Tripping over the soapbox

IT WAS A VERY GOOD crowd for a Friday night, Michael Eric Dyson noted from the podium with satisfaction. The scholar and cultural critic was speaking at Eso Won Books, the premier black bookstore in L.A., about his latest work, “Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster.” Just about every space in the store not taken up by books was filled with people, about 100 of us sitting in metal folding chairs or standing, all eager to hear Dyson expound in his impassioned, inimitable style.

We were primed to hear about Katrina, especially from the unequivocal Dyson, who is also a preacher. The hurricane had dealt us a huge psychic blow, rupturing again whatever faith we had in the dream of American inclusion and pushing us a couple more degrees closer to an awful certainty that we are, and always have been, on our own in our own country.

But blacks are nothing if not eternally hopeful. This post-disaster gathering felt not like a wake but a welcome opportunity for all of us in this far-flung city to come together, compare notes and losses and, if we were lucky, coalesce around an issue or two.

For all sorts of reasons, the last thing tends not to happen, but we bring fresh expectations to every public meeting anyway. Most of the regulars who attend events at Eso Won and other places like to believe that every time blacks fail to solve a problem in public, the chances increase that the next time out, we’ll succeed. It’s an inverse earthquake theory of black history, as well as a gambler’s somewhat hapless but hardy optimism -- as the losses pile up, what else can you believe in but winning?

I was as ready to win as everyone else in the room. But I was more than a little apprehensive, mostly out of habit. So many times, forums like this dissolve into internal gripe sessions about what is wrong with black people, who is most responsible for the wrongs and what we need to do to fix them; call it the Bill Cosby syndrome (which was, as it happens, the subject of Dyson’s last book).

Dyson began his address deliberately. He started gathering rhetorical steam as he connected more and more dots -- among Katrina and Reconstruction, black identity and invisibility, the state of the church that’s lately become synonymous with the church of the state. The audience nodded, clapped, murmured or shouted approval. One of the many things Dyson noted was how blacks of all strata and identities -- middle class, poor, straight, gay -- had suffered equally in New Orleans. More claps and approval.

Then, during the question-and-answer session, it happened. A bespectacled woman stepped up to the soapbox and chastised Dyson -- not for his viewpoints on Katrina but for bringing up gays. They had nothing to do with anything, she said, although her irritation made it clear that they had a lot to do with something. “Gays,” she snapped. “Who cares?”

IMMEDIATELY CAME groans, hoots of derision, a few murmurs of assent. Several minutes later, another soapboxer, a man, voiced his agreement with the woman, a move that so vexed the crowd that he was eventually driven out of the store. But from the first mention of the word “gay,” I could feel the conversation already swooning, the frail sense of cooperation coming apart and the latest attempt at black coalescence ending in a draw, at best.

And just like that, despite the abundance of energy and eagerness to do that had drawn people to Eso Won in the first place, another opportunity for unity was gone. I had prepared myself for this, even as I’d hoped to be proved wrong. People feel so unheard and shut out by the system, and are so eager to occupy a public space and deliver answers they carry around in their heads on any given day, that they will drag their soapboxes up to any available microphone for their 15 minutes -- more if they can get it. The rest of us have no choice but to listen -- often, as on Friday night, with a charged mix of sympathy and scorn, and by the time we settle on one thing or the other, the event is over.

Not that this was a waste of a Friday night -- far from it. Dyson was riveting, even forgiving; as it turned out, he was the person most attentive to the woman’s complaints, more even than the man who declared himself her ally. He was aware of things going sideways and strove to keep them upright.

He didn’t fail; we did. Next time, I’m sure, we’ll fail better.