EAR TO THE STREET

Speaker honors King at UNLV

I was hungry heading into UNLV’s Moyer Student Union ballroom on Monday to hear Michael Eric Dyson. It didn’t help that the generous spread outside the packed second-floor ballroom was off limits until the notoriously verbose pop culture motormouth wrapped up his keynote for UNLV’s 4th Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Ceremony. The cookies, brownies, pecan-topped mini sweet-potato pies, toasted chips (with not one, but two kinds of dipping sauce!), sautéed veggies and chicken skewers would have to wait. (I quietly rejoiced when I overheard someone say Dyson needed to clear up some business with his boarding passes. He might cut the 30-minute speech down and I could get my grub on sooner).

I was also curious. Dyson can be quite an earful. And a brain full. He’s an ordained minister (Baptist), professor (stints at DePaul, Chicago Theological Seminary, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Columbia, Brown, University of Pennsylvania; he’s now at Georgetown), author (14 books), cultural demographer (analyses on race, dissections of King, Malcolm X and Tupac) and intellectual bon vivant. The man likes to talk.

So I figured his would be yet another what-we-gotta-to-do-to-fulfill-King’s-dream address, chock full of the typical prescriptions for all that ails us—toss invertebrate leaders out of office, reverse the decline in our moral fabric, care for the least of us, kiss and make up—albeit delivered in typical Dyson fashion, i.e., rife with biblical references, multisyllabic words and rap lyrics. It was that. And so much more.

Dyson covered more terrain than a racecar in the Dakar Rally in a speech that (and I’m not complaining) lasted nearly 50 minutes. Yes, I timed it. He veered from King’s lesser-known war on poverty to America’s war on young black men, from the need to awaken the academic appetites of students (“get your lesson out,” as his parents would say) to collectively developing a “useful intelligence” that will allow us challenge homophobia, sexism, racism, environmental racism and attacks on immigration.

King would neither repeal hard-won rights as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is doing (referring to his attacks on affirmative action), nor chastise poor Blacks (he calls them the “ghettocracy”) like Bill Cosby (a member of the “Afristrocracy”) does, Dyson said. “He wouldn’t stand with Cosby because he died for poor people.”

Dyson said Blacks don’t owe former President Bill Clinton anything, because he signed welfare-to-work legislation and kept America on the sidelines during the Rwandan genocide, and should be railing against lawmakers who want to outlaw sagging pants. “I’m not worried about sagging pants, I’m worried about the sagging hopes of a younger generation,” he said, before good-naturedly suggesting that sagging plays a role in the high incarceration rates of young black males. “They can’t run.”

Solemnity of the occasion aside, Dyson seemed to be having a good time. Mimicking Cosby’s voice (laughs.) Repeatedly saying “sagging pants” so he could watch the woman translating his speech into sign language. (When he said it, she leaned to side, cocked her head and dropped trough. Laughs). Joking about blacks naming their kids after things they want but can’t have—Mercedes, Lexus, Versace (laughs). Speaking ebonics, calling a sandwich, a “samich” and the library a “library.” (Laughs). Admitting that he’s a purveyor pornography. “I the love libary, because it’s where the lies are buried. Others can have the information superhighway. I love the smell of papyrus. It gets me off. It’s intellectual pornography for me.” Digging at his wife, the Rev. Marcia Dyson (a vaunted religious thinker in her own right) about supporting Hillary Clinton. He’s an Obama boy. For the hip-hop heads in the crowd, he quoted choice lyrics from the likes of Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Biggie Smalls and his favorite muse, Tupac.

Unlike the on-cue clap-and-stand routine at Monday night’s the State of the Union address in Washington D.C., the applause for Dyson seemed genuine. With his speech on the same day as Bush’s, you knew Dyson would take a swipe at America’s 43rd president. Anti-intellectualism isn’t endemic to the black community, he said, “because if Bush and [Ronald] Reagan can be president, then Hillary and Barack can be the dictator of the universe.”

If you’re wondering about the grub, two thumbs up. Special props on the pecan-topped mini sweet potato pies. They were the lick (which, in urban parlance, means they were good).

Damon Hodge is a staff writer with the Las Vegas Weekly

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