Keepin' It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric

8. A Question of Ethics? Hush Harbor Rhetoric and Rationalities in a Neoliberal Age

167 Muhammad Ali was arguably the most popular athlete of his era. Michael Jordan was and is one the most popular athletes of any era. Muhammad Ali embodied the zeitgeist of his era; Michael Jordan his. Because he is now an internationally beloved figure, because his marvelously dissonant, brave, voice has been stilled by Alzheimer’s, it is easy to forget and to unremember the audacious, frank, fierce, dangerous, “I am America” Muhammad Ali to which Keepin’ It Hushed refers. “I am America” is Black noise, dissonance that drops the mask: it is spoken through an African American terministic screen—a hush harbor rhetoric. Unfortunately, we live in epoch dominated by rhetorics and rationalities of neoliberalism, what Cornel West refers to as free-market fundamentalism, or what I call African American or Black neoliberalism. In such an era, the ethics and ethos of the market where the social, political, and the human 8. A Question of Ethics? Hush Harbor Rhetoric and Rationalities in a Neoliberal Age 168 Chapter 8 are increasingly evaluated based on their exchange value—privilege the sale of tennis shoes over the struggle for social justice. Michael Jordan embodies the ethos of Black neoliberalism; the dominant rationality, as I have argued, of our era—a rationality Senator Barack Obama had to navigate to become president. This is also the context into which Rev. Jeremiah Wright deployed his African American hush harbor rhetoric (AAHHR). The substance of this chapter focuses on Senator Barack Obama’s–Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s rhetorical debate that was pivotal to President Obama’s election. While their antagonisms would be an obvious and productive focus, I will focus on what the two men had in common: their knowledge and use of AAHHR. More specifically, in President Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech and Rev. Wright’s two sermons—“The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall” and “Confusing God and Government”—that the public latched on to. The two men attended the same hush harbor: Trinity United Baptist Church. I want to focus on this hush harbor commonality for two reasons: First, the brouhaha, of course, brings attention to the continuing importance of African American hush harbors (AAHHs) and of AAHHR, as Keepin’ It Hushed incessantly argues. Second, in a Black neoliberal age where personal, private, and economic success trumps communal good, hearing two African Americans frankly and bravely discuss race as it relates to communal and societal benefit through hush harbor motifs invigorated the public sphere. In addition, the hush harbor subtext of the debate added some Black dissonance that placed African American life and culture at the center of the public debate that made the public sphere, with considerable resistance, more Black than it has been in a long, long time. Before getting to the Senator Obama–Rev. Wright speeches, I think it is important to situate their discourse in the context of neoliberalism as a rationality to which I have been referring throughout Keepin’ It Hushed. Specifically, I want to situate their AAHHR debate within the context of Black neoliberalism—to set up the terrain to read the speeches of both men on a productive register. Neoliberalism and Black neoliberalism in particular make race, its associated hush harbor perspectives, and other social issues more difficult to discuss. Unlike capitalism, which functions on the assumption that Hush Harbor Rhetoric and Rationalities in a Neoliberal Age 169 self-interest is a phenomenon natural to human relations so government should not interfere, neoliberalism is interventionist: its supporters and policies encourage the government to privatize and reconfigure all human relations through a market logic or ethos. Neoliberalism constructs the market as the primary organizing principle for all social, economic, and spiritual phenomena. It depoliticizes politics itself and reduces public activity to the realm of utterly privatized practices and utopias, limiting citizenship to the buying and selling of goods. It collapses the public into the private, rendering all social problems as personal. As Toby Miller, an expert in media and cultural studies, said to me in a discussion about neoliberalism, “The key thing is that neoliberalism is more—or perhaps less—than an account and an ordering of an economic mode of production. It is about a form of subjectivity, of rational calculation and desire, that argues for all forms of life being subsumed to it, with everything from divorce to religious affiliation understood through its lens.”1 Black...