Why being Black in America so often involves some kind of performance

Michael Eric Dyson’s latest book, “Entertaining Race: Performing Blackness in America,” is an ambitious effort to explain how Black performance shapes this country. The 50-chapter volume collects three decades of Dyson’s efforts to interpret and embody Black performance through his work. As an interpreter, Dyson shares both his admiring and critical commentary that makes the book a fun read. But it is his embodied performance in a vast range of roles - as he lays them out: “preacher, writer, pastor, university professor, public intellectual, lecturer, cultural critic, author, social activist, newspaper columnist, radio talk show host, political analyst, and media commentator” that readers are likely to find applause-worthy. For decades, Dyson has been astonishingly prolific as he emphatically advances the cause of racial justice in the academy and beyond. And this book offers a rare opportunity to see the range of his written and spoken technique in one place.

Dyson’s concerted effort to show the cultural importance of Black performance begins with the somewhat teasing pun in the book’s title. He declares at the outset that Black people were once forced to be an entertaining race - a race frequently called upon to perform for White audiences. As a defense tactic, Black performers contrived a creative strategy that was at once entertaining and emancipating. An example is when enslaved people “sang spirituals about a heavenly destination with veiled information” that communicated to one another how they would escape to freedom here on Earth. Black entertainment, Dyson shows, has never been merely Black entertainment.

Dyson argues, too, that Black people survive in society by frequently entertaining race - that is, engaging the idea of race while dealing with its social and political consequences. Even when others deny that race matters, he argues, Black people must bear the costs of its existence and reflect on its paradoxical status in society.