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The double truth, Ruth: 'Do the Right Thing' and the culture of ambiguity

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by James C. McKelly

As Du Bois describes it, this political condition, a consequence of pressures exterior to the black community, creates a corresponding interior dilemma for African-Americans who achieve authority in American culture despite its institutionalized racism. Which of two competing allegiances does one serve? One's loyalty to the black community, which would benefit profoundly from one's acquired expertise in engaging white America? Or one's duty to one's own future, ironically linked to the esteem of a majority culture violently inimical to the minority community of which one is a part?

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In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, composed some ten years after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, James Weldon Johnson likewise identifies "a sort of dual personality" which "every coloured man" has "in proportion to his intellectuality," a "dualism" which persists both "in the freemasonry of his own race" and "in the presence of white men" (2122). And like Du Bois, Johnson's hero feels a dichotomy at the core of his ambition: "Was it more a desire to help those I considered my people, or more a desire to distinguish myself . . .?" (147).

Du Bois calls this dilemma "the waste of double aims," a "seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals" (5) which can never be reconciled. The powerfully unitary pull of responsibility to community and responsibility to self, when configured as oppositional by a racist symbolic order, must inevitably become self-destructive. Thus, sublated in this polarized crisis of responsibility is an equivalently polarized crisis of identity.

Cornel West has argued that it is precisely this perceived crisis of identity, this "sense of double-consciousness," which led "anxiety-ridden, middle-class Black intellectuals" such as Du Bois and Johnson to construe the African-American cultural experience in terms of "simplistic binary oppositions" that forced black attempts at personal and political liberation to "remain inscribed within the very logic that dehumanized them" (72). The implication of West's critique is that the cultural logic of "double-consciousness," as it was promulgated by the intellectuals of the modern black diaspora and as it has been inherited by contemporary African-American culture, consigns that culture to an untenable role within the American capitalist symbolic order. It dooms the African-American subject to a literally "entrepreneurial" purgatory, eternally situated between the oppositional terms of a complex hierarchy of antinomies which by definition can never be resolved. This weft of irreconcilable binarisms is constituted by the ideologies and oppositional counter-ideologies which govern the subject's relation to the hegemonic socioeconomic order, to the strategies of resistance conceived to combat this order, to the strategies of survival necessary when this resistance is compromised, and to the subject's own evolving sense of identity, inextricable as it is from this intricate fabric of relations.

Do the Right Thing, produced in 1989, is director Spike Lee's attempt to explore the human particularity of this system of binarisms and the culturally entrepreneurial situation of the African-American subject within it. Lee's own background reflects this cultural positioning. He was the eldest child in an "uncomfortably middle-class" black family living in the then predominantly white Brooklyn neighborhoods of Cobble Hill and Fort Greene, where most of his friends were Italian (Breskin 14, 151). He graduated from traditionally black Morehouse College in 1979, after which he entered NYU's film school as one of only two African-Americans in his class (Lee later was to enlist the other, director Ernest Dickerson, to handle the cinematography of Do the Right Thing). It is not surprising, then, that young African-American novelist Trey Ellis cites Lee as one of "today's cultural mulattoes," during whose public schooling "it wasn't unusual to be called 'oreo' and 'nigger' on the same day." According to Ellis, these young black people are able skillfully to navigate a multi-ethnic universe due to their education in "a multi-racial mix of cultures" - yet despite this unique ability they "feel misunderstood by both the black world and the white." They are a generation "torn between two worlds," and, depending upon which term of the social binomial they embrace, they either "desperately fantasize themselves the children of William F. Buckley" or "affect instead a 'superblackness' and try to dream themselves back to the ghetto. Either way they are letting other people define their identity" (234-36).

Ellis's commentary confirms the persistent power of the ideology of "double-consciousness" and the ontological and ethical duplicity it promotes. In Souls, Du Bois anticipates this very duplicity - he calls it "the peculiar ethical paradox" which results from "the double life every American Negro must live" - and he identifies it as a socially generated psychological state which "tempts the mind to pretense or revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism" (202), the two extreme poles of a binaristic formula of resistance to oppression:

The double truth, Ruth: 'Do the Right Thing' and the culture of ambiguity

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by James C. McKelly

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