by Kant, who uncoupled aesthetics from other fields of cognition. For Kant, there existed a hiatus between the discerning subject and the world, and he held that the beautiful in particular could not be seized by conceptual thought. Therefore, he regarded all judgments on aesthetic representations as judgments of taste, not, however, of cognition. Basically, he conceived of literary works as autonomous objects that are characterized by "purposiveness without purpose" and should be treated with "disinterested complacency."

Of course, Hegel subsequently attempted to conjoin all that Kant had shattered and to subject literature to conceptual thought, thus, in a way, reapproaching older Western as well as African conceptions. Following Hegel, in the twentieth century, we can find similar tendencies in Marxist literary theory. The mainstream of later Western literary theory and aesthetics adhered, however, to the conceptions of Kant, as is particularly evident in Formalism, New Criticism, and Structuralism. The literary artefact came to be regarded as a self-contained, self-sufficient world, as a text that is independent of its production and reception situation and that pursues exclusively literary aims (since all that is important happens within the text itself). It is especially this renunciation of all extratextual intentions that is, moreover, held to guarantee a text's transcendence of particular contexts and to turn the issues created by the text into "universal" issues. Literature that serves pragmatic goals (which nevertheless continued to be produced), didactic, political, religious, socially committed literature, is often dismissed in such an aesthetic view, based on a division of labor between the various discourses, as an inferior, bastardized form. This approach to literature was to culminate in modernist conceptions. It goes without saying that such theories claim universal validity.

In the nineteenth century, when blacks in South Africa were gradually starting to become literate, the clash of African and Western conceptions evidently contributed among blacks to an almost total refusal to write fictional texts, which -- according to Western views -- lacked any immediate social or political significance. Instead, black South African authors concentrated on imitating various forms of white journalistic writing: travelogues, biographies, and autobiographies that served obvious social functions. In fact, this kind of nonfictional writing was, more often than not, profoundly political, discussing the role of the blacks in a society dominated by whites.

In the early twentieth century, the strong tendency of black writers towards a politicized journalism continued. During the first three decades, a vast number of journalistic texts (both in English and in African languages) were published in newspapers and magazines, and various books appeared, all of them, however, factual ones. Apart from a few exceptions,(3) fictional and literary texts did not emerge until the end of the 1920s, when R. R. R. Dhlomo published An African Tragedy (1928), Sol. T. Plaatje at last managed to find a publisher for his novel Mhudi (1930), and Dhlomo started to write numerous stories for magazines and newspapers.

Though copying Western models, this black fiction was -- and for some two decades remained -- to a fair extent influenced by the oral tradition; and it regularly aimed at performing pragmatic functions. Thus Dhlomo's An African Tragedy occasionally turns into a fervent pamphlet, with no less overtly religious aims than in the case of a sermon; and Mhudi is not just intended as a fictional historical novel, but as an endeavor to re-read and re-write history from a black point of view.

With the beginning of the 1950s, black authors -- following the earlier example of Peter Abrahams -- began more intensively to copy Western, especially black American models of writing, refuting altogether literary conventions of the indigenous tradition. In fact, the authors of the so-called Drum generation perfected the imitation of white writing and largely complied with Western conceptions of literature. In one important aspect, however, these writers also deviated from orthodox Western aesthetics, namely in often producing works, predominantly short stories, of protest (though they appeared mainly in other outlets than Drum). It was primarily as a result of the introduction and implementation of the various apartheid laws during the 1950s that black authors used fictional texts as instruments to achieve political goals, to condemn the apartheid system, thus violating the Western ideal of the "purposelessness" of literature of quality. Because of their Western orientation, many authors were quite apologetic about their texts, but claimed that the political situation in South Africa left them no other option.

The 1960s witnessed a massive clampdown by the government on this type of protest writing (and black writing in general), resulting in the authors being silenced and driven into exile. And when, after this period of deprivation, black literature was revived in the following decade, it again looked quite different. Based now on the concepts of Black Consciousness, white literary orientations were no less denounced than the political values of whites: in fact, this new generation of blacks conceived of the Western literary conceptions as an integral part of Western imperialism. In a reaction that paralleled discussions by other Africans and black Americans about creating a black aesthetic as opposed to a white aesthetic (e.g., Gayle; Gurr and Zirimu; Chinweizu et al.; Johnson et al.), black South African authors now again returned to traditional African models of literature. And one of the most important aspects of their black aesthetic was to reject the Western idea of a division of labor between thevarious discourses. Thus Mothobi Mutloatse declared:

In a race-obsessed country like South Africa the part the black writer has to play is rather demanding -- but nevertheless worth it. It seems to me that he is expected to be a jack of all trades -- and a master of all! He has to be tradesman, docker, psychologist, nurse, miner, matshigilane, tshotsa, teacher, athlete, toddler, mother, musician, father, visionary, imbongi and -- above all -- oral historian. (1)(4)

This also meant renouncing the Western credo according to which "good" literature has to abstain from all political goals and is to pursue only literary aims of its own. In the black tradition, it was contended, literature always had distinct social functions. Zakes Mda points out:

I have dismally failed to respond to the strange aesthetic concepts so cherished in the western world that profess that artistic creation is an end in itself, independent of politics and social requirements. I draw from the traditional African aesthetics where art could not be separated from life. In our various African societies the artist was a social commentator. (296; see also Gwala)

Consequently, it was claimed that the current black literature, especially under the conditions of apartheid, had also primarily to serve political goals, namely the resistance against white oppression. Therefore, black South Africans not only saw no more reason to have a bad conscience when writing political fiction; black writers and critics now declared that "good" black literature necessarily had to be politically committed. As Mbulelo Mzamane puts it:

Since the most important lessons for South Africans are in the political sphere, a writer in that land is
unimportant, irrelevant and probably alienated unless he is political. Art and politics in South Africa, as
in many parts of Africa, have become inseparable for the simple reason that politics pervades all
aspects of a blackman's existence. (150)

In part as a reaction against the massive censorship in South Africa, this new black literature of the
1970s was mainly poetry (which could be transmitted orally, avoiding government control); but such
oral poetry also conformed well to the objectives of Black Consciousness. In contrast to the solitary
act of reading, orally performed poetry afforded a common social experience. Accordingly, the former
protest literature was now replaced by a resistance literature that appealed to black solidarity in the
struggle against white hegemony.

In written and printed literature, black authors displayed a similar recurrence to traditional African
concepts, even writers who had only little sympathy with Black Consciousness ideals.(5) A
particularly clear expression of the attack on Western literary conceptions appears in those texts that
were labeled "proemdras" and that, in the final decade of the apartheid regime, assumed in several
ways a programmatic status in the blacks' opposition to white aesthetics and values.

The development of the concept of the "proemdra" was also motivated by the spirit of Black
Consciousness; and it was Mothobi Mutloatse who coined the term and wrote a kind of manifesto,
namely in the introduction of the anthology Forced Landing (1980), from which some lines were
already quoted above:

We are involved in and consumed by an exciting experimental art form that I can only call, to coin a
phrase, `proemdra': Prose, Poem and Drama in one!

We will have to donder conventional literature: old-fashioned critic and reader alike. We are going to
pee, spit and shit on literary convention before we are through; we are going to kick and pull and push
and drag literature into the form we prefer. We are going to experiment and probe and not give a damn
what the critics have to say. Because we are in search of our true selves -- undergoing self-discovery
as a people.

We are not going to be told how to re-live our feelings, pains and aspirations by anybody who speaks
from the platform of his own rickety culture. We'll write our poems in a narrative form; we'll write
journalistic pieces in poetry form; we'll dramatise our poetic experiences; we'll poeticise our historical
dramas. We will do all these things at the same time. (5)

As the neologistic term "proemdra" indicates, the main target of this new kind of writing is the
Western compartmentalization of literature into different genres, hence the primary aim is the fusion of
modes. But as the phrase "we'll write journalistic pieces in poetry form" demonstrates, the boundary
between fictional and nonfictional discourse is under attack as well. Moreover, the condemnation of
critics and the reference to the self-discovery of blacks as a people disclose that the literary attack is
simultaneously a political attack: the emancipation from Western literary conceptions is part of the
liberation from white domination in general.

This exuberant introduction of the "proemdras" as a new and exclusively South African genre (or rather
nongenre) did not, however, evoke, as far as can be ascertained by evidence from printed texts, too
large an echo. Strangely enough, the anthology Forced Landing does not contain a single "proemdra."
That this text type did nevertheless enjoy some popularity is illustrated by the fact that occasionally
older texts, written long before the term "proemdra" was coined, were later relabeled "proemdras." This
is the case, for example, with a piece by Can Themba entitled "Music, Food of Love! Tale of a Girl
Whom Music Saved from the Blues," which Essop Patel classifies as a "proemdra" in the collection
The World of Can Themba (1985). The text offers a short love story, presented in what appear to be 14
little prose stanzas. Originally, however, these "stanzas" were subtexts to photographs; and what is
declared here to be a "proemdra" is but the verbal extract of a picture story published in Drum in
August 1957.

The label "proemdra" seems somewhat confusing, also with regard to Mothobi Mutloatse's "A Walk
Down Memory Lane," which is included in the anthology Reconstruction (1981) in a separate
"Proemdra" section. This piece deals with the first anniversary of 16 June 1976 (when the Soweto
uprise started) and recalls some of the main events, discussing the consequences and lessons for the
future they provide for both blacks and whites. The text gives the overall impression of an essay, but
employs a highly condensed language and displays numerous rhetorical devices, for instance when
Mutloatse writes:

Warped minds became alive; babies stopped crawling and started strutting; boozers jumped out of the
barrel; liars stopped cheating; conmen walked the straight way of the Lord; and the men of God
walked the way of the people; and the people walked the way of Unity. And they walked tall!

We were the enemies of fear. Fear was so afraid of us that it hid itself inside bullets and burst during a
fit of frustration and paranoia coupled with claustrophobia.

We smoked teargas and swallowed bullets, and vet we died so that we should live in peace and
harmony. We were reborn -- without the help of the Bible. We were new people. WE ARE
DIFFERENT!

...

Yes, we all remember well how we burnt our useless voices singing songs from the bottoms of our
hearts; songs of hope; songs of thirst; songs of hunger; songs of metamorphosis; and songs of an
awakened people; songs of old of Zenzi; songs of we-shall-be-free-and-God-knows-it-too.

O, yes, we know what panic did to THEM.

And on the fourth day of the eighth month, we still managed to scrape up that hill to seek the release
of our brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends, sons and daughters who
had been whisked off to our reluctant resort -- jail. (306-07)

In these passages, Mutloatse's effort to transform his prose language into poetic diction are more than
evident, and though the importance of the Bible for blacks is dismissed, the text itself displays obvious
traits of a Biblical style. The last three lines of the piece then actually take the form of lines of
poetry.(6) Moreover, the motifs of life, death, and rebirth touched upon in the paragraphs quoted
meander through the whole text, and at the end the corpse becomes the central image for the whites
in the country.

Although "A Walk Down Memory Lane" may thus be an example of a journalistic article written in
poetry form, according to Mutloatse's programmatic declarations, there is no element of drama in this
text. Neither does this piece break new ground with regard to the distinction between fictional and
factual discourse. It is rather similar to many pieces of black South African journalism that use various
rhetorical and literary devices in order to enhance their political impact and of which some instances
are also included in the section "Journalism" of the anthology Reconstruction (R. V. Selope-Thema,
"How Congress Began"; Nokugcina Mhlope, "My Dear Madam"). The main difference between "A
Walk Down Memory Lane" and those articles therefore seems to lie simply in the label of this text --
and, in fact, in the influential magazine Staffrider, in which many of the pieces of the anthology first
appeared, and especially in the collection Reconstruction in the Staffrider Series, an arbitrary play with
labels seems to be part of a strategy to subvert different classifications of texts. Thus, the anthology
contains inter alia a section "Prose," implying fiction as opposed to the section "Journalism"; but two
of the allegedly fictional pieces (Mankati Kwadi's "Fate" and Narain Aiyer's "The Cane Is Singing") are
apparently journalistic texts. "Cane" was originally published as a "story" in Staffrider (3.4 [1980-81]),
as was Nokugcina Mhlope's piece "My Dear Madam" (3.4 [1980-81]; under the name Nogukcina
Sigwili) which in Reconstruction is relabeled "Journalism." Thus, the game with labels started by the
magazine, which aimed at showing the close affiliation of "documentary" and "imaginative" genres
(see Vaughan, "Staffrider" 200) is continued and intensified by Mutloatse in the collection
Reconstruction. He, too, places "Cane" in an apparently wrong section, whereas in the case of
Mhlope's text he seems to rectify the labeling. But in so doing, he again contributes to the game in
that this text now bears two different and contradicting labels. As it is, the Western differentiation
between journalism and (fictional) prose seems to be introduced in Reconstruction only in order to blur
such compartmentalizations. And in the case of "A Walk Down Memory Lane," the boundary
transgression of the alleged "proemdra" also lies primarily in its confounding label.

The situation is somewhat, though not altogether different in Maropodi Mapalakanye's "Somebody Is
Dangling (Edited Version of a Dramatic Presentation)" in the same collection. Although this text
contains no genuine prose, the verses are quite prosaic indeed. Furthermore, the beginning of the
"proemdra" displays an obvious narrative element, which is perhaps reminiscent of prose rather than of
poetry:

Down Plein Street

At the park,

I met a privileged underdog.

Of his paint I couldn't draw

Whether pink or colourless.

This worn-out skeleton was pretty dirty.

I greeted,

He didn't reply;

I smiled

He begged;

I sympathised,

He knelt;

I offered 50 cents,

He played a raw comedy.

Then a black hobo landed with rage and motive

From somewhere, I don't know where

And --

`Don't give to that Nationalist!

He votes for our miseries,

He's a Broederbonder,

Take it back!

Don't let him have it.'

`Voertsek kaffir.'

`Kaffir?'

I protested.

I lunged at him

Caught his paw

Enriched by my coin,

And --

`Asseblief, Asseblief,'

He begged me.

I meant business.

The black one Shared the Struggle.

We retrieved the coin,

And I gave it to the

Brother. (310-11)

Later, however, the text turns rather mediative or descriptive:

Let me say it:

Life here is rich with

Art and matter, mad with emotions

Whose human frictions and tensions

Contribute to earthquakes and revolutions.

Peasants here

Are terrorists to voters,

Voters terrorists to peasants,

Freedom fighters to soldiers terrorists,

Soldiers terrorists to freedom fighters.

Are our forces in combat with tornadoes

From outside

Intending to grab `our' Gold?

Or is it that our defender

Is a vulture to most species of this land?

Don't tell me

If you know.

If you don't,

Classify

Yourself with any class you belong to.

But make it yours.

I'm tired of human classification.

You know, I've learned enough from the dumps of bantu education. (312)

The poetic element represented by the verse form is further substantiated by occasional song-like
stanzas (313), and it is intensified in that the central image reoccurs refrain-like throughout the text,
namely that "somebody is dangling / From the branch of a rootless tree" (314), an image, naturally, for
the white people in the country. The dramatic element, finally, also emerges from the beginning of the
piece, which is perhaps as much drama as narrative; in addition, the text as a whole is described in
the subtitle as an "[e]dited version of a dramatic presentation" (310).

In fusing fictional and factual discourse, however, the text proves as little illuminating as "A Walk
Down Memory Lane." On the other hand, the piece displays, to a larger degree than Mutloatse's
"proemdra," features of mixing conventions of poetic texts with those of expository pieces. The second
quotation may serve as an example. As the antithetic and chiastic juxtaposition of the respective
"terrorists" demonstrates, the text's attack on such classifications is not only stated, but created in
exposing the interchangeability, of the classifying labels. Nevertheless, there is also the overt verdict
on such classifications in the lines further down. In a similar way, the whole "proemdra" -- which is
primarily concerned with such a "human classification," while striving to reveal it as an actually
"inhuman classification" (318) and dealing with the rift and hatred between blacks and whites as well
as with the pending danger emerging from this confrontation -- seems also constantly compelled to
spell out expressis verbis what it constitutes. It repeatedly creates the issues in a -- modernist --
poetic manner, and yet Mapalakanye seems afraid that they are too highly encoded and hence may
be obscured; he therefore simultaneously explains them as in an expository text. In this aspect,
"Somebody Is Dangling" is similar to much of the black poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, which
endeavors to be populist. Though opting for a poetic form, the authors nevertheless want their texts to
display some of the clarity and immediateness of a political pamphlet. Consequently, "Somebody Is
Dangling" also exercises the functions of such a pamphlet: like numerous other texts, it is designed
as a warning against whites and as an appeal to the solidarity and the liberation efforts of blacks (as is
evidenced by the capitalizatio