Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought

BARBERSHOPS,

BIBLES, AND BET

EVERYDAY TALK AND BLACK

POLITICAL THOUGHT

Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS  PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2004 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place,

Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harris-Lacewell, Melissa, 1973–

Barbershops, bibles, and BET : everyday talk and Black political

thought / Melissa Harris-Lacewell.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-691-11405-6 (cl. : alk. paper)

1. African Americans—Politics and government. 2. African

Americans—Intellectual life. 3. African Americans—Attitudes.

4. Conversation analysis—United States. 5. United States—Politics

and government—1989– 6. Black nationalism—United States.

7. Feminism—United States. 8. Conservatism—United States.

9. United States—Race relations—Political aspects. I. Title.

                             E185.615.H295 2004

                             320.5'089'96073—dc22

                                                                                                             2003055452

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

To Parker

Contents

List of Tables

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One

Everyday Talk and Ideology

Chapter Two

Ideology in Action: The Promise of Orange Grove

Chapter Three

Black Talk, Black Thought: Evidence in National Data

Chapter Four

Policing Conservatives, Believing Feminists: Reactions to Unpopular Ideologies in Everyday Black Talk

Appendix 4.1

Appendix 4.2

Chapter Five

Truth and Soul: Black Talk in the Barbershop

Written with Quincy T. Mills

Chapter Six

Speaking to, Speaking for, Speaking with: Black Ideological Elites

Chapter Seven

Everyday Black Talk at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Tables

Table 2.1      Orange Grove Church Respondents

Table 3.1      Summary of Measures of Everyday Talk

Table 3.2      Summary of Core Belief Measures

Table 3.3      Summary of African American Ideologies Measures

Table 3.4      Effects of Core Beliefs on Black Ideologies

Table 3.5      Effects of Informal Political Conversations on Core Beliefs

Table 3.6      Effects of Rap Music on Core Beliefs

Table 3.7      Effects of Black Media Exposure on Core Beliefs

Table 3.8      Effects of Membership in a Black Organization on Core Beliefs

Table 3.9      Effects of Church-Based Politics on Core Beliefs

Table 3.10    Other Significant Effects on Core Beliefs

Table 4.1      NCCU Political Attitudes Study Experimental Manipulations

Table 4.2      KKC African American Attitudes Study Experimental Manipulations

Table 4.3      Indicators for Measurement of Feminist Ideologies in 1998 NCCU and 2001 KKC Studies

Table 4.4      Indicators for Measurement of Conservative Ideologies in 1998 NCCU and 2001 KKC Studies

Table 4.5      Examples of Prompt Questions Used by Feminist Group Leaders in 2001 KKC African American Attitudes Study

Table 4.6      Examples of Prompt Questions Used by Conservative Group Leaders in 2001 KKC African American Attitudes Study

Table 4.7      Effects of Black Media on Ideology Scores across Experimental Conditions, 1998 NCCU Political Attitudes Study

Table 4.8      Effects of Hip-Hop on Ideology Scores across Experimental Conditions, 1998 NCCU Political Attitudes Study

Figures

Figure 3.1      Simplified Form of Estimated Model: Determinants of African American Political Ideology

Figure 3.2      Percent of NBPS Sample Supporting Measures of Core Beliefs

Figure 3.3      Smoothed Black Nationalism Distribution

Figure 3.4      Smoothed Black Conservatism Distribution

Figure 3.5      Smoothed Black Feminism Distribution

Figure 4.1      Percent of Respondents Who Correctly Matched Popular Figure, 1998 NCCU Political Attitudes Study

Figure 4.2      Percent of Respondents Who Correctly Matched Popular Figure, 2001 KKC African American Attitudes Study

Figure 4.3      Effects of Feminist Message Groups on Respondent Ideology, 1998 NCCU Political Attitudes Study

Figure 4.4      Comparison of Mean Scores on Feminism across Experimental Categories, 2001 KKC African American Attitudes Study

Figure 4.5      Comparison of Mean Scores Across Experimental Categories, Attitude toward Whites and Strategic Integrationism, 2001 KKC African American Attitudes Study

Figure 4.6      Effects of Conservative Message Groups on Respondent Ideology, 1998 NCCU Political Attitudes Study

Figure 4.7      Comparison of Mean Scores on Conservatism across Experimental Categories, 2001 KKC African American Attitudes Study

Acknowledgments

THOSE OF US who were children and adolescents in the 1980s have been labeled in a variety of ways. We were just a little behind the age cohort known as the me generation and a little before the group now called generation dot com. Soda companies targeted us as the Pepsi generation and most settled on calling us generation X. But I have always thought of myself as part of the Cosby generation. I was one of the thousands of African American youth who learned that Thursday night was a sacred night for television. That was the night when it seemed that everyone tuned into NBC at eight o’clock. For me, the Cosby generation’s only real divisions were associated with whether you identified most strongly with Denise, Vanessa, Rudy, or Theo. Cosby was unique because it quietly challenged racism simply by normalizing the Huxtables’ blackness. It present[ed] in microcosm the importance of black unity—between genders and generations—without any sloganizing about the necessity of holding together for survival in a hostile environment (Downing 70). It mattered to be part of the Cosby generation. It normalized blackness and made me, as a child, feel proud and confident in my black womanhood.

I got this same feeling again in college when my girlfriends and I founded the Nia House. We were thirteen black women on a white college campus who were tired of the racism we experienced in the residence halls. Together we formed our own residence and named it the Nia House. (Nia means purpose in the East African language Kiswahili. Nia is one of the seven principles celebrated in the African American winter holiday, Kwanzaa.) My pride in this place came from realizing that we had done more than flee a bad situation. We had created a refuge, a haven for other black students who were also tired of wearing the mask. In the Nia House we could all be ourselves. We disagreed, we argued, we fought, but we did so within a cocoon of racial safety. In the Nia House we talked about ourselves and about each other. We talked about sex and parties. We talked about religion and life. And we spent a lot of time talking about blackness and politics. Da House, as it came to be known on campus, was a place where many black students talked with one another about how to survive in the racially hostile environment of our university. We sympathized and strategized and, in so doing, we defined and processed what it meant to be black.

It was being a Cosby kid and Nia House woman that led me to my research agenda about how and what black people think about the public world. I am thankful to all my childhood and college friends with whom I shared those early experiences.

I am deeply indebted to a family and community that have supported and nurtured me throughout the preparation of this book. A work of this size is never the result of an individual effort, but is the product of collective intellectual engagement and sacrifice. Thank you, John Brehm, for believing in this work when it was nothing more than an ill-formed dissertation idea, and for your continuing support, guidance, and friendship over the years. Thank you to John Aldrich, who was the first person who made me believe it was possible to do political science and still be true to myself. Thanks also to Karen Stenner, who has been a friend, confidant, and teacher. I owe a special debt to Michael Dawson for inspiring me before we even met, and for being such a dear friend and intellectual companion since we have known one another. I am thankful to Cathy Cohen for her faith in me, for her guidance and humor, and for finally reading those chapters! Thank you to Lisa Weeden, Jacob Levy, Patchen Markell, and Dan Drezner for being my junior colleagues and partners in crime. I am grateful to Dr. Maya Angelou, whose spiritual and financial support made graduate study possible for me. A broad community of scholars have read and commented on the work, supported me in the madness of preparing it, and given me invaluable resources and support. Special thanks are owed to Lee Baker, Wahneema Lubiano, Jarvis Hall, Carlton Wilson, Mazella Hall, Todd Shaw, Rob Brown, Andrea Simpson, Lester Spence, and Shayla Nunnally.

I am grateful to the organizations that have financially supported this research. Karla Holloway and her team at the African and African American Studies Department at Duke University provided valuable financial resources toward the collection of empirical data. The social science division and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago generously provided funding for the research in chapter 5. I am indebted to a terrific team of student researchers: Ashley Nall, for her transcription work, and Quincy T. Mills, for his irreplaceable assistance with the barbershop chapter. Thank you so much to Bethany Albertson for basically running my entire life! I also must thank the students at North Carolina Central University and Kennedy-King College, Reverend Kenney and the members of Orange Grove Missionary Baptist Church, and the men of Truth and Soul who volunteered their time and passion to make my research possible.

A special thanks is owed to my sisters, Rolisa, Dana, and Elizabeth, for keeping me laughing. Thank you to my nieces, Catherine, Christina, Claudia, and Elisse, and to my nephew, Mac, for helping me keep it all in perspective. Thank you to my dad for being my first academic role model. Thank you to my mother for reading, transcribing, editing, watching the baby, and caring so deeply. Thank you to Deidre for providing loving care for my daughter so that I could work and feel a little less guilty. Thank you to my best friend and spiritual sister Blair, without whose intellectual and emotional support everything would be impossible. You are Zuzu’s petals!

Introduction

Knowledge is from the very beginning a co-operative process of group life, in which everyone unfolds his knowledge within the framework of a common fate, a common activity, and the overcoming of common difficulties (in which, however, each has a different share).

—Karl Mannheim, 1936

ZENO NAMED his mule Toussaint L’Overture to honor the great Haitian revolutionary. A married father of three and a former marine, Zeno now makes his living driving a mule-drawn carriage for the tourists in New Orleans’s French Quarter. It’s a job that rewards funny, informative characters who use rhymes, songs, and humor to cajole tourists to ride. Even among this animated lot, Zeno is a personality. He is working on a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Orleans and fancies himself a serious historian with a particular commitment to the stories and perspectives of black people, so he reserves a special tour for his African American patrons, one he describes as a unique Afrocentric tour of the historic Vieux Carre.

Zeno’s tour not only takes riders all over historic New Orleans, it takes them all over the map ideologically. He starts the tour with a stop in Integrationism. He visits the graveyard where the famous nineteenth-century Integrationist litigant Homere Plessy is buried. Ernest Dutch Morial, the first black mayor of New Orleans, is also buried here. Although Zeno speaks proudly about how Dutch’s arrogance and stubbornness were just what the city needed in a black man, he suggests that Dutch’s son, Marc, a recent mayor of New Orleans, will be remembered as the better leader because, unlike his father, his political maneuvers have gained the loyalty of a cross-racial coalition in the city council. Riders start to get comfortable, assuming they can read Zeno’s politics. He appears to be a classic Integrationist, holding up the heroes of civil rights litigation and electoral politics.

But it would be bad idea to get comfortable in Zeno’s buggy. As he lurches across a busy intersection coming from the cemetery, he crosses into Nationalist rhetoric. Zeno reveals his deep suspicions about whites and their involvement in black life and culture. As he drives the mule past the Funky Booty nightclub, he complains that it is owned by a white man who stole the name from a black nightclub in black Storyville. It is just another example of white people’s theft of black people’s culture. As he points out the Louis Armstrong Park on the left, he complains that jazz music in New Orleans has become an inauthentic commodity sold to whites. When Zeno fails to come to a complete stop at the traffic light, a white officer in a patrol car pulls up beside and jokingly threatens him with a ticket. As the cruiser pulls off, Zeno hisses his contempt for the police. They always harass people for no good reason. Don’t deal with real problems. I mean damn, the sound of a police siren is a universal signal for fresh donuts. He peppers this part of the tour with critiques of violent and oppressive whites. He tells of a white woman, just like Martha Stewart, who tortured and murdered black slaves, her barbarous acts entirely unnoticed by the community until a fire in her attic revealed the broken bodies of dozens of black men and women. This, he suggests, is just how whites treat African Americans today.

Just as Zeno really gets worked up into a Nationalist fervor; Toussaint gets agitated by something in the street. The mule stops abruptly and starts backing up. Zeno tries to guide the mule, but his riders are in for a scary few moments, and they clutch the sides of the buggy and hold on as the tour takes a new direction, now coming around by the Mississippi River. Zeno’s language, like his mule, has also taken a turn, this time into Conservative sentiment. Talking proudly about the many notable black men who hail from New Orleans, he starts praising the New Orleans native who played an aggressive, black Republican car salesman in the Spike Lee film Get on the Bus. In that role, the black men on the bus eject the character when he repeats: Niggers are lazy. Zeno argues that the brotha was right, so what if he said ‘niggas, niggas, niggas,’ I mean black people need to do more for themselves and not complain so much about what the white man is doing. The statement is stunning to riders after listening to nearly an hour of Zeno’s complaints about whites’ mistreatments of blacks. At the end of his tour, Zeno encourages his customers to eat at the restaurant where his wife works because it is black-owned, and we don’t need to be givin’ the white folks all our money. He makes it seem a racial duty to tip him and then to patronize his wife’s restaurant. Riders emerge from his long, twisting ride with a sense of both physical and ideological whiplash.

Margaret is a pleasant, round-faced, light-skinned woman. A schoolteacher who has never been married and has no children of her own, she has lived in Durham, North Carolina, and attended Orange Grove Missionary Baptist Church her entire life. When she speaks of Orange Grove, it is with great respect and ferocious loyalty. She remembers the Orange Grove of her youth as a small, family-centered place where the congregation spent as much time visiting in the parking lot after services as they did worshipping in the pews during church. Margaret speaks of Ms. Sophie Lee, an older black woman who sat in the front pew watching Margaret and her friends when they were children singing in the youth choir. Ms. Sophie Lee would watch the kids. Whoever fell asleep or acted badly knew they would be called to task later that week when Ms. Sophie Lee paid a visit to their parents. But for Margaret, Ms. Sophie Lee and the long after-church discussions are wistful, almost bittersweet memories.

Now when she thinks of Orange Grove, she describes a church that is so large and dominated by new faces that she feels like a visitor even though she has been a member for thirty-two years. Although she says that sometimes I don’t feel like I am at home anymore, she just as quickly affirms that she would never leave Orange Grove because it is my home church. And although she is nostalgic about the little, family-centered church she remembers, she is excited about how her Orange Grove has evolved. She describes a place where people are drawn to services by the powerful and relevant messages of an energetic, young minister. Her pride is tangible when she speaks of Reverend Kenney and how he has led Orange Grove into an activist role in Durham’s African American community. She mentions the minister’s weekly column in the local paper and the active participation of church leaders and members in the antiviolence marches in Durham’s black community. She talks of how proud she is to tell people that she attends Orange Grove, because everyone knows the church for all it does in the city. Margaret mourns the loss of community among the church membership, but she celebrates the church’s increased connection to the larger community.

Louise is a wiry, thin, brown-skinned woman. She has been attending Orange Grove for only six months. Her first contact was not with the church, but rather with the minister, Reverend Kenney. The Reverend lives on Louise’s block, and when she began to have marital troubles, he offered her and her husband free counseling, even though they were not members of the church. Unlike Margaret, she has no particular loyalty to Orange Grove as an institution and is instead bonded to the church because of her respect and gratitude for Reverend Kenney. Louise takes particular interest in the way that Reverend Kenney and Orange Grove are connected to Durham’s black community. She describes Kenney as a fighter for the underserved, the underprivileged, just the kind of people that Jesus catered to and served. She explains that his stances are often unpopular and put him in the line of fire. She says that his willingness to stand firmly on his beliefs encourages her when she faces difficult challenges in her own life.

Hajj is the owner of Truth and Soul: Black Stars, a barbershop on Chicago’s Southside. He says of his shop, in this barbershop you hear all kinds of shit, and he is by far the ringleader of the shit talkers. He renamed himself Hajj when he became a Muslim and explains that his given name wasn’t mine to begin with. I had to shed my slave name. Hajj believes, Your name is everything. If I told you Cho Ping was coming to get a haircut today, you would automatically think a Chinese man was coming to the shop. Your name means everything, it tells people who you are. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you had a spotted cow in your barn and I lived next door with a spotted cow as well and both looking identical. Say one day you left your gate open and your cow wandered in my barn. And you came over and said, ‘You got my cow.’ How would you know which one is yours? … By the brand. That cow will have your initials branded on him. So, no matter where your cow roams, you will always be able to identify him. Black people in Hajj’s estimation continue to carry the brand of white racists through their slave names.

He criticizes important black intellectuals for failing to see the oppression inherent in a slave name. How can Alex Haley, after doing all of that research, find out that he comes from the Kente people and keep the Haley name? He talks about meeting Alex Haley at an award banquet for Haley and John Hope Franklin at the downtown Hilton hotel. "A friend of mine worked for Ebony and gave me a couple of tickets. When I got the chance, I went to their table, shook their hands and said hello. I asked him why he kept the name Haley after doing all that research and he said, ‘You know it’s political man.’ Politics my ass. And John Hope Franklin, what black man you know named John Hope?"

When Zeno picks up black passengers, his mule-drawn carriage is transformed into an unexpected space. Although he owns neither the mule nor the buggy, he uses them as a place to express his beliefs about what is good and bad about black people. He constructs a narrative of a particular black history, which emphasizes the power and accomplishments of African American men in his city, he offers analysis of the current problems facing black people, and he suggests solutions for them. In his willingness to expresses several, seemingly contradictory, political attitudes within the space of a single hour, Zeno is emblematic of the intersections and textures in black political thought that defy neat categorization.

Margaret and Louise look to the examples of Orange Grove’s membership and leadership to help them make sense of the complex and often hostile society in which they find themselves. Long before Hillary Clinton spoke of a village’s responsibility to young people, Ms. Sophie Lee taught Margaret that raising black children should be a shared, communal responsibility. When Louise must deal with the racist and demeaning behavior of white co-workers, she draws strength from Reverend Kenney’s battle with Durham’s white power structure over the rights of Durham’s black citizens. She is able to survive her own troubles when she thinks of her embattled minister. These are not solely moral lessons. These are political lessons that help to shape the way that Margaret and Louise define problems and propose solutions in the political world.

Hajj sees his shop as more than a place to cut hair. It is a place where black people talk about everything from the political to the raunchy. It is a place where he can inject his own brand of truth and soul into his neighborhood. Hajj pushes brothers to think about the meanings of the things they say. No idle comment is left unexamined. In Truth and Soul there is a politics to hanging out.

At the turn of the century DuBois described black life as an existence that occurred behind a veil. He understood that when white Americans forcibly separated themselves from blacks, they lowered a dark shroud between the races that allowed a certain covert reality for African Americans to operate beyond the reach of whites. A veil is opaque but not impenetrable. While African Americans have operated in a world that is institutionally and culturally distinct, others have always been able to detect movement on the other side of the veil. There is a distinct, if not entirely separate, African American public sphere that operates among African Americans, and it continues to influence the political lives, thoughts, and attitudes of those who interact there.

Insufficient empirical attention has been paid to the continuing significance of the black counterpublic in the political lives of African Americans. Not only have historical circumstances created different forms of discourse for black people, but the complex reality of living in a society where one’s daily communication is stratified and separated by race has serious political consequences for African Americans. The black counterpublic (the life that exists behind the veil) is both a reaction to exclusionary policies of white institutions and an assertion of the value of intragroup interaction that is neither observed nor policed. This book is about the effects of interaction in these counterpublic spaces and how they contribute to the reproduction of black ideology.

This book investigates how this distinct black life contributes to the development of political thought among African Americans. By focusing on the development of political worldviews among African Americans, it contributes important insights about the nature of ideology. It examines how black people use their interactions with one another in the black counterpublic to develop collective understandings of their political interests. These understandings constitute ideological stances, which both tie black people to an African American intellectual tradition and inform contemporary strategic thinking about the political and social world. This work intervenes in current notions of ideology by demonstrating that black people construct personal worldviews by borrowing from multiple ideological traditions in ways that are complex and often surprising. It is not only an empirical study intended to provide an accurate depiction of contemporary black thought, it is also a theoretical contribution that forces a reevaluation of social scientific understandings of ideology, its reproduction in marginalized communities, and its influence on individual social and political attitudes.

Two critical arguments frame this book. First, there are four political ideologies that constitute the framework of contemporary black political thought: black Nationalism, black Feminism, black Conservatism, and Liberal Integrationism.* These ideologies emerge from an African American intellectual tradition, and clusters of these four worldviews continue to organize individual political and racial attitudes among blacks. These ideologies help African Americans to understand persistent social and economic inequality, to identify the significance of race in that inequality, and to devise strategies for overcoming that inequality. By asserting the value of ideology as a meaningful way of understanding the political attitudes of ordinary African Americans, this text centers itself in a contemporary stream of research in political science, interested in reexamining ideology.

Second, the book offers a theory of black political thought, which states that African Americans use everyday talk to jointly develop understandings of their collective political interests. By entering spaces of everyday black talk, the book grapples in a unique way with contemporary black culture from the Baptist church, to Essence magazine, to hip-hop music. It returns political agency to ordinary people by privileging the voices of regular black men and women whose discussions contribute to the extraordinary process of ideology building. The text listens in on black college students talking about the Million Man March and welfare. It asks Southern, black Baptists about homosexuality and the church. And it eavesdrops on black men in a barbershop early on Saturday morning.

Because these settings are free from the discursive restrictions of the racial mask that African Americans must don when they venture beyond the veil, the counterpublic affords African Americans the opportunity to exchange interpretations of the truth; to understand the complexity of the political world; to link their individual experiences to group narratives; to identify friends and foes; to define desirable outcomes to public problems; and to devise strategies for achieving those outcomes, all through everyday talk. In short, this black counterpublic makes available the resources necessary for building the social language and individual knowledge structure that is political ideology.

This text seeks to understand men and women like Zeno, Hajj, Margaret, and Louise by investigating the ways that their interactions with other African Americans contribute to their beliefs and attitudes about the political world. The chapters that follow first present a theory linking everyday talk to black political beliefs and situate this theory in existing literatures on ideology, resistance, and public opinion. The text then presents a series of empirical chapters designed to offer evidence that African Americans do in fact use spaces such as barbershops and churches to express and explore important issues of power, inequality, race, gender, and politics, and to demonstrate that these discussions are linked to identifiable patterns of public opinion that can be understood as ideologies. This text will use ethnographic, statistical, and experimental evidence to trace contemporary African American political thought and its connection to everyday talk. Together, these empirical pieces demonstrate the existence of identifiable ideologies in contemporary mass opinion; provide some evidence of the causal linkage between conversations among African Americans and the expression of ideological attitudes; and flesh out the content of these conversations through careful observational work. Finally, the book offers evidence that the ideological work done by ordinary men and women actually constrains the content and style of ideological appeals made by political elites. Ultimately the text both revives the concept of ideology as a useful construct for understanding the political attitudes of ordinary men and women and demonstrates that a substantial portion of the work of ideological development occurs through processes of adult socialization in the African American counterpublic.

*Throughout the text, capitalization on the ideologies is used to designate specifically African American versions of these ideologies. Each of the ideological traditions discussed in this text emerges from a black intellectual history and is rooted in the experiences, traditions, and scholarship of that history. However, each is also tied to larger intellectual and political trajectories. Nationalism, feminism, conservatism, and integrationism have variants among many peoples in different times and spaces. This text is not centrally concerned with engaging the extensive literatures on these related ideological traditions. For example, although there is some reference to the research on nationalism, there is no specific attempt to locate black Nationalism within scholarship on nationalisms. Therefore, capitalization of the ideological terms is used in order to maintain both clarity and specificity with regard to the central arguments made in the book and to distinguish arguments made in reference to African American ideologies from claims about related traditions.

CHAPTER ONE

Everyday Talk and Ideology

Say it loud: I’m Black and I’m proud.

—James Brown, 1968

Instead of a closing-ranks mentality, a prophetic framework encourages a coalition strategy with those deeply committed to antiracist struggle.

— Cornel West, 1993

They have journeyed through the pothole-ridden road of liberal promises and found it ends in a frustrating dead end.

— Black and Right, 1997

Whoever walked behind anyone to freedom? If we can’t go hand in hand I don’t want to go.

— Hazel Scott, 1974

BLACK PEOPLE come together to worship; organize around communal problems; sit together to cut and style one another’s hair; pass news about each other through oral and written networks; and use music, style, and humor to communicate with each other. Along with the intimacies of family and the responsibilities of work, these are the everyday spaces of black people’s lives. Yet, with the exception of the church, these everyday contexts of black interactions have largely escaped the notice of social scientists studying the politics of black communities. To more fully appreciate the political thought and action of African Americans, it is imperative to understand that these interactions are more than social. They are the spaces where African Americans jointly develop understandings of their collective interests and create strategies to navigate the complex political world. These strategies are best understood as ideologies, tied to a black intellectual tradition and alive in contemporary African American public opinion. The study of everyday talk in spaces of ordinary black life provides a framework for understanding what African Americans think and the mechanisms of how black people develop political attitudes.

If we are to understand the genesis and development of political thought among African Americans it is important, but insufficient, to study the fully articulated ideological utterances of black elites. It is important, but insufficient, to map the extraordinary instances of mass-based social movements. It is important, but insufficient, to apply, without revision, models of American public opinion primarily designed to investigate the attitudes of white Americans. It is important, but insufficient, to study the influence of family and childhood socialization on individual attitudes. Understanding African American political attitudes requires an analysis of seemingly mundane interactions and ordinary circumstances of daily black life, because it is in these circumstances that African Americans often do the surprising and critical work of constructing meaningful political worldviews. Through worship, discussion, music, laughter, and news, African Americans construct meaning from the ordinary. Therefore, one important element in understanding how black people interpret and make sense of the political world is to listen in on their everyday talk.

That discourse is central to the work of politics is an old notion. Critical theorists, largely within their work on the public sphere, have argued for the essential role of citizen conversation in cultivating democratic attitudes and action (Tocqueville 1835; Arendt 1958; Habermas 1962; Eagleton 1985; Herbst 1994; Putnam 2000). Mansbridge (1999) locates the everyday talk of citizens at the center of the deliberative political system. She calls attention to this system of interactions that anchors democratic processes and argues that everyday talk is as important as formal deliberation to producing creative and just governance. Engaging in either purely expressive or more goal-directed conversations in protected spaces allows citizens to identify conflicts, better understand their interests, and learn whether or not their interests contribute to a common good.

Gamson empirically demonstrates the significance of ordinary citizen interaction and argues that the study of American public opinion is plagued by a serious deficiency in its failure to account for these interactions. Referencing the collective knowledge of decades of public opinion scholarship, Gamson notes, We do understand a lot about the end product—the content of opinions they [the American public] express. But on how they get there, on what the issues mean to people, and how they reach their conclusions, we are still groping (1992, xi). For Gamson, political talk supplies the answers to these unsolved puzzles of public opinion. Listening to people talk about politics, he argues, allow[s] us to observe the natural vocabulary with which people formulate meaning about issues (192), and thus to explore the ways that citizens are able to make sense of political issues about which they appear to have little information. Sociologist Nina Eliaoph argues that neither the theoretical contributions of critical theorists nor the empirical work of social scientists have gone far enough in studying the politics of citizen talk because none of these works have analyzed actual political conversations as they unfold in real time, within existing groups, circulating across a range of everyday life spaces (1996, 263).

This book makes progress toward the goal of better understanding how ordinary deliberative processes contribute to the work of democratic politics. Using the specific case of African Americans and employing a number of social scientific methods of inquiry, it offers both a theoretical and empirical exploration of ordinary black people’s political attitudes and the processes that contribute to their development. This study both identifies several unique patterns of public opinion among African Americans that can be understood as expressions of black political ideology and uses an analysis of black organizations, public spaces, and information networks to suggest the ways that African Americans (re)produce these ideologies when they interact with one another. Ordinary spaces of everyday talk among African Americans serve as forums for dialogue that contribute both to the development of individual ideological dispositions and to the revisions of ideologies across time. A study of ideology formation through this talk demonstrates that engaging in black community dialogue is a distinct process that affects ideology separately from the impact of socioeconomic or demographic variables and shows that black political thought can be understood more fully through an analysis of the ways that African Americans use conversation to engage in ideological construction.

AFRICAN AMERICAN COUNTERPUBLIC

There is no better place to begin an empirical study of the relevance of everyday talk to American politics than among African Americans. Studies of black political participation have demonstrated the historic and continued importance of a communal approach to political life among African Americans (Campbell et al. 1960; Dawson 1994; Tate 1993). African American cultural and political life is shaped by a reliance on and respect for oral communication (Henry 1990; Levine 1977). Because black politics is traditionally marked by communalism and orality, the search for black ideology must begin with the oral tradition (Henry 1990, 7). It must begin with the study of the conversatin', shit talkin', gab fest, rap sessions, where black people are just kickin’ it on the set. Such a study is situated squarely within the concerns raised by James Scott (1985, 1990) and Robin Kelley (1994) about the ways that subjugated members of society resist hegemony.

Scott (1990) locates resistance to political, cultural, and ideological hegemony among the daily acts of the relatively powerless. While the social movements literature tells us about what happens in extraordinary circumstances when marginalized members of society directly confront oppressive forces,¹ Scott’s contribution is to allow us to glimpse how normal circumstances contribute to hidden modes of resistance. Scott juxtaposes public and hidden transcripts and encourages close observation of the acts, language, and symbols of the hidden narratives acted out offstage. The study of the everyday allows entry into the world where the ordinary weapons of powerless groups are forged. The study of African Americans interacting with one another apart from whites is in the spirit of Scott’s concerns with how the subjugated develop distinct political realities that often counter the hegemonic narratives of the powerful.

Robin Kelley takes up this project in Race Rebels, where he explicitly links Scott’s theory of the hidden transcript to daily acts of African American resistance in the Jim Crow South and contemporary urban spaces. Kelley delineates black working-class resistance of both white domination and black middle-class cultural norms. Articulating why the everyday illuminates the politics of African Americans, Kelley firmly rejects the tendency to dichotomize people’s lives, to assume that clear-cut ‘political’ motivations exist separately from issues of economic well being, safety, pleasure, cultural expression, sexuality, freedom of mobility, and other facets of daily life. Politics is not separate from lived experience or the imaginary world of what is possible; to the contrary, politics is about these things (1994, 10).

Both Scott and Kelley offer an important reconceptualization of the behavior of subjugated populations and of politics. Foot dragging, sabotage, and dissembling can be understood as weapons of resistance used by those without access to conventional forms of power and influence, rather than seen as pathological behavior by lesser members of the polity. Politics can be found hidden in the zoot suits, rap lyrics, and broken milkshake machines of the black working class. While this text is not primarily interested in acts of resistance per se, it is interested in discourse that occurs as part of creating the hidden transcript.

In black public spaces, in black organizations, and through black information networks, African Americans enter into dialogue with one another. Much of what they discuss is task-specific, personal, or frivolous. Church members plan choir rehearsal. Friends share stories about their families. Neighbors gossip. Sports fans argue about what team will win on Friday night. But alongside these kinds of conversations is an everyday talk that helps black people to develop collective definitions of their political interests. Embedded within conversations that are not always overtly political is language that seeks to understand American inequality, to define the importance of race in creating inequality, to determine the role of whites in perpetuating inequality, and to devise strategies for advancing the interests of self and group. It often does so through the use of personal anecdote, urban legend, and tall tales, but the work of this everyday talk is serious. By uncovering how ideology is developed by black people talking to one another in their daily lives, we can better describe, analyze, and predict variation in African American political thought.²

Scholars have long been interested in determining the ways that political culture is created and transmitted in identifiable communities. Habermas’s (1984) theory of the bourgeois public sphere, where men engage in creating the politics of our lifeworld, has been particularly influential in shaping contemporary discourse on the role of deliberation in the development of political worldviews. Both feminist and black studies scholars have critiqued his formulation of the public sphere as inappropriate for the study of marginalized publics. Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser critiques Habermas for idealizing the liberal public sphere because of his failure to account for competing public spheres, or counterpublics, that are not liberal, bourgeois, or male. Virtually from the beginning, counterpublics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech (Fraser 1989, 116). For Fraser, the assumptions of deliberation that underlie Habermas’ conception of a single public sphere are exclusionary and masculinist. Stratified societies are better served by a plurality of competing publics than a single deliberative arena governed by the discursive norms of the powerful. These subaltern counterpublics are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs (1989, 123).

Scholars of African American politics have also leveled critiques of the exclusionary Habermas formulation. These scholars have sought to define the African American counterpublic as a sphere of critical practice and visionary politics, in which intellectuals can join with the energies of the street, the school, the church, and the city to constitute a challenge to the exclusionary violence of much public space in the United States (Black Public Sphere Collective 1995). For scholars of black politics, Habermas’s formulation does not adequately account for the ways that inequality alters discursive relations between citizens, nor does it speak to the ways that the relatively powerless are excluded from the idealized bourgeois space. The bourgeois public sphere has a historically specific provenance and development; it cannot be simply mapped onto contemporary African American lifeworlds (Holt 1995, 326). Scholars of black history, society, and politics have offered broader visions of the black counterpublic as an oppositional space composed of relatively autonomous spaces of civic life and culture.

It is incorrect to conceive of the black counterpublic as historically static or as ideologically cohesive at any given historical moment. The churches, political organizations, news outlets, fraternal clubs, mutual aid societies, barbershops, juke joints, and labor unions that constitute the black counterpublic are internally contested spaces. Identities of gender, class, color, sexuality, and privilege crosscut the terrain of a racially homogenous public sphere. Fraser reminds us that even oppositional counterpublics are not always virtuous, even those with democratic and egalitarian intentions are not always above practicing their own modes of informal exclusion and marginalization (1989, 124). In pursuit of racial goals, black counterpublics have often sought to suppress the internal differences of gender, class, and sexual identity that mark blackness (Cohen 1999). Jane Mansbridge (1999) warns that deliberative processes can transform the I into we through an often invisible assertion of control by the more powerful members of the group. The African American counterpublic is vulnerable to such exclusionary practices. Thus the African American counterpublic itself spawns subaltern, oppositional publics organized around gender, class, color, and sexual identity. The existence of these multiple layers complicates the task of talking about a single black counterpublic just as the existence of a black counterpublic challenges the notion of a single public sphere.

The black counterpublic is historically contingent, with different elements of the sphere emerging as relevant in distinct moments. The black press in the years before the Civil War (Hutton 1992); the clubs of middle-class black women at the turn of the century (Higginbotham 1993); the church meeting halls of the civil rights movement (Morris 1984); and the hip-hop of the late 1990s (Kelley 1994) all constitute aspects of the black public sphere that have taken on relatively greater significance as sites