Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries
by Orlando Patterson
Civitas-Counterpoint. 330 pp. $29.50

Some years ago, on the same university campus and within weeks of one another, I attended lectures on the black experience by Orlando Patterson and Frances Cress Welsing. Patterson, a professor at Harvard, was already known by then as a pathbreaking sociologist and historian, and his lecture drew upon the research for his monumental Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), winner of the National Book Award. But only two dozen people, at most, were in the audience. By contrast, Welsing, a psychiatrist best known for her pseudo-Freudian conspiracy theories, drew a throng of several hundred eager to embrace her symbol-laden world view in which Nazi swastika = Christian cross = black man’s genitals = castration/lynching = black holocaust.

The contrasting receptions afforded the ideas of Patterson and Welsing illustrate a variant of American anti-intellectualism, with serious scholarship overshadowed by crank therapies. Reading Patterson’s newest book, however, one might suspect that he has taken a page from Welsing’s weird anthropology of African-American life.

Rituals of Blood is a fascinating, disturbing, and ultimately maddening book. Arranged in a trio of unequal chapters and loosely centered on the theme of black manhood, it begins with a long quantitative analysis of the African-American family, moves to a historico-religious treatment of lynching, and concludes with a meditation on the present-day cult of black sports celebrities. Not only do the chapters get progressively shorter, but the quality of argument becomes more frenetic as the book unfolds.

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Harking back in his first chapter to arguments associated with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s ill-starred 1965 report on the black family, Patterson contends that slavery produced an “ethnocidal assault on gender roles, especially those of father and husband, leaving deep scars in the relations between Afro-American men and women.” The extensive child labor of sharecropping, coupled with prohibitions against property rights and education, codified pathological patterns that still plague a large proportion of African-American families. Dissociated from the capacity to provide for offspring, the impulses of sexual manhood were, and remain, severed from the responsibilities of fatherhood.

Patterson’s analysis of the black family runs strongly against the grain of revisionist theories—pioneered by Herbert Gutman and others—which maintain that slavery produced extended kinships, biological or not, that have paradoxically continued to provide African Americans with strong alternative “family” structures. Basing himself on a careful interpretation of data from two recent national surveys and a wealth of secondary literature, Patterson demonstrates that this theory, firmly entrenched in contemporary scholarship, is a Utopian delusion in the case of slavery, and no less a delusion today.

Patterson is severe in documenting the roadblocks to black progress that can be ascribed to the continued irresponsibility of black men. Rituals of Blood points to a series of trends: dramatically reduced marriage prospects (whereas a Euro-American woman will spend 43 percent of her lifetime in a viable marriage, an African-American woman will spend only 22 percent); differential effects of early sexual experiences (an out-of-wedlock birth in a cohabiting relationship triples a white woman’s chance of marriage, but a black woman’s chances are unaffected); vastly higher rates of male infidelity (43 percent for black men versus 17 percent for white men); and so on.

When it comes to interpreting these patterns, Patterson rejects explanations based on contemporary racism, unemployment, or the staggering incarceration figures for young black men. Finding no evidence that male kinsmen and friends provide compensating role models for young blacks, he also ridicules the belief—the “myth of the ’hood,” in his derisive phrase—that such networks can take the place of functioning families. Until African-American men reject “predatory attitudes toward women” and accept their responsibilities as fathers, he writes, black culture will remain locked in a cycle of despair, notwithstanding the increasing affluence of the black middle class and the gradual disappearance of racism from American life.

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Up to this point, Rituals of Blood reads like a somewhat heterodox sociological treatise. Patterson’s ideas are not, to be sure, in the academic mainstream, but neither are they off the map (they seem to tilt toward neoconservatism). Suddenly, though, button-down scholarship gives way to provocation as Patterson takes a new tack. In his second chapter he contends that the nation’s epidemic of lynchings of black men between the 1880’s and the 1940’s proves that Christianity is nothing less than a violent, 2,000-year betrayal of Jesus’s teachings, a betrayal that reached its apex in the American South.

Patterson is hardly the only scholar to have dwelled on the “religion of the Lost Cause”—the nostalgic belief that the grandeur of the Confederacy could be recaptured in a modern South carefully ordered by race and class—as an explanation of racial violence during the long era of segregation. And he is right to suggest that lynching was, in many cases, justified by a community’s obsession with besmirched honor and its need for scapegoats. But what he adds is a degree of speculation about the meaning of the practice that is at once unnerving and unproved.

From the testimony of participants, as well as from harrowing literary depictions by writers like William Faulkner and Richard Wright, it is clear that some lynchings, in their combination of solemnity and ritual festivity, did have the character of sacrifices “to a Southern Christian God.” African-American literature and commentary of the period are themselves suffused with images of the “black Christ” as lynching victim, while white racist literature, led by the novels of Thomas Dixon and epitomized in film by D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, explicitly associated racial purity with religious fervor. The further Patterson goes into symbolic anthropology, however, the more he sounds like Frances Cress Welsing.

Olfactory science, the smell of burnt offerings in Leviticus, and the prevalence of barbeque in the South are all adduced by Patterson to explain why lynching was in actuality a form of cannibalism dressed up in Christian garb. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of the “raw and the cooked,” the primitive and the civilized, offers him a means of arguing that the “cooked Negro, properly roasted, [was] . . . culturally transformed” into something that could be communally consumed. From there, it is but a step before Patterson invokes the analogy of Nazism to ask: “What is it about the cross that so easily turns people on to genocide? That so frequently makes bloodthirsty brutes and cannibals of ordinary men and women?”

The phrase “ordinary men” alludes to the thesis (popularized in different ways by the historians Christopher Browning and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen) that the Nazi Holocaust was carried out by common people galvanized by circumstance into a capacity, even a lust, for diabolical acts. But whether the extremities of German fascism could illuminate the underlying logic of Rituals of Blood is impossible to say, for the book next veers into a third chapter even more offbeat than the second.

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In this final chapter, Patterson portrays superstars like Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson as cultural instances of the American Dionysus: black men whose transgression of societal boundaries counters the Apollonian impulses of an “overworked, post-industrial civilization.” In the wake of the civil-rights revolution, he suggests, the role of black man as sacrificial victim has given way to the role of black man as redemptive hero in the nation’s race drama. But the mega-success of such men only disguises—worse, it contributes to—the black community’s economic and social fragility.

Patterson’s condemnation of revered athletes who hypnotize black youth with grotesque illusions of wealth, a new “Uncle Tom’s cabin in the sky,” rests in important ways on his prior critique of the corrupt values of a promiscuous street culture. Yet beyond this connection to the first chapter, his argument is hard to fathom. His revulsion at black outlaws like O.J. Simpson and the cross-dressing basketball star Dennis Rodman, figures of thuggery and minstrelsy elevated to iconic status, is stated in ostentatious terms:

The 21st century of American popular culture can be said to have begun in 1994, on that wonderful night in Miami when Dennis [Rodman] first bedded down with Madonna, the ultimate Euro-American sex goddess. Not since Dionysus laid Ariadne on the island of Naxos has there been a coupling quite like that.

The trouble is that elsewhere in his work Patterson has explicitly endorsed racial mixing and intermarriage as the only sure way to overcome the heritage of slavery and racism. Why, then, should this particular “desecration of once-sacred boundaries” be decried? And how has the fearful menace of black sexuality—the theme of emasculation, both figurative and literal, runs through chapters one and two—been transformed in American culture into public adoration of black male sexuality? “For better or for worse, that’s how far we have come in American ‘race’ relations,” remarks Patterson of the Rodman-Madonna union. Unfortunately, he fails to tell us whether it is for better or for worse, and what if anything it portends.

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Rituals of Blood is the second volume of a proposed trilogy. The first was The Ordeal of Integration (1998), a book that tried, with only passing success, to steer a course between contemporary liberals’ preoccupation with the legacy of racism and contemporary conservatives’ emphasis on personal responsibility and their rejection of the state acting in loco parentis. In that earlier book, Patterson mounted a sustained attack on ethnocentrism; advocated the phasing-out of affirmative action over a fifteen-year period; underscored the dramatic racial progress of recent generations; and announced that the category of “race” (a “relic of the Nazi era”) should be banished from the national dialogue and the United States census.

Although the new book does not backtrack from these views, its reveling in the bloodshed of the past and its painful attention to the incapacitation of black men today produce a result that can only be called schizophrenic. Patterson’s demand that African Americans take responsibility for their own lives and communities and his call for a “radical recommitment to stable gender, marital, and parental attitudes and behavior” are salutary. But neither his few timid proposals along those lines—better day care, child-rearing education, prosecution of deadbeat fathers—nor his exhilarating forays into ritual sacrifice and the marketing of American sports heroes tell us how to get from psycho-historicism to workable public policy. Let us hope that the key will be revealed in volume three.

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