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Books by Floyd W.
Hayes, III
A Turbulent Voyage: Readings in African
American Studies /
Forty
Acres and a Mule: The Rape of Colored Americans
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Overview
Floyd W. Hayes,
III, coordinator of programs and undergraduate studies—A
senior lecturer in the
Department of Political Science, Hayes is
coordinator of programs and undergraduate studies in the
Center for Africana Studies. His teaching and research
interests include black politics and political
philosophy, urban politics and public policy,
educational policymaking and politics, leadership
studies, and the politics of jazz. He is the author of
numerous articles and the editor of
A Turbulent Voyage: Readings in African
American Studies.
He is currently
working on a book examining the social and political
thought of Richard Wright, “Domination and Ressentiment:
The Desperate Vision of Richard Wright.” Hayes earned a
BA in French and political science from North Carolina
Central University, an MA in African Area Studies from
the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in
government and politics from the University of Maryland.
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Given the present resurgence of antiblack
racism and violence throughout America—as
witnessed by lynchings in Virginia and Texas, recent white
supremacist aggression at many college campuses, such as Miami
University in Ohio and Cornell University in upstate New York,
and the vicious right-wing assault on Affirmative Action
policies—Kwame
Toure’s commitment to contest and uproot all forms of cultural
domination is important because it should inspire us to study
and struggle against injustice, even to fight the racism and
repression at Purdue. Indeed, he epitomizes the contours,
questions, challenges, and struggles of our times. A
Tribute to Kwame Toure
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Perhaps Richard Wright’s novel of ideas,
The Outsider
(1953), is his most sustained and compelling inquiry
into the question of the possibility and quality of
Black male freedom in an anti-Black American world.
Wright also is concerned with the issue of power and the
knowledge that buttresses its performance. Ultimately,
he constructs the image of a self-possessed Black man,
who is fearless, knowledgeable, and courageous. Untamed
by the culture of modern society, he is an
intellectually authoritative existential-nihilist—a
rebel-criminal who creates and tries to live by his own
social rules (Hayes 1997).
Significantly, to counteract
prevailing literary notions of the Black man as ignorant
and submissive, Wright was engaged in creating a new
conception of the Black man. Finally,
The Outsider
represents Wright’s disillusionment with the Communist
Party and with the possibility of racial justice in
America.
The Cultural Politics of Paul Robeson and
Richard Wright
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As an
actor, singer, and scholar, Robeson became the most
controversial Black figure in America and the most
widely known around the world during the 1930s and
1940s. As a writer of fiction and non-fiction during
the same period, Wright almost single-handedly created
new, progressive, and assertive images of Black people
that challenged traditional racist stereotypes. Both
men left America for a period of time. Robeson
eventually returned with hope and optimism in the USA;
Wright became a permanent exile in Paris after World War
II, considering white supremacist America beyond
redemption. Although Robeson saw himself as a son of
Africa, Wright considered himself a Black man who was
the displaced offspring of the modern West.
Significantly, both men were knowledgeable, powerful,
and courageous.
The Cultural Politics of Paul Robeson and Richard Wright
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In his
search for freedom, Wright’s rebel-nihilist breaks the
laws of civil society, but he considers himself
innocent. He attempts to create and live by his own
values. Wright refers briefly to this figure as an
ethical criminal. There also is the district
attorney, who is sworn to uphold the law, but who does
not believe in the sanctity of the law. Rather, he
admires and identifies with those who break the rules of
civil society, yet view themselves as innocent. But can
individuals, particularly black persons, actually escape
the laws of a decadent American social order and create
their own rules? Can individuals live beyond good and
evil?
Richard Wright and the Dilemma of the
Ethical Criminal
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Floyd Hayes will
speak on “Womanizing Richard Wright: Constructing The
Black Feminine in
The Outsider.”
Tuesday, April 8th 4-6pm Sherwood Room
Levering Hall. WGS Program for the Study of Women, and
co-sponsored with the Center for Africana Studies
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Table
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I dare say that even in your American
political philosophy course, there might be a discussion
of 4 or 5 black political thinkers, at best. Perhaps!
At worst, most of these courses include no black voice.
Why do conventional political philosophy professors
ignore this profound voice of black opposition?
Presently, I am reading through many of the speeches
that black people gave during and after the Holocaust of
Black Enslavement. Why aren't you reading them, too, in
your American political philosophy course? Philip Foner
and Robert J. Branham have edited the numerous speeches
of black women and men in
Lift Every Voice: African
American Oratory, 1787-1900. This book contains
925 pages; obviously, black people had something
important to say!
Ongoing Struggles in Black
Academia |
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For numerous
historical reasons, particularly since the advent of
modernity and the rise of the Enlightenment in Western
Europe, the production of Africana cultural and literary
discourse has been a political act. In particular,
African American culture—and black culture in Latin
America and the Caribbean—emerged within the context of
Western cultural domination—the Atlantic Slave Trade,
chattel slavery, imperialism, colonialism, segregation,
white supremacy, and antiblack hatred and violence.
These structures and processes of domination also served
as the cultural milieu in which Western Europeans and
Euro-Americans came to define and represent their
African captives and their American descendants
(throughout the Americas) as negative and inferior.
Hence, the life experiences of native black Americans
have been characterized by intense political, social,
and cultural struggle. Black American creative artists
have themselves engaged in various forms of resistance
in the historic and monumental battle for black freedom,
human rights, and self-determination. In many ways,
reflecting black people’s experiences with the underside
of modern American culture, beboppers and their complex
and improvisational music might be considered
counter-modernists, as they both embraced and challenged
modernist American culture.
Bebop
Modernism and Change
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Reasoning that poor education
ultimately would hurt black and white working class
children in the Nation’s capitol, community leaders
called for neither racial integration nor segregation;
rather, they demanded quality education. Washington, D.
C. community activists defined this educational goal
unambiguously: (1) the distribution and mastery of the
fundamental tools of learning: reading, writing,
computational skills, and thinking; (2) academic
motivation; and (3) positive character-development.
Each of these elements was supposed to advance as
students matriculated from elementary through high
school.
Like residents of so many other urban
areas, Washington, D. C.’s black community lost the
political struggle for quality education. In 1967, the
celebrated Hobson v. Hansen case terminated the school
system’s tracking policy, but the court claimed that
racial integration automatically improved the
educational performance of black students. Liberal
civil rights leaders and educational managerial elites
won the day and began to implement various racial
integration policies—racial-balance using, magnet school
programs, and other education experiments. Because
integration is not an end in itself but only a means to
achieve an end, the contradictions and dilemmas quickly
became apparent.
The Collapse of Urban Public Schooling
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Some think that by setting
aside a month or two to honor the contributions of
African Americans trivializes it. However, this
commemoration does not trivialize it, though sometimes
the way it is implemented in a school curriculum, for
example, does trivialize it. It’s what James Banks, a
prominent educator, calls the “Contributions Approach”
to integration of diverse content into one’s curriculum.
Its emphasis is on merely inserting the heroes and
events and other cultural components into the curriculum
without studying them in their historical context. This
type of addition usually results in a superficial
understanding of this racial group and serves to
reinforce stereotypes and misconceptions. One example of
an African American personality who has been trivialized
is Martin Luther King, who has been reduced to that of a
dreamer. Most young people, if they know anything at all
about King, have heard of his “I Have a Dream” speech.
However, King was a remarkable scholar who has produced
volumes of books and speeches.
Letters in Support of Black History Months
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Although
Shelby’s call for pragmatic black solidarity seems to be
persuasive, his argument is unconvincing, especially in view of
the growing segment of young and affluent African Americans who
are joining the ranks of the ultra-right wing Republican Party.
Chief among those shifting to the right is a significant
segment of the black church, which is being effectively co-opted
by the Bush regime’s faith-based initiatives.
This trend toward increasing religious, political, and
class differentiation and fragmentation within the black
population shows every sign of rendering impossible any form of
mass black political unity—pragmatic solidarity or otherwise. Pragmatic
Solidarity
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posted 19 February 2008
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