Those are fighting words

In the first few pages of her new book, “The End of Blackness,” Debra Dickerson wastes no time making it clear she’s going in for a little equal opportunity thumping:

* “The first step in freeing one another is for black people, collectively, to surrender. Blacks must consciously give up on achieving racial justice. They must renounce any notion of achieving justice that is meant to even the historical score or to bring about full racial integration.”

* “The ‘woe is me’ race men [would] have nothing important left to think about, no other way to organize their lives, no mechanism by which to understand themselves except as always marginalized, the perpetual outsiders.”

* “Today whites deny the continuing effects of their past racism as well as the privilege they yet retain, simply because they are too stiff-necked, too embarrassed and too sickened to follow these truths to their logical and moral conclusions. They simply cannot live with the truth of how they came to be who they are so they choose not to know.”

Has she gotten your attention? Well, that’s the idea.

“I feel dangerous as hell,” she writes, throwing down the gauntlet, “and I’m spoiling for a fight.”

And she’s getting one.

She’s already roused more than a little bit of curiosity -- if not ire -- around the country with her “stop wallowing”/”does racism work for you?” message. There have been appearances on chat shows and C-SPAN, a full-page, largely critical review in the New York Times Book Review, written by essayist and academic Gerald Early, questioning her scholarly chops, dismissing it as an “advice book.”

No matter, Dickerson, 44, a journalist, is ready for more. Here in L.A. recently for a couple of promotion-packed days, she made the rounds -- a spot on “20/20,” a sit-down with Bill Maher. On this particular evening, at Eso Won bookstore, near Baldwin Hills, the audience is crammed with those curious to see for themselves just what all this ruckus is about.

Dickerson knows she isn’t going to make a lot of friends -- white, black or otherwise -- with her bluntly dealt assertions. That isn’t the goal. This is about shaking things up, not making friends.

“Oh, I’ve heard it all: ‘How did you come hate every drop of black blood in your body?’ ‘How did you come to be such an Uncle Tom?’ ” she says sitting on the mudcloth-covered sofa in the bookstore’s back room, sipping bottled water. “ ‘Ya’ll in the back need to get a good look at the Uncle Tom,’ ” she says with an eye roll. “Sorry about the defensiveness,” she quickly adds. “People just say the most amazing things.”

Moments later, Dickerson, glammed up in pinstripe slacks, a sheer black blouse and heels, strides up to the podium. Instead of cracking open the text, she begins by way of her personal biography: how she came to be Debra Dickerson. She speaks of her slave and sharecropper lineage, of her parents’ dream for her to have a “sit-down job.”

“The big thing was air conditioning. That’s what I was aspiring to. They were preparing me for heaven, not Harvard,” she explains,

It was the military -- a stint in the Air Force -- that altered Dickerson’s fortunes, that sent her from her hardscrabble working-class neighborhood to college and eventually toward a law degree from Harvard (much of the journey chronicled in her forthright 2000 memoir, “An American Story”). “Education brought me context,” she explains. “I was really militant.... I went through a Clarence Thomas phase, but then I realized lots of people work really hard but that doesn’t get them anyplace. I guess you could say I’ve swung back to the middle.”

But even in that middle space, Dickerson clearly doesn’t feel comfortable. She’s still searching. This evening she sorts through her own back-and-forth battles with rage. The crowd listens intently; a range of expressions is thrown back from the audience -- furrowed brows, chins in palms. But no fireworks tonight.

She tosses out an incident at a Dunkin’ Donuts when she, the only black female present, is passed over in line and rendered invisible -- then dwells on it all day. She recounts a story of a lay minister basketball coach, telling his young team at the outset, “ ‘You’re one of the few black teams out there; you’re going to face a lot of racism. You’re going to lose more games than you win.’ And I listened to him and thought: ‘I’m so tired of being black this way.’ ”

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A complex manifesto

Her not-so-small goal -- one announced on the jacket of her new book -- is to explain both how the antique notion of “blackness” has “bamboozled” African Americans and how white America “exploited the concept to sublimate its rage toward and contempt for black America.”

But it isn’t that simple.

The book, a densely constructed manifesto, is dizzying in its sprawl. Dickerson weighs in on slavery, knee-jerk racism and white intransigence and kicks up the already piquant mix with a chapter titled “Kente Cloth Politics,” taking a swing at a range of folk across the political and pop-culture spectrum, from Condoleezza Rice to Tiger Woods to motivational speaker Iyanla Vanzant. “I was tired of being defined in opposition to racism. I needed a template,” she tells the bookstore crowd. “My parents didn’t have it ... that knowledge.” Dickerson casts a net, broad and deep, to contemplate: “What is my responsibility to the world -- and the Civil Rights legacy?”

Many of the points that Dickerson makes in “The End of Blackness “ aren’t new. Personal inventory, self-definition, community focus and self-sufficiency have been subjects that black thinkers have ruminated over since the days of slavery. And indeed, she borrows liberally from the writings of Fredrick Douglass, Carter G. Woodson, Albert Murray and James Baldwin. In “The End of Blackness,” however, they have been dressed up, provocatively packaged and given a pop-culture spin, with examples culled from a range of sources including Listserv jokes and episodes of UPN’s “Girlfriends.”

She believes that blacks have lost sight of the prize by getting mired in finger-pointing, while waiting for white people to send “a Hallmark card” of apology.

“Somebody’s just got to step in. Why are we still so focused on racism when that’s not just poor black people’s biggest problem everyday?” she asks, settling down the morning after her bookstore appearance to a hotel breakfast of cold cereal and hot tea. Today, she’s suited up in workout gear: a pair of shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with a portrait of Douglass framed by the words “Black Radical Congress.”

“I struggled for years knowing I needed to move beyond this focus on racism but not wanting to let white people get away with it,” she explains. “But you can’t do both things at once. You can’t be totally focused on what white people are doing and totally focused on helping people in the community.”

There wasn’t a specific event that nudged Dickerson toward this book. “I would have included this stuff in the first book if I had been through thinking this through,” Dickerson says. “For some reason, my agent doesn’t want me to say this, but clearly to me it is like Part 2 of my memoir, which was like a voice from the working class ... from the black masses [of] trying to throw off those chains. Everybody says, ‘Oh, it’s America. You can be anything you want.’ OK, but how?”

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Getting a response

Although some reviewers, such as Mother Jones’ Michael Robbins, see Dickerson’s work as a “solidly researched account of the evolution of black identity in America” with a bracing “get over it” message, many others have pointed out that that her power-of-the-individual approach glosses over serious issues -- access, economics, healthcare, housing -- still fundamental to black progress. They fault her as well for not having laid out any strategy for enacting her ideas.

Those responses are tame compared with those she has encountered on the road: “The name calling: ‘You’re insane.’ ‘You’re traumatized.’ ‘You don’t get to speak.’ ” Which is why, she admits, she has taken to talking about who she is beforehand as a matter of context, so people understand her own journey. “But I really think I’ve tapped into a wellspring out there.... People are also saying things like ‘You blessed me’ and ‘Thank you.’ I’m humbled by it and I’m saddened by it.”

It’s impossible to label Dickerson. The message isn’t conservative or neo-con, not radical nor middle of the road but politically provocative. Even when she refers to herself as “post-black,” she does so with an enigmatic smile. “We need to give ourselves permission to think about other things other than our oppression,” Dickerson says. “What I am saying isn’t anything different than what our grandmothers have been saying since we’ve been brought here. But when did we stop believing in each other’s capacity to respond to constructive criticism?”

Dickerson’s book is a hot poker, aimed at shaking up assumptions on all sides. If she’s succeeded in anything thus far, she’s succeeded in that: getting people talking, for better or for worse, about race and race relations.

“People think that someone could be walking behind me in a Klan robe and I wouldn’t notice it,” she says. “People keep telling me, ‘You want us to ignore racism. You don’t understand the significance of racism.’ No. It’s what is the proper response to racism. That’s the phase we should be in now. It’s just a sin, a shame, a crime -- the ignorance, the poor health, the crime [in our communities] -- and we’re chasing around someone who said ‘niggardly’ or we’re looking at old pictures of Babe Ruth: ‘He was black! Babe Ruth is black!’

“It’s sort of like walking past a burning car and you can see people inside. We’ve got to stop walking past the burning car. Doesn’t matter whoever set the fire. There’s people in the car. We’ve got to get them out.”