Africana

Dear Gerald:

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I'm enjoying this more than I thought I would, though it does remind me why, when I quit reviewing books for the Washington Post last year, I swore I'd review no more. Book-reviewing bears about the same resemblance to literature as cleaning up after the elephants does to being in the circus, except that you're more likely to be useful pushing a broom behind the elephants. Who, after all, really wants to step in elephant dung?

This question has been implicit in our conversation: Just what, as we approach the year 2000, is the responsibility of the black intellectual? I don't claim to have any answers, but I can't help thinking about Chris Rock's routine comparing Jesse Jackson to Martin Luther King and Louis Farrakhan to Malcolm X, and his conclusion that, while in the '60s we had leaders, now we have substitute teachers.

When I consider the inclusion in Africana of Tupac Shakur and his cohort of the rappers, I wonder whether black academia has been hijacked by a crew of thirtysomething know-nothings who actually think this stuff is important. The truth, though, is that this fascination (by people who really ought to know better) with violence and outlaw behavior is a long-standing phenomenon. Stanley Crouch (or was it someone else?) calls it "the romance of the street nigger," and he's absolutely right. It crosses the color line, of course--think of Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott. But it's a particularly dangerous foolishness for black Americans, because it leads us to take seriously thugs like the Black Panthers, and to glorify the Kody Scotts and Nathan McCalls we ought to condemn instead.

What I'm really puzzled about this morning is the omission of Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Alan McPherson from Africana. McPherson was one of my teachers at the University of Iowa; in fact, I went to the writing program there to study with him.

I'd first encountered his work nearly 20 years before, when I was one of perhaps 20 black students at a Quaker high school in Washington. His Hue and Cry and, later, Elbow Room, spoke directly to that integrationist experience, to the complexities (and confusions) of inhabiting an environment where, say, white people valued aspects of black culture, like the blues, that my own firmly middle-class family had long since discarded. McPherson grappled with the complexities and contradictions that plague us as black and white Americans in a way that no other writer I know of has done.

But I looked all through Africana, hoping vainly they'd spelled his name "MacPherson" or that there was a list of black Pulitzer Prize winners. (That last isn't all that unreasonable, given the unremittingly cheerful Ebony magazine-like achievement accounting of Africana.)

I returned last night to Cornel West's essay on W.E.B. Du Bois and almost threw Africana at my television. I didn't--the book's too heavy, and besides, Monday Night Football was on later. I've never met West. Perhaps he's a genuinely nice man. But so much of his writing is smug and sanctimonious--he knows all the answers, and if the rest of us would just listen and follow his advice, the world would be a better place.

Much of the essay takes Du Bois to task for his "inadequate interpretation of the human condition"--translation: Du Bois didn't fight hard enough for the rights of women, homosexuals, and other oppressed minorities and doesn't seem to have thought much about writers like Tolstoy or Kafka--and his "inability to immerse himself fully in the rich cultural currents of black everyday life." As near as I can figure, that last means W.E.B. Du Bois wasn't black enough.

The essay's almost nearly 20 pages of small-point, narrow-leaded type, West at his insufferable, pontificating worst. In my last message, I observed that West, like Gates, wants to be Du Bois when he grows up. I wonder now if his problem isn't that he realizes he can't be and so--to paraphrase Baldwin's famous, if apocryphal, observation--this son must kill his father.

At one point, West quotes Du Bois--with no sense of irony--to the effect that "we must have honest men or we die. We must have unselfish, far-seeing leadership or we fail." And that, to return to the question I posed earlier, is just the problem. So-called public intellectuals like West, bell hooks, and, yes, Henry Louis Gates Jr. himself, seem to me both dishonest and selfish--they're in it for the money and the power as much as out of any sense of obligation or responsibility to the black community.

I don't know what they--unlike, say, Martin Luther King--stand for. Either they've never made it clear (like Gates) or, like West, because they stand for so much, appealing to, and appeasing, so many constituencies. West, after all, is a man who's managed the not-unenviable feat of sharing stages with Al Sharpton and Michael Lerner, though not (as far as I know) at the same time.

I'm suspicious of giving too much credit to celebrities, but maybe Chris Rock is on to something.

David

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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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