Africana

Dear David:

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I would not see myself as being easy on Henry Louis Gates Jr. There are those who frankly think him fraudulent, some of whom are very prominent people. I think this might be a bit unfair. What I find fascinating about him is not the work, which may or may not be remembered in years to come, but rather the driving ambition so directed at what seems to me to be small causes writ large by advertising and the sheer claims he can make for them. In this regard, he is an incredible intellectual figure and an incredible public presence. I think it is a waste of time for a major scholar to create an encyclopedia, despite the efforts of Diderot and Du Bois in the past. I think it is a waste of time for a major scholar to do such hack work today, even if one could make a great deal of money doing it. It is this obsession, which far exceeds anything I have ever encountered in any scholar (and scholars and intellectuals have no little ego and no little ambition), this need to have his fingerprints everywhere, that I find curious but that I also think, ultimately for Gates, is destructive of the very end he probably wants to achieve. He wants, I assume, to be taken seriously, but is he, in the end? And will he be 10 or 20 years from now?

Yes, I do agree that he has taken advantage of the practice that whites have of wanting one prominent Negro at a time in a field. He is a very shrewd man, and I cannot blame him for taking the world as it has been given to him. Whites find him agreeable for the two reasons that they find any black intellectual agreeable: he makes what he knows about Negroes interesting but not threatening; he knows a great deal of white intellectual stuff, which whites always find amusing and entertaining in a Negro. But while he is a singular black intellectual figure, his position is simply, to some large degree, that of any hustling black intellectual who knows that the rewards worth having in this culture for his professional pursuits are all controlled by whites.

Now, your comments about the politically correct nature of Africana are right and point up one of the serious flaws with this book. It is far too trendy, almost whimsically so, to be of great value to any reader, say, five or six years from now. This book aspires to be not only an encyclopedia but also an almanac, a biographical dictionary, a historical monument in and of itself. Here is an intellectual effort that is greatly compromised by anti-intellectual forces of compelling strength: the need to give emphasis to homosexuality all out of proportion to its importance in black life, the need to mention people such as rappers like Tupac Shakur and the like when the art and significance of such people remain to be proved worthy of attention, the need for personalities generally like Rupaul whose inclusion is an embarrassment. Then, there are the thought-clichés such as the inclusion of Cleopatra even though all the credible scholarship shows that it was extremely unlikely that she was of African descent.

It is this sort of pandering to the popular and to notions that many black people hold dear even though they are wrong that works against this book and against black intellectual efforts generally. That is because, in the end, the black intellectual finds him or herself engaged in a propagandistic defense of the race, instead of a true, objective exploration of the meaning of the race's experience, good, bad, and indifferent. This makes the black intellectual not only a propagandist but also an apologist, at times, of the most hypocritical sort, blowing up trivialities while ignoring profundities because of their ambiguous nature, all the while operating with the urges of a philanthropist, discarding merit in the name of equality of space or for "educating" the public in favor of a good cause. This, more than anything, makes the public intellectual, black or white, fraudulent, dangerous in both his or her snobbery and his or her political moralism. And this has particularly sapped the vigor and strength of the black intellectual, his or her incisiveness swallowed in a sea of bathetic race promoting. It is telling, indeed, about the anti-intellectual nature of this book that the blurbs on the back do not come from intellectuals or scholars at all but from popular black personalities and partisans for causes. Nothing corrupts good intellectual work more thoroughly that the righteous malice of a cause.

I do not particularly like to engage what is not in a book, but, of course, it cannot be avoided in this sort of work, as its scheme is meant to make a statement about what is important about the black experience and what isn't. To ignore people like Shelby Steele, Stanley Crouch, Ward Connerly, Glenn Loury, Anne Wortham, and Thomas Sowell is irresponsible. They deserve to be objectively presented whether one agrees with their positions or not. But there are other absences here that, given the p.c. nature of the work, are very surprising. There are no entries on Hamza El-Din or Ahmed Abdul-Malik, the two most famous Sudanese musicians ever to play in America. Adbul-Malik played with Monk, for instance. Hamza El-Din has made the oud famous in America, as Ravi Shankar did the sitar. Since the book is trying so hard to promote a global black culture and "world music," (whatever that is), their omission is just bewildering. There is no entry for Curt Flood. How can the man who challenged baseball's reserve clause in court--who gave up his career as a professional baseball player in 1970 rather than submit to going to a team for whom he did not wish to play (Philadelphia)--how can such mighty resistance, which this book and all black political correctness greatly prizes, be ignored!? Curt Flood was probably second only to Jackie Robinson as the most important political figure in 20^th-century baseball. Yet nothing on him in this book. His omission outraged me. Snoop Doggy Dog or Nikki Giovanni or Queen Latifah are more important than Flood!

This brings me to the entries that are connected in some way or another to Philadelphia. I was heartened to see entries for Raymond Pace Alexander and his wife, Sadie Mossell Alexander. I was disappointed that there was no entry for Wilson Goode, the first black mayor of Philadelphia, or for Dick Allen, the first black superstar baseball player for the Phillies, who was traded to St. Louis in the deal that was to bring Curt Flood to Philadelphia, the deal that Flood used as a pretext for challenging the reserve clause. So, Allen was important in several ways, but not to have him in the book was understandable. What was less understandable was the absence of Cecil Moore. Indeed, the Alexanders, as black leaders in Philadelphia, cannot be understood without Cecil Moore, the fiery ex-Marine who became the head of Philadelphia's NAACP in 1963 and proceeded to turn the city upside-down with his militant protests. The Alexanders, middle-class black leaders who were uncomfortable with street protest, detested Moore. Indeed, most of Philadelphia's black leadership did. Also, the entries on the Alexanders did not mention her role as the president of the Human Relations Commission, a city organization that was started when the reform Democrats swept the Republicans out of power in the city in 1951 and changed the city charter. The Human Relations Commission was very important in the history of race relations in the city in the 1950s and 1960s, although it was a group without strong enforcement abilities. It was not mentioned in Raymond Pace Alexander's piece how he worked in the 1950s to try to desegregate Girard College (he failed) and how he tried to get the Mummers in their annual parade to stop using blackface makeup (he failed there, too). In the entry on Philadelphia itself, there is no mention of the 1964 riot that changed the city dramatically. No mention in the Chubby Checker entry that his marriage to a white woman, Kathrina Lodders, a Dutch woman, in December 1963, adversely affected his career.

I mention all of this to say that to me, as a Philadelphian, what is said collectively about Philadelphia in the book is not terribly useful. And that is precisely the problem with these sorts of catch-all books, with entries often written as hack work by writers who are not terribly familiar with the subject. The writers try to emphasize what makes the person a national figure without concentrating very much on the local context of the person's importance, which is often far more valuable and meaningful to understanding the person's historical standing than what can be said about the person as a national figure. This I find enormously frustrating about a book like Africana. This is why I am puzzled that a man of Gates' abilities wants to do such unsatisfying and such compromised intellectual work as this. Africana is a very self-conscious monument. But to what?

Gerald Early

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This week, a discussion of Africana, the encyclopedia and CD-ROM edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Anthony Appiah (click hereto buy it). Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently completing a book about Fisk University and an anthology about Sammy Davis Jr. David Nicholson is a Washington writer.

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