The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 8

December 26, 2021

The first task of the cultural critic is to create a voice: and through the voice, a persona. It hardly matters who’s behind it. Greg Tate could be a balding, middle-aged white guy with a potbelly and an unlit briar clenched between yellowed teeth, occasionally spilling drums of a cherry-flavored Cavendish mixture into his Underwood manual. He isn’t, but he could be for all that mattered.

This is Henry Louis Gates’ forward to Flyboy in the Buttermilk, the collection of essays that made Greg Tate visible to folk who didn’t have ready access to (or even interest in) The Village Voice. I pulled Flyboy off the shelf after Tate’s untimely passing a couple of weeks ago at the young age of 64. What strikes me about this paragraph is how utterly timebound (and wrong) it is. Greg Tate could have have been a balding, middle-aged white guy with a potbelly…it is possible.

But.

Here’s Tate remarking on Houston Baker (on Ellison) and Gates:

In [Baker’s assessment of Ralph Ellison], Baker could of course be remarking on the peculiar tautologies of language and formal language black academics like him and Gates have to deploy to keep sup a good front. I mean this is a clock game the bloods are running here, making with all the right poststructuralist references and verbiage to translate black folk’s linguistic thang into some doodad dem buckra can relate to while at the same time being true to black culture’s version of semiotics, namely signifyin’. Gates’s closing essay, ‘The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the SIgnifyin’ Monkey is a masterpiece of such duplicity…(By the way, Henry, we’ve got to figure out some other distinction besides this black and Western stuff, being as how blackness is a Western category in and of itself, and all that’s black ain’t purely African or non-Western even, semantic convenience notwithstanding. Robert Farris Thomas’s notion of a Black Atlantic tradition is one solution, but you know, you start bringing bodies of water into it and folk get to signifyin’ Negroes can’t swim. Anthony Braxzton’s ruff on the Trans-Atlantic tradition is another possibility but that could get confused with the antiapartheid organization. Hmm, rebbe semantic convenience will have to stand. (Tate, 1992, p. 150)

This is 1992. One year after Gates took over Harvard’s moribund Dept. of Afro-American Studies  (as a result of student protest, which in hindsight no one talked or talks about) but a year before he recruits the beginnings of what would come to be called (after the 1992 USA Olympic basketball squad) the “Dream Team”, and a few years before Temple would establish the first PhD granting Black Studies unit. Only four years after Yo! MTV Raps premiers and barely one year after Soundscan becomes the sine qua non of Billboard chart composition. And right before Bill Clinton is elected on the back of a pungent mixture of black suffering (Ricky Ray Rector) and black pop culture (The Arsenio Hall Show).

The institutional apparatus doesn’t yet exist for a middle-aged balding white boy to have access to the multitudinous cultural catalogue that would enable him to be familiar enough to namecheck Baudrillard, Clinton (George, not Bill), William Gibson, David Murray, Ntozake Shange, and Barbara Smith (much less interview a figure like Clinton), to name but a few. Such a thing still doesn’t fully exist but it’s much closer now.

There were really only three spaces that could prepare writers for such a thing—black cities like Detroit and DC, black colleges and universities, and black spaces created at majority white universities. Tate, who was born and raised in Washington DC, who went to Howard University, was arguably a product of sixties and seventies black nationalism. And was himself a force for it. If there’s another columnist more responsible for recognizing hip-hop’s power and capacity I’d like to meet him/her/them.

Gates’ forward reeks of condescension towards black nationalism—the type of condescension that many like him in the academy almost had to perform given the poststructuralist turn in the academy and the growing power black cultural representation played in the country at large. Tate recognizes Gates’ hustle for what it is.      

Gates probably recognized it too. Here’s the last sentence of that same foreword—“So, gentlefolk, read him, argue with him…and, most important of all: keep this nigger boy writing.”

By 2016 Tate’s status in the now well-ensconced field of black cultural studies was itself so settled that Duke published a Greg Tate Reader. I’ve written more than once about Richard Iton’s In Search of the Black Fantastic here. Tate creates a space not only for a figure like Ta-Nehisi Coates (Howard product), he makes it possible for a historian like Jelani Cobb (Howard product) to create a robust enough career as a columnist to become a professor of journalism at Columbia, makes it possible for someone like a Richard Iton to deftly bring together cultural studies and political science, and makes it possible for a Mark Anthony Neal to be both the chair of a black studies department and a named professor at Duke.

I got a chance to hang out with Tate a few times over the past few years at my friend Don Palmer’s house. He was as cool as the other side of the pillow. I wish we’d had more time. And I’m hoping that when they publish a new version of Flyboy that they give Gates another shot at that foreword.

NPR and The Village Voice have Tate tributes worth reading.