Lifestyles of the Rich and Tenured

By Mark Anthony Neal
SeeingBlack.com Music and Cultural Critic

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During the opening weeks of the new year, there was considerable attention paid to the cohort of Black public intellectuals who reside in the ivoriest of Ivory Towers at Harvard University. In the case of Randall Kennedy, such the attention was planned as the legal scholar began to promote his new book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Kennedy's book offered a unique opportunity for the larger culture to seriously examine the most prominent racial epithet in American history, and to perhaps begin a real discussion about White supremacist practices that the word symbolically shorthands, not the vulgarity of the word itself. But Kennedy's book was overshadowed by a very public dispute between Harvard's President Lawrence Summers and the "pre-eminent" Black Public Intellectual Cornel West.

According to senior faculty members at the university and sources close to West, in an October meeting with West, Summers "chided" West for recording a "rap" CD, his prominent role in Al Sharpton's likely presidential bid in 2004, his overly accessible scholarly work, and grade inflation. In Summers's defense, he had similar "critical" discussions with other Harvard University faculty, particularly with regards to grade inflation. But Summers' purported comments and various schools of response to the controversy raise troubling questions about perceptions of Black intellectual production, the increasing gaps—real or perceived—between elite Black intellectuals and the larger black public whom they "speak" for, and the often bankrupt strategies of mainstream civil rights activists and sycophantic Black conservative commentators alike.

Cornel West began his scholarly career a little more than 20 years ago as a self-defined "post-modern" Marxist Black philosopher, a description that would corner any market in any corner of the world. There's was literarily no public language at the time to support even the idea of Cornel West and the generation of Black "post-structuralist" and feminist literary and cultural critics and theorist that emerged during the late 1970's and 1980's.

Names like the late Barbara Christian, Houston Baker, Jr., Hortense Spillers, and Henry Louis (Skip) Gates, Jr. were simply not part of the public lexicon, particularly in relation to the ebbs and flows of everyday Black life in America during that time. Nevertheless, many of these same scholars would emerge as powerful forces within the American Academy, with Gates emerging as the prominent with the publication of his groundbreaking study The Signifying Monkey in 1988.

No doubt erudite in his scholarly work, West's power came from his lay-preacher style that was part Emersonian, (DuBoisian) and Franklin-ian (as in Rev. CL). As West admitted in an 1990 interview with Bill Moyers, he believed that the "vocation of the intellectual is trying to turn easy answers into critical questions and putting those critical questions to people with power." On the brink of intellectual stardom, West was described by Robert Boyton (who would later write an influential essay on the Black public intellectual for Atlantic Monthly magazine) as bringing "religious zeal to intellectual issues" and making the "life of the mind exciting."

West's initial breakthrough to popular audiences came perhaps with Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991), his collaborative "conversation" with bell hooks that was published by South End Press in 1992. hooks already had a rather prolific career, specializing in presenting "popular" black feminist theory and criticism to "alternative" audiences in books like Ain't I A Woman (1981) and Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989). Arguably at the time of their collaboration, hooks was the more visible of the two. Breaking Bread primed West for the widespread acceptance of Race Matters (Beacon Press, 1993), a collection of very accessible essays on race and African-American culture. The book, for all intents, officially ushered in the era of the Black public intellectual.

Dressed nattily in navy three-piece suits and even nattier (not nappier) afro, West became the poster boy for generation of Black scholars, including the aforementioned Gates and hooks. Others in the group included Michael Eric Dyson, Patricia Williams (who writes consistently brilliant pieces for The Nation), Todd Boyd (the forthcoming The New H.N.I.C.: the Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip-Hop), and Tricia Rose (author of the groundbreaking book on hip-hop, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994).

The seeming sole purpose of these thinkers for mainstream (literate) White America was to interpret the signs and sounds of hip-hop, Black youth culture, the O.J. Simpson trial (which made Dyson a star), the Million Man March, and the murders of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. While this generation of black public intellectuals as been alternately celebrated and scorned, they were not a "new" phenomenon, as some argued in the mid-1990s, but rather the latest of a long tradition of Black Public Intellectuals that included seminal; figures such as Ida B. Wells Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, and the legendary C.L.R. James.

At the time Race Matters was published, West was directing the Afro-American Studies program at Princeton. Three years later in 1996, West was firmly ensconced as a member of the "dream team", the collection of Black scholars that comprise the faculty of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. This group now includes folks like Gates, who runs the institute, West, sociologist William Julius Wilson (The Truly Disadvantaged1987), Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and recent additions Michael Dawson and noted post-colonialist Homi Bhabba. The DuBois institute is synonymous with the field of African-American, often eclipsing the profile of equally important programs/departments like those at Yale, NYU, Duke, Berkeley, Columbia, and Brown.

According to Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Trescott in a 1996 piece on the Institute, the "dream team" was "in terms of critical mass, the most prestigious group of Black intellectuals since Thurgood Marshall gathered his team three decades ago" in preparation for Brown vs. Board of Education. In the piece, Black Issues in Higher Education publisher Frank Matthews admitted that the stakes were high: "We have the right to expect something from them in terms of solutions. Some answers to the very vexing problems we have—from freedom of speech and rap music to how do we deal with the? AIDS crisis. We have to expect more than business than usual."

While the Institute has fell short of such lofty expectation-how can any individual department be expected to change the world?—it's high visibility has had, generally speaking, a positive impact on the field of African-American studies. While Gates wields real "gatekeeper" power within African-American studies, it is West who has been the most visible embodiment of the DuBois Institute and African American Studies.

It against this back drop that Lawrence Summers, former Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration and brand new President of Harvard University, sat down West in October of last year. Though the exact details of the meeting remain somewhat vague, it is clear, as reported initially in The Boston Globe, that Summers took some issue with the grades assigned in West's intro class in African-American Studies (apparently a wide spread problem at the University). He reportedly also criticized West's proclivity for producing books for general, non-scholarly audiences (Summers apparently had only read Race Matters), and the recording Sketches of My Culture, a spoken-word CD that has been mistakenly defined as a "rap" CD.

Summers apparently also chided West for heading Al Sharpton's presidential exploratory committee, though there is some dispute about this aspect of their conversation. After the story broke in late December, the reactions were swift. The "attack" on West became conflated with the larger issue of Harvard's commitment to affirmative action leading the battling Reverends Sharpton and Jackson (in mortal combat over leadership of the mainstream civil rights movement) to enter the fray.

In a phone conversation with The Boston Globe Jackson asserted that the "tension at Harvard is having an impact across the country. It is America's flagship university. And the tension at Harvard over the equivocation or lack of clarity about affirmative action and inclusion is very disturbing." In a separate conversation with the same paper, Sharpton stated that he didn't want to see faculty members "intimidated."

Given the myriad of crises faced by people of African descent in the United Sates, such as police brutality, racial profiling, erosion of civil liberties, lack of health care and a state of economic depression in some communities, particularly after 9/11, the decision of Sharpton and Jackson to use whatever political and social capital they actually possess to mediate a dispute between an elite Ivy League president and a six-figure, elite Black public intellectual, seems particularly problematic.

One has to wonder if either would extend the same energy in support of black faculty and staff at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), who, depending on the institution, are treated as little more than chattel. But to raise questions about Black faculty who are "intimidated" by gatekeepers within Black institutions, is to risk access to and influence within those very institutions, and no politically astute Black mainstream politician is willing to do that.

In a another questionable response, The Tom Joyner Morning Show initially reported that Harvard was attempting to "fire" Cornel West. West is of course a tenured University Professor at Harvard (one of 14 at the institution), who short of being convicted for a role in the 9/11 attacks, is not likely to be "fired" by the institution, as is the case with most tenured professors. The mistake on Joyner's part speaks to the fact that the general public has very little understanding of the ebbs and flows of academic life, though that didn't keep the show from mounting one of their famous "air-advocacy" campaigns in support of West.

The "air advocacy" campaigns (the hosts urge listeners to fax and e-mail complaints/protests), which are largely the brain-child of commentator and NPR host Tavis Smiley, have been a mixed bag. On the one hand they have been instrumental in assisting flood victims in North Carolina and pushing through of the appointment of Roger Gregory to the Federal courts. On the other hand, the campaigns have been bogged down symbolic in minutiae like protesting the flying of the confederate flag in South Carolina (as opposed to actually helping to address the economic and educational inequities in the state).

Accordingly, it was on the debut edition of Smiley's NPR show in January that West first spoke publicly about the fray, acknowledging that he doesn't "tolerate disrespect, being dishonored and being devalued." Again, one has to wonder that if this was another era, and Smiley and Joyner were positioned as they are now, whether they would had extended such forums to the Institute's namesake W.E.B. DuBois, when the influential Black intellectual—the template for the tradition—was carted out in front of McCarthy's House Un-American Committee (HUAC) in the early 1950s and asked to renounce his ties to radicalism. (The mainstream NAACP, which DuBois helped to create, had cut their ties him in the late 1940s).

The efforts to rally around Cornel West are likely unprecedented in the history of the Black intelligentsia in the United States, with only the early 1990s controversies surrounding the suspect Afrocentric scholar Leonard Jeffries coming close. The sudden attention towards the Black intelligentsia, raised consciousness among the Black masses about the role of Black intellectuals in their lives. During an extraordinary three-hour call-in program broadcast on C-Span 2 in early January, West fielded a wide array of questions about himself and the field of African-American studies.

One caller raised the question as to why scholars such as West and others teach at elite "White" institutions instead of teaching as historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). West did what some many of us know as the post-structuralist two-step, (I've done it more than a few times) with a lot of references to "teaching loads," "research budgets," and "financial rewards." Of course many of these HBCUs, especially elite institutions like Howard, Hampton, Spelman, Morehouse, and Fisk, were largely responsible for nurturing most of the black intelligentsia well into the 1980s. With the "integrating" of traditionally "White" universities and colleges post-1970, there has effectively been a brain drain of the best and brightest Black thinkers, who have been integrated out of black institutions.

Still, more than half of the Black Ph.D.s produced in the United States are products of HBCUs and these Ph.D.s most often pursue careers at HBCUs. In some cases, some of these faculty members are forced into a state of peonage, where they teach 8 and 10 course loads (in comparison, most faculty at public and private research institutions teach 2-4 courses a year), leaving them unable to become productive scholars and thus making much them less marketable to other institutions. This reality has broader implications beyond HBCUs when the experiences of community college faculty and adjunct faculty are more closely examined.

There is effectively a two-tier system of higher education, where students and faculty at elite research institutions simply derive greater rewards, than those at non-research (teaching) and community colleges. Courtland Milloy, makes such a point in his biting commentary about the lack of "elite" Black intellectuals in Washington, D.C. as he opines that the reason "Gates and West give for considering leaving Harvard is that they don't always feel 'respected.' However, the discomfort they are experiencing ought to serve as a reminder of how much worse it must be for Blacks who have no power to leverage."

Part of the leverage that West possessed was a long-standing offer to return to Princeton and, in fact, part of the public discourse surrounding his flap with Summers has been this threat by West and fellow dream-teamers Gates and K. Anthony Appiah to leave Harvard. Though Gates does not have a formal offer from Princeton, Appiah and West both have accepted new positions at Princeton.. This is part of the academic star system. Elite scholars are recruited from one elite institution to another all of the time, and the dream team is no different.

In her scathing critique in the Village Voice Thulani Davis suggests that the controversy was little more than a "power play" on the part of West, to secure a more lucrative deal from Harvard. While such tactics are not unusual (some elite scholars pursue offers from other institutions for just that reason), Davis notes that in this instance, West's power moves may create a "backlash for academics, Black and White, in African American studies all over the country." She adds that "These thousands of scholars, some doing brilliant and unheralded work, have struggled for respectability for years, and they don't need the kind of fallout that comes when privileged men call the race troops to arms for no greater reason that to enhance their already cushy careers." In Davis's essay, NYU historian Robin D.G. Kelley (Race Rebels (1994) and Yo Mama's Disfunktional (1997) raises the question that "if the president of Harvard could bring the country's top Afro-American department down a notch, I can't imagine what deans might do at other institutions where there is no respect for what we do."

Barely two weeks after The Boston Globe, first broke the story, Summers for all intents, apologized for the controversy, affirming his commitment to "create an ever more open and inclusive environment that draws on the widest possible range of talents." Summers was of course within his right to try and hold his faculty accountable—college and university presidents regularly do this—but this particular incident with West is unique because of West's profile, the historic devaluation of Black intellectual thought (and more explicitly the intellectual capabilities of people of African descent) and, more recently, a general skepticism about the rigor and significance of African-American studies and its various incarnations (Black Studies/Africana Studies).

But there was a general consensus, especially among right-leaning commentators, that Summers had capitulated to the "evil" forces of White liberal guilt, political correctness, Black victimology, and old-school race pimping. In this regard, the very backlash that Davis and Kelley suggested became real-time narratives in press organs like National Review, The Wall Street Journal and even the "liberal" New York Times. Roger Kimball, for instance, made such a point in National Review, where he argued that Summers "learned.that if he dares to criticize Black professors at Harvard, he will face the wrath of The [New York] Times, Jesse Jackson, and the whole steamroller smear machine of racialist political correctness. It is the text book of liberal intimidation at work."

Post-apology commentary about the West-Summers fray ranged from public examinations of West's income from public lectures (Rob Dreher in NR, 1.1.02) and general perceptions that West et al were crying "wolf." In the same Times issue that Kimball accused of liberal bias, Kate Zernike wrote as piece on the controversy titled "Can Crying Race Be Crying Wolf?". In the Sunday Times (London), Andrew Sullivan derisively titled his commentary on the flap "When Being Black is an Excuse for Taking the World for a Ride."

In the piece, Sullivan states that West is "phenomenally rich. It's hard to argue that he is a victim of the racist, sexist, homophobic, bourgeois elites he so often invokes and condemns." The basic premises of both pieces are that West economic status supercedes not only his feelings of insult in the aftermath of Summer's comments, but that it also bankrupts, in their minds, his more legitimate disgust at racial, sexist, and queer discrimination and economic exploitation. Both essays exhibited a profound ignorance of the Black intellectual traditions in general and, more specifically, a fundamental misunderstanding of the field of African-American studies.

Nowhere was such ignorance more profound than in National Review contributing editor John Derbyshire's ridiculous piece, "Af-Am Nonsense." Early in the piece, Derbyshire admits that he was a "modest authority" on the subject of dispute because he "once read a book by Cornel West while standing in the aisle of one of the bookstores in Midtown Fifth Avenue in New York." He adds that "Race Matters was a small book, I am a fast reader, and I won't swear that I read every word. I read enough though to know that the book was irredeemably awful. It was so badly written and constructed that you couldn't tell what it was trying to say."

The reality that he might be ignorant of the field of African-American studies, is, of course, lost on Derbyshire, who felt he could and legitimately critique a book that he skimmed while standing in line at a Barnes and Noble store, by a scholar in a field of study that he has no real knowledge. (I guess we can call this White privilege, the same that Summers articulated when he critiqued West for a CD he hadn't listened to.)

Derbyshire in fact latter admits that he "like most non-Blacks" he "always thought that 'Afro-American Studies' is pseudo-discipline, invented by guilty White liberals as a way of keeping Black intellectuals out of trouble and giving them a shot at holding professorships at elite institutions without having to prove themselves in anything really difficult." It is exactly this kind of uninformed and condescending B.S. that West was reacting to in the first place.

In Breaking Bread West writes that the "central task of postmodern Black intellectuals is to stimulate, hasten, and enable alternative perceptions and practices by dislodging prevailing discourses and powers. This can be done only by intense intellectual work and engaged insurgent praxis." West's quote has effective become a mantra for a whole generation of Black intellectuals, particularly those who work in the fields of Cultural Studies and Critical Theory. In other words it has been partly the job of these scholars to create a space for alternative visions of black life and culture, on the one hand countering white supremacist doctrine and, on the other, challenging the essentialist hegemony of mainstream black institutions.

The written work of scholars such as Hortense Spillers, Houston Baker, Jr. and Paul Gilroy, as well as the public lectures of West or Michael Eric Dyson are text-book examples of how difficult it can be to follow many of these themes. Some would recognize this effort as representing a certain complexity of thought among these scholars or, at least, an over-reliance on post-structuralist jargon. Derbyshire just calls its "bad" writing.

Race Matters was a particularly perplexing book for some readers, because the book attempted to "shorthand" some of West more erudite commentary. In short, if the goal of Beacon Press and even West, was to make Race Matters a "best-selling" commentary on "matters of race" then, that would most likely be achieved via a 150-page book as opposed to a 500 page one. It is well known within the field of African-American studies that Race Matters was heavily edited for just that reason—to make West a viable cross-over star.

This is not to say that 500-page non-fiction books cannot be best-sellers, 500-page non-fiction books by Black intellectuals might be a difficult sell for audiences who were largely unaware that a Black intellectual tradition exists, or who regularly regard figures like Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan. Magic Johnson and Ja Rule as being the most visible purveyors of Black intellectual thought.

The reality is that even in the era of the Black public intellectual, Black thinkers and artists are rarely allowed a "public complexity," but rather reduced to the smallest possible "racial box" in order to sell them and their ideas to mainstream audiences, black and non-black, who have never thought of Blackness as being complex at all. Thus there is no language, for example, to think of Jay Z as a "entrepreneurial Gramscian thug" instead of a "gangsta rapper." In this environment, John McWhorter's largely anecdotal Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2000) is hailed as a "brave" intellectual achievement instead of a collection of uncritical perceptions about Black life.

The small space allowed Black public intellectuals was made painfully clear a few months ago, when Michael Eric Dyson appeared on Book Notes with Brian Lamb to promote his latest book Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. Admittedly, Lamb's audience is not the type that would be familiar with Shakur or Dyson for that matter, but Dyson was reduced to answering inane questions from Lamb like: "What's a homie? Ok, then what's a ho (whore)? Then what's a bitch?"

In his piece, Derbyshire doesn't even grant Black intellectuals and the field of African-American studies that much complexity. Of the presence of the German-born literary critic at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard, Derbyshire writes, the "presence of Prof. Sollors is encouraging, suggesting that this is not entirely a boondoggle for otherwise-unemployable Black intellectuals." (As an aside Derbyshire rails against the fact the institute was named after a communist, again showing his ignorance about the complexity of even Du Bois's legacy). In other words the department can only be validated by the presence of a White and presumably objective scholar.

Derbyshire finally suggests that African-American studies is bankrupt because it doesn't engage in formal mode of peer review, as he writes "You publish a paper in a learned journal, or read it at a scholarly conference and scholars in your fields then scrutinize it. Does this actually happen? in 'Afro-American Studies'? My guess is that it doesn't." Derbyshire should guess again. Phylon and the Journal of Negro History were pillars of Black intellectual life for much of the first half of the 20th Century. Even today, journals such as African American Review, Callaloo, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, The Western Journal of Black Studies and Transition (which is housed at the Du Bois Institute), as well as "non-Black" journals such as Social Text and Public Culture (which published a groundbreaking issue on the Black Public Sphere in the mid 1990s), are some of the places where Black scholars do in fact face rigorous forms of peer review. Clearly there was no form of peer review for Derbyshire before he provided such an ignorant and condescending commentary on the field of African-American studies.

While Derbyshire can ultimately plead ignorance, Shelby Steele presumably knows better. Thus his mean-spirited diatribe against West et al in The Wall Street Journal ("White Guilt=Black Power") is not so easily dismissed. There is a long history between West and Steele, who are the most visible poles of liberal and conservative ideology in blackface. Currently a research fellow at the hyper-conservative Hoover Institution, which also houses fellows Thomas Sowell, Dinesh D'Souza and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Steele earned the National Book Critic's Circle Award for his largely anecdotal The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (1990). He is, for all intents, John McWhorter's intellectual father).

He has been the consistent voice of blackface commentary against affirmative action and multiculturalism. In classic form, Steele used the West controversy to attack White liberal guilt. In the piece he describes West as an "academic lightweight." (To put in perspective, Steele has published two books, while West has written or edited close to twenty. As my momma would be apt to say, this is the "pot (cast iron) calling the kettle black.") His argument is that West is a University Professor at Harvard only as a function of affirmative action policies. Of course, Steele doesn't openly discuss whether he is only allowed a voice at The Wall Street Journal because he too is a "mediocre" scholar who has been given a "conservative pass" because he is the most visible (and decidedly uncritical) apologist for Black ambition.

Steele goes on to describe "White guilt" (which he accuses of Lawrence Summers of) as "best understood as vacuum of moral authority… It means whites lack the authority to say what they see when looking at blacks and black problems." Apparently Steele is unaware of the moral authority that White (and Black law enforcement officers use to racially profile black and Latino/a people throughout the country. I'm pretty sure that the family of Amadou Diallo or Sherae Williams, who was "quietly" beaten by NYPD officers in September of 1999, would disagree that there is a vacuum of moral authority and privilege among whites. While I concur to some degree that Jackson and Sharpton function as enforcers of White guilt and silence, I am hard pressed to find examples where that has translated into real institutional or political power.

Now America has some idea of the Black intellectual tradition, though figures like Steele, Derbyshire and Kimball will have you believe that it is at best "mediocre" and at worst bankrupt. On the other hand, "spokespersons" such as Sharpton, Jackson and Joyner/Smiley have in some way undermined the self-critical functions of the Black intelligentsia. They brokeri the perception within the mainstream that there is really some connection between their efforts and the work being produced in the field of African-American Studies, which is of course not the case (unless of course you count the recent Hip Hop Summit).

Ones hope is that such energy will be used in the future to support efforts of all folks doing meaningful scholarly work in the field and not just in support of the folks who show up regularly on "Nightline", "Charlie Rose" and "C-Span 2". With such support, the kinds of attacks on the tradition made by the folks identified above will instead be seen legitimately as racist attacks on the intellectual capabilities of the black community and not insightful commentary.

SUNY-Albany Professor Mark Anthony Neal examines the Black Public Intellectuals of the 1990s as well as the "Post-Soul Intelligentsia" in his new book Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, published by Routledge.

-- April 25, 2002

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