From preaching to teaching Tupac

(See below for corrections.) "Shh!" he blows into the microphone. "Listen to the words." The chattering stops and music fills the room. And even as a crack fiend, mama/You always was a black queen, mama/I finally understand/For a woman it ain't easy tryin' to raise a man. Michael Eric Dyson is poised at the podium, eyes closed, head bobbing to the words of late rapper Tupac Shakur's "Dear Mama." New to Penn's faculty this year, Dyson's class on the life and lyrics of Tupac Shakur this semester is a highly popular course in the African American Studies department, drawing around 200 students into the lecture room at Logan Hall for three hours on Tuesday afternoons. The course looks at Tupac as a religious, historical and social figure. It examines "his music, his philosophy, the contradictory factors of his life, the conflict he engaged in... and the uses to which his memory has been put now that he's dead and a member of that great pantheon of figures that are claimed to still be alive, like Elvis or JFK," says Dyson, who is not only a fan of Shakur's music but has written a book on him entitled Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. Like Shakur, Dyson, 44, is popular for his controversiality and outspokenness. "I'm a 'tweener," Dyson says of his position in the African American community. "I'm not old enough to be part of the Civil Rights Movement but too old to be part of hip hop." He sees himself as a "bridge figure" between the two generations, "trying to connect civil rights identity to hip hop culture and to forge a connection between older and younger Americans, especially black Americans." Dyson's daily life is dizzyingly packed. In addition to his class, he appears on a local radio show and preaches around the country at colleges and other venues about black and religious issues. He also writes -- his latest book, Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture and Religion just came out in December. Dyson describes himself as a "paid pest" -- the "Socratic gadfly at work." His goal, he says, is to "try to prick the conscience of myself... and of others to see if we can't fashion a better world." But before the exclusive interviews, nationwide speeches, signing and promotions for his eight books and professorships at a slew of prestigious universities, Dyson's life was a vastly different picture. • Dyson grew up in the inner city of Detroit, Mich., in the 1960s, the second of five boys. His mother was a teacher's aid in Detroit public schools and his father worked in a factory -- neither went to college. "They were just two hardworking black people trying to protect their children from the society in which we lived," Dyson says. From a young age, it was clear that Dyson possessed a gift for rhetoric. Through his Baptist church, he began acting and giving speeches, winning his first oratory contest when he was 11 years old. At the age of 16, Dyson got a scholarship to a top-ranked Michigan boarding school. But what seemed like a fortunate experience quickly turned into a nightmare -- Dyson, who had previously lived in what he describes as a "segregated world," was confronted with being one of 10 black students in an elite white school of over a thousand. "It was very jarring to me, like a sense of Hitchcockian Vertigo," Dyson says, adding that he would often return to his dorm to find his door adorned with racial slurs. Eventually, Dyson was kicked out of the school and returned to Detroit. From then on, things only seemed to get worse. Though he eventually earned his high school degree, Dyson was on welfare and a teen father at 18. He was in a gang, hustled, worked in a factory and got fired from his clerk job at Chrysler a month before his son was due -- "There were several days we didn't eat," he says. During this turbulent time, however, Dyson also discovered a passion for preaching and became a licensed and ordained minister. And at 21, Dyson decided that a change needed to be made.

"I needed to have a better future for my son," he says. He enrolled in college and earned a B.A. in philosophy from Carson-Newman College in Jefferson, Tenn., preaching and working in a factory to support himself. • Dyson began writing on critiques of black culture, in part to raise money for the defense of his younger brother, who has been in prison for 14 years charged with second-degree murder. "I discovered that as I was raising money by writing various articles to help him, I was generating a book," Dyson says. The result was Reflecting Black: African American Cultural Criticism. Dyson went on to get his doctorate in religion from Princeton University, and he taught at seminary schools and top-tier universities before coming to Penn in July. Penn's African American Studies Program Director Tukufu Zuberi, who was instrumental in bringing Dyson to campus, has hailed Dyson's appointment as "an initial step in the revitalization and expansion of the Afro-American Studies Program at Penn." Indeed, Dyson already has plans for future courses on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as black theology and American religion. He also plans to teach a course on hip hop culture that would include not only Shakur, but also Biggie Smalls and other influential rappers. Penn is "an alive, intellectually interesting, electrifying place, and I want to contribute to that ongoing tradition," Dyson says. Part of that tradition, Dyson says, is the "feisty nature" of the public debate here at Penn. "Of course, it is controversial to talk about issues of race in a culture that is addicted to forgetfulness," Dyson says. "We live in the United States of Amnesia, and as a result of that, we have a Barbra Streisand ethic -- what's too painful to remember, we choose to forget." At a recent King symposium, Dyson openly expressed his opposition to war with Iraq. He hopes, he says, to forge solidarity with progressives here at Penn who are against the war. "I'm here to stand, hopefully, as a voice of consciousness around that issue," he says, and a host of other issues, including affirmative action. "When the president makes ludicrous, ridiculous, illogical statements attacking the University of Michigan's affirmative action program as quotas, we gotta be here to say 'No, no, no, he's wrong. Bless his heart. He's a good man, but he's ill-informed,'" Dyson says, adding that "if anyone has benefited from the worst version of affirmative action, it's been" Bush. According to Dyson, "one of the tragedies of our time is that we've seen a shift from the overt to the covert. A shift to more subtle forms of racial oppression.... We have a long way to go before racial nirvana." A solution, Dyson says, is to get young people involved and thinking about these issues. And through his class on Shakur, Dyson seems already well on his way to drawing in the young people here at Penn. The class has attracted students from a wide variety of backgrounds and interests. College junior Wonwhee Kim, an international relations major, says that although he's never taken an African American Studies course before, he thought it would be interesting to learn more about the late rapper's life. "Dyson frames Tupac in a different context, which totally changes my perception of him," Kim says, adding that he admires Dyson's eloquence as a professor. "He has a lot to say." Indeed he does.

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