The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (89 page)

Because black folk are leaving their mark all over American culture, there are renewed debates about what blackness means. Who better to call on than those blacks who spend their lives thinking, writing, and living black experience. (I can see it now: The film features our heroes being summoned to city hall to fight the slime and sludge of racism, backed by the refrain of the movie’s theme song, “Who you gonna call? RACEBUSTERS! I ain’t afraid of no racist.”) As terrible as the fallout from all the fuss about black public intellectuals is—that is, as limited and limiting as the focus on a few elites is—at least some of us have a small say in what’s done, or more modestly, in what’s thought about black folk.

That’s a significant improvement over the times when white critics pontificated about blackness without knowing, or in some cases, caring much about the subject. Even when white critics were righteous, when they were honest and critically sympathetic and did their homework, they were the only ones allowed to speak about black culture to the masses. If black folk weren’t allowed in the front of the bus, at the top of white classes, or in the major leagues—about the only place they were invited to be first was, when they could enlist, at the war’s front line—they certainly weren’t going to be delivering astute analyses of their kith and kin to millions on television, radio, or in newspapers.

As usual, however, a blessing brings burdens. Some white critics have pointed out—some lamenting, others fuming—what a terrible thing it is for blacks to talk only about race, and that for them to make race their sole subject is, in the long
run, harmful to the image of black intellectuals as perpetual one-noters. True enough. But a little clarification is in order. Black thinkers fought hard for Americans to take race seriously, that is, as an object of legitimate, critical examination. Early white thinkers, people like David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, resisted the process, outside of scandalously biased interpretations of black culture that masqueraded as scientific treatises on the inferiority of black culture. It was not until well into this century that white scholars began to study race for greater intellectual purposes than the proof of white superiority and the redemption, however crudely managed, of black savages. So black intellectuals paid the cost to be the boss in a realm of experience in which their thinking on the subject was usually overlooked, discounted, or berated.

Also, criticisms of the racial monomania of black intellectuals sometimes miss how black thinkers have been discouraged from making comment in public about issues other than race. The year he died, Malcolm X noted how even when whites “credit a Negro with some intelligence,” they still feel the black thinker is only qualified to speak about race. “Just notice how rarely you will hear whites asking any Negroes what they think about the problem of world health or the space race to land men on the moon,” Malcolm remarked in 1965.

That’s still true today. Black intellectuals are rarely asked about the collapse of communism, the crisis of capitalism, whether cigarettes should be banned in public spaces, the successes and failures of feminism, the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, the state of modern Islam, the transcendentalist vision of Emerson, Walt Whitman’s beliefs about erotic friendship, the impact of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle on the debate about postmodernism, Foucault’s notion of power, Walt Disney’s role in pop culture, fin de siècle apocalyptic thinking, Russian formalism, Murray Perahia’s Beethoven concertos, and a world of things besides. We’re rarely even asked about the unusual things black folk do, like scuba diving, writing histories of German warplanes, studying ancient Chinese cultures, and so on.

So before critics ascend their high horses too quickly, they should dig their intellectual spurs into the beast of history and hold on for the long, rough ride. Black intellectuals turned a deficit into a credit. They were limited to writing, or speaking in public, about race. As a result, the subject is now viewed the way black intellectuals have long viewed it, as the central problem of American society, through the eyes of thinkers who have witnessed the bitter triumphs of racism while working feverishly for its defeat. Just because the rest of the world caught on much later—and to be fair, many whites have fought side by side with blacks from the very beginning—is no reason to punish those, or at least their descendants, who got the point in the first place.

It is important to remember that contemporary black public intellectuals do have forebears. That would certainly temper whatever pride or self-satisfaction some black public intellectuals might feel about their present fortunes. They didn’t fall out of the sky, fully formed and prepared to contest the demons of race. Black intellectuals learned at the knees of, and sometimes, unfortunately, at the
expense of, black thinkers who blazed the paths we now travel. Too often, these pioneers were cut off from the public they coveted, their writings deprived of the close and critical readings they so richly deserved.

E. Franklin Frazier, renowned sociologist and the first black president of the American Sociological Association, was restricted within the broader, whiter world of academia in which he was trained and over which he had at least nominal influence. And W.E.B. Du Bois, the universally recognized Thomas Jefferson of black letters, the founder of black intellectual invention in the twentieth century, and the first black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, was prevented from sharing his genius with the institution that shaped him. As the strange career of race has evolved, the anatomy of opportunity for blacks has changed as well. The post–civil rights generation of black intellectuals has begun to get some of the benefits that even towering intellectual giants were routinely denied. For the most part, the present cadre of celebrated black intellectuals is the first generation to gain entry as students into elite white colleges and universities, later to return and find their voices and vocations within those same halls of ivy as professors.

But even that progress contains a drawback. Much of the attention has been given to those black intellectuals who have managed to find—and hog—the public spotlight. Less attention has been paid to their cohort in universities for whom the classroom and careful scholarship are enough. (Or to community college teachers whose commitment to educating black folk is undervalued.) Such scholars—shall we call them, for want of a better term, black private intellectuals?—have been, by virtue of the dramatic emphasis placed on the public intellectuals, done a grave disservice.

The cruel irony is that just as black scholars have attained legitimate standing in the academy, getting it the old-fashioned way, by earning tenure, writing scholarly monographs, and publishing learned articles, they now have to compete for attention with so-called black public intellectual superstars. Such figures are the pampered, high-profile elite who command large speaking fees; get their books reviewed in all the right, bright-light, high-gloss magazines and newspapers; appear on television to chat about their latest work; and occasionally represent the hardworking, low-wage-earning, undereducated black masses. (Sometimes these intellectuals secretly compete with the masses in their own minds, as they recall their latest critical rebuff or exaggerate their own suffering, seeing it as the moral equivalent of welfare, class warfare, and income inequality.)

In other words, not only do private black intellectuals have to put up with all the mess they take from a white academy that is often still insensitive and hostile, they now have to hear about the goings-on of black public intellectuals, who are the supposed proof that not only do black scholars have it good, they’ve got it better than most white academics. What a bind. (Of course, given the levels of hostility now being directed at black public intellectuals within the academy, the private intellectuals might use their status to their advantage: “Oh, no, not me. I’m not a public intellectual. I’m just a poor working stiff who grades papers, attends
faculty meetings, serves on committees, writes articles and books, and, in what spare time I have, I volunteer for the neighborhood literacy project.”)

As we grouch, sometimes with good reason, about the narrowness and limitations of the university, black public intellectuals should remember that it is the foothold we found inside the academy—before we “went public”—that became our launching pad for fame and fortune in the first place. The academy is still home, and our criticisms shouldn’t feed into the hysterical rantings against the academy by the far right that leave our private intellectual colleagues, especially black ones, most vulnerable. Many conservatives believe the university is a den of politically correct educational thieves, robbing our kids of their moral futures with all sorts of strange theories.

Well, the university isn’t all it’s cracked down to be: an artificial environment removed from the lives of real people. Last time I checked at my university, there were actual bodies in the classroom, real people running the place, and life-anddeath issues being fought over by people who will one day run businesses, defend clients, make millions, enrich lives, ruin government, and become politicians (sorry for the repetition) in the Real World. Be glad—okay, some of you should be sorry—that many of my colleagues get a crack at them first. Some esoteric theory, off-the-cuff comment, or chance encounter with someone completely opposite in viewpoint might make the difference, a quarter century after a student leaves a classroom, in her doing the right or wrong thing.

Sure, the alleged Unabomber went to Harvard and Michigan. But before that he lived in Chicago’s white suburbs, and after he dropped out of the academy he haunted the mountains of Montana. And no one’s going to argue that, based on their influence on his outlook, either place should be destroyed. (I simply can’t resist noting, with all the unfairness and smallness of perspective my comment implies, that the alleged Unabomber’s genius was quantitative; maybe if he’d had more humanities courses, he could have dropped rhetorical, not literal, bombs!)

Not only is the problem of the black private intellectual compelling, but, if we’re honest, the current crop of black public intellectuals is selected in a way that’s elitist and incestuous. Most of us went to Ivy League schools, few of the official designees teach outside of elite eastern schools, and none teach at historically black colleges and universities. I’m not aiming here at some sort of compensatory principle for the sake of including all segments of the black intellectual community. I’m simply pointing out that if the criterion for being a public intellectual is the ability to speak and write clearly and substantively about important public issues for broad audiences, then many, many more black scholars fit the bill. Black scholars like William Strickland, Jerry Ward, Gloria Wade-Gayles, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ethelbert Miller, and a host of others certainly qualify. And God knows that black nationalist and Afrocentric scholars like Maulana Karenga, Molefi Asante, Asa Hilliard, Ivan Van Sertima, Na’im Akbar, and LaFrances Rogers Rose were doing public intellectual work, especially among despised, invisible black communities, way before the term took hold.

Certainly that’s part of the catch. Contemporary black public intellectuals are valued because we speak—by no means exclusively, and, in some cases, not even primarily, but nonetheless in important ways—to a
white
public. We are involved, however much we might not like it, with the translation, interpretation, explanation, and demystification of black culture to white masses. The temptations are readily apparent. That we become the judges of authentic blackness. That we become viewed as the most visible, and hence, the most important and informed interpreters of black culture. That we hoodwink naive white folk with a racial abracadabra whose plausibility depends upon their ignorance. That we misrepresent the cantankerous ideological and cultural differences within black life. That we come to think white folk are the only folk that count and, in trying to please them, we end up selling out black interests.

One black writer harshly reproved black public intellectuals for explaining the heart of black darkness to white folk, saying that we based our claims on being Real Blacks as we make big cash telling white folk about the ins and outs of black culture. According to him, we were conniving, careerist sellouts. He made that charge, of course, in the well-known black weekly, the
Village Voice
, gaining a reputation for tough talk, and a column in that publication to boot. Who says trashing black intellectuals for selling out to whites doesn’t pay off handsomely, giving the critic, in this case a black intellectual, more visibility, a larger public voice, and more legitimacy in the white world?

Let’s get real. Black folk read the papers, watch television, and consume books like everybody else. In fact, much has been made of the strong and still increasing numbers of black book buyers. Black public intellectuals are reaching broader white and black audiences through their work. Only by underestimating the intelligence of those audiences can we conclude that black public intellectuals will get away with too much rhetorical or intellectual legerdemain. Besides, most of the black public intellectuals I know make regular appearances among black folk to hash out important ideas about race, democracy, and this nation’s destiny. In fact, many of the black folk who show up to see and argue with these figures read their books, saw them on television, read their articles in newspapers, or heard them on the radio.

Mass media have changed the stakes for the black intelligentsia. Even when Du Bois, Frazier, Zora Neale Hurston, or Langston Hughes held forth in black communities, they didn’t have anything like the range of audience or publicity today’s black scholars enjoy. Television, radio, newspapers, and now the Internet have changed all that. Now that black intellectuals regularly appear on the
Today
show and National Public Radio, and in the pages of the
New York Times
, the
New Yorker
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and the like, they have more visibility and name recognition than many of their predecessors.