The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (90 page)

It’s easy to see why many critics think that’s a bad thing. First, such critics play an authenticity game themselves, that follows this line of reasoning: Real scholars read, write, study, and reflect at home or in the university. The virtue of their
work often rests in its ability to critically and carefully examine a subject with as much rigor and intellectual responsibility as they can muster. While their findings may apply directly to public life, their work will be read—and critics don’t often say this—mainly by other academics and graduate students. Sounds good to me. I’ve written stuff like that, with no apologies, because as a black person, then a black scholar, I’ve learned that we really have little choice but to master many languages, arcane theoretical ones and eloquently lucid ones as well.

But that’s not the only valid, compelling model of scholarship available. To put it simply, we need both: serious, critical reflection away from the lights, cameras, and action of the public realm; and gritty, graceful, engaged intellectual work that takes on the issues of the day with force and fire. Some of us can do both, while many of us can only master one. There’s no shame either way. The elitist, snobbish attempt to say only traditional scholarly work counts is self-serving. It’s also an intellectually bigoted view of the life of the mind. On the other hand, the attempt to equate fame or notoriety with intellectual achievement is vicious and small-minded.

At some point, the claim that the work of black public intellectuals is simply not rigorous enough, that its intellectual predicates are too thin, can be legitimately made about all public intellectuals. I know it’s true of some of my work. (Please, don’t ask what work I’m referring to; I might have to tell you which paragraph of an essay I wrote when I was twelve that I have in mind.) We all slip. And our critics should be there to catch us. But the genre of public intellectual work is not itself indictable on that charge, as some critics want us to believe. True enough, we can’t equate an op-ed piece on the unfairness of sending blacks to jail in disproportionate numbers with a dense description of the ways criminality has functioned to stigmatize black folk in America. The latter will, if well done, do much to reorient thinking among scholars who influence the perception of these matters in academic circles, and, by extension, beyond the academy. The former could pull the coat of some policy wonk or congressional flunky who might pass it on to her boss. Both sorts of work are worthwhile.

What’s doubly intriguing about the debate over lack of rigor, especially among black intellectuals, is that, like the mourners at a funeral, those crying the loudest are the most guilty. I’ve seen, heard, and participated in too many discussions with self-styled rigorous black intellectuals (shall we call them the rigorighteous?) who took special pride in the complexity, nuance, and density of their thinking—while despising the lack of same in the work of other black intellectuals—who were then denied tenure by their white colleagues for lack of substantive work, and laughed at behind their backs by those they seek to please with their displays of rigorous wizardry. There’s a useful distinction to be made between rigor, which can be expressed in elegant prose or in complex theory, and wanton inaccessibility, which masquerades as cutting-edge intellectual craft when it’s little more than jargonbloated, obfuscated intellectual nonsense. Make no mistake. This is not a minibroadside against postmodernism, poststructuralism, or any of the influential pillars, like Derrida and Foucault, of those posts. At its best, theory should help us
unmask the barbarous practices associated with some traditions of eloquent expression. But like a good sermon or a well-tailored suit, theory shouldn’t show its seams.

Black scholars—though this is true for other scholars as well, just not with the same implications about presence or lack of intelligence—are often put in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” bind. On the one hand, we were told for years that our work was worthless, that it lacked the rigor and language by which serious scholarly work is known. We were subtly but insistently implored to employ the jargon of our disciplines, thereby showing our mastery of that plot of intellectual ground we were taught to plow. Then we were told that if our scholarly writings were too jargon-filled they were obtuse and meaningless. We were told that if we couldn’t write in ways that made sense to a broad public our work was of no use. This is good to remember now that critics are taking black public intellectuals to task for our work. Back when scholars like Oliver Cox and W.E.B. Du Bois were doing just what it is alleged we often don’t do—careful, serious, deeply thoughtful work—they were ignored or dismissed. Du Bois’s monumental study,
Black Reconstruction
, sold only 376 copies in its first year of publication in 1935. The book wasn’t even reviewed by the
American Historical Review
, the leading journal in the historical profession. That’s a sober reminder of how black intellectuals shouldn’t be too quick to surrender whatever visibility we’ve managed to secure in deference to a notion of scholarly propriety. We see where that got us.

It’s also evident that the lure of the lights can corrupt black intellectuals by making us believe our own press. Or by making us addicted to praise and disdainful of serious criticism, which, by the way, every public intellectual lauds as a virtue, except when it’s directed his or her way. Nobody hates criticism like a critic. Still, many black public intellectuals have been victims of drive-by, gangsterstyle criticism. In this sort of attack, one can virtually hear the machinery of jealousy working overtime to crush another black intellectual’s work, to knock her reputation down a few notches to build up the critic’s own. No one but the critic benefits from such hateful exercises.

Equally worrisome, too many black public intellectuals hog the ball and refuse to pass it to others on their team. Many times I’ve been invited on a television program, a prestigious panel, or a national radio program because a white critic or intellectual recommended me. Later I often discover that another prominent black public intellectual, when consulted, had conveniently forgotten to mention my name or that of other qualified black intellectuals. Ugly indeed.

I guess this is a way of saying that, yes, a lot of black public intellectuals, despite what we say—maybe because we say we don’t—really do want to be HNIC, which, in light of the fierce and corrupting competition over the sweepstakes of visibility, also means Hottest Negro In The Country. If that’s the case, it’s a disgusting waste of a grand opportunity for a group of black intellectuals to make a significant impact on our nation’s debates about race and blackness. By doing that well, we might open up space for black thinkers to range freely over the entire field of American interests. Black public intellectuals have a great responsibility:
to think clearly, to articulate eloquently, to criticize sharply, to behave humanely, and to raise America’s and black folks’ vision of what we might achieve if we do away with the self-destructive habit of racism and the vicious forces of black selfdefeat taking us down from within.

Black public intellectuals are leaders of a particular kind. We stir up trouble in broad daylight so that the pieties by which we live and the principles for which we die, both as a people and a nation, are subject to critical conversation. Black public intellectuals are certainly not leaders in the sense as, say, Jesse Jackson or Louis Farrakhan, with an identifiable base in black communities from which we launch criticism or commentary that often, though not always, reflects our constituencies’ beliefs. Not that black public intellectuals don’t have what might be considered constituencies. There are many publics, and black public intellectuals move in and out of many of them, including the university. Sure the university is not, nor should it be, a civil rights organization, although some crotchety conservatives and miffed liberals would argue that multiculturalism, identity politics, and “PC” have made the differences between the two rather small. But the university is a public sphere, with a lot of rich people’s and poor people’s kids attending. And given the attention we’ve got, black public intellectuals have to try to help make the world smarter, safer, and saner for those, and all of America’s, youth. We don’t speak for The Race. We speak as representatives of the ideological strands of blackness, and for those kinships we possess outside of black communities, that we think are most healthy.

But we ain’t messiahs. Nor should we have messiah complexes. We can’t afford to take our world’s problems lightly. But we certainly can’t afford to take ourselves too seriously. In that spirit, Gentle Reader, I offer you as a send-off—perhaps even a send-up—a summary of what I think about black public intellectuals and our critics. Since we’re not, for the most part, eligible for Oscars, Grammys, or Emmys, consider these the Envys, given to recipients of the First Annual Awards for Black Public Intellectuals and Their Critics.

The Cheaper By the Dozen Award.
This award is given to Adolf Reed and Eric Lott, two very smart, if mean-spirited, scholars who revel in ad hominem and ad feminem arguments. Reed wrote an essay about black public intellectuals in the
Village
Voice
, heaping personal attacks on me and bell hooks (“little more than hustlers”), Cornel West (whom Reed in the past called “a thousand miles wide and about two inches deep”), Robin Kelley, and Skip Gates. Reed called me and West “running dogs” for Farrakhan in another
Voice
article (but we must not be too well heeled—we still didn’t get a chance to speak at the Million Man March!). Reed’s bitter commentary seems based more on a writer’s level of success with the public than on anyone’s actual ideas, since he is so damn mad at so many different thinkers!

Lott, too, has taken to personal attacks, especially in the left journal
Social Text
, where he called West a sellout, and in the journal
Transition
, where he labeled my work “middlebrow imbecilism” (just to think, most people have to meet me twice to draw that conclusion). For both writers, we black public intellectuals just aren’t
radical enough. But isn’t that argument worn out by now? At their worst, Reed and Lott prove that the left continues to do what it seems to do best: self-destruct! The left holds firing squads in a circle, while our real “enemies”—the radical right-wingers who detest every bone in our progressive heads (I’m sorry, I mean bodies)—get off scot-free!

The Elijah Complex Award.
This award is named after the biblical figure who cried, “I, even only I, am left,” proclaiming himself the only true prophet in town. It goes to the undeniably brilliant bell hooks for the numerous times she’s told us, in writing, in public, or in conversation, how she’s the only black intellectual to talk about class, or the only black on a panel to get the deeper dimensions of the topic of conversation, or one of the few black feminists who’s a serious intellectual. Somebody tell bell that God told Elijah, “Sorry, but there are 7,000 others like you still around.” Well, maybe there aren’t that many black feminists and serious intellectuals who talk about class, and about race, and gender and sex, too, but there are a whole lot more than bell seems to be aware of. Please, somebody give her a list!

The Spike Lee/Terry Mcmillan Award for Shameless Self-Promotion.
Okay, I’m the recipient of this award, for calling newspapers, television and radio stations, magazines, and other venues to tell them why they needed to review my book, or have me on to talk about my work. I can’t believe I’m telling this. After all, I wanted people to believe my name was so hot that folk just couldn’t stand to run special issues of journals, assemble conferences, or do shows on the matters that I address without me. And you thought the black public intellectual’s job was easy. Listen, if there are any publishers, magazine editors, or television producers reading, I’d like to tell you about my latest book . . .

The Golda Meir “Humility Is My Strong Suit” Award.
Meir once said, “Stop being humble, you’re not that great.” This goes to the very talented Cornel West, who genuinely is very humble, but who slipped—and don’t we all—and reminded us. (My pastor once said to me, aware of my pride in my humility, “The moment you announce you’re humble, you no longer are.”) This award is also in honor of West’s three-piece suit—a nod to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Victorian duds—the armor that West slips into every day to fight the good fight. Only problem is, he made a lot of people mad when he said that, generally speaking, black intellectuals these days dress so shabbily. Since most black intellectuals can’t pony up for nineteenth-century gear—or, for that matter, most twentieth-century high fashion—the only hope is for J.C. Penney to recruit West to design affordable clothes for private intellectuals. (Be careful, though, of all those low-paying sweatshops, they almost ruined TV personality Kathie Lee Gifford’s clothing empire.)

The Moses “Who Me? I Can’t Talk” Award.
This goes to Robin D.G. Kelley, a New York University historian and cultural critic. He is, without question, one of the
most gifted scholars of any generation, of any discipline, of any school, writing today. Kelley is ridiculously well rounded: a gourmet cook, an excellent father, a devoted husband, a committed mentor to graduate students, and an indefatigable researcher and writer. But he won’t own up to his gift to clearly explain complex stuff in public. Given all the crap out here (uh, I wasn’t referring to my crap), we need Kelley’s passionately intelligent voice. To show you what a sacrificial—oops, I mean, helpful—public intellectual I can be, I once reluctantly accepted an assignment that was first offered to Kelley. The second time I appeared on the
Oprah Winfrey
show happened because Kelley turned them down and recommended me. Listen, if it had been anybody but Kelley (not me, mind you, I’m above the fray), the
Oprah
staff could have asked us to speak about birds, and we would have put on some Charlie Parker records, rented a few Tweetie and Sylvester tapes for inspiration, and become an ornithologist overnight. I’ve got the solution: let’s introduce Kelley to R&B sensation R. Kelly. The next time we see him, he’ll be known as “R.D.G., That’s Kelley you see,” and he’ll be saying, “I don’t see nothin’ wrong with a little pub in
Time.
”