Africana

Dear David:

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

It is more than a little distressing that James McPherson is not included in Africana. I admire him as a writer and like him greatly as a person. He is, I think, a very significant post-1960s writer, someone who I think took up the mantle of Ellison. Plus, he has won a major literary prize, something that means a lot to the people who put together this book. Why would McPherson not be included here? Gracious, that's as bad as not having Curt Flood.

The omissions in Africana, some of which I pointed in my previous message, are glaring and food for serious thought. Africana is making a statement about what the editors and the advisory board feel is important. Those who have been consigned to the dustbin of irrelevancy, where the evidence clearly does not support such a judgement, only deepen one's uneasy about the purpose of this book.

The role of the black intellectual is difficult to discern. Clearly, I do not think the role of the black intellectual is to churn out books of this sort. First, I have never had the occasion of seeing a reference book marketed on the strength of the celebrity of its editors. I have no idea who edited the reference books I used. I couldn't tell you who edited my dictionaries or my other source books. I think this is true with most people. It is not especially important to know this. Already, the idea of the black reference book with glamorous editors is something of a real problem and should make the public a bit suspicious because it seems so much like a marketing ploy. It is, perhaps, this sense of opportunism, and of blowing up ordinary jobs like creating a black reference book of this sort as if one were announcing the return of the monarchy to America, that makes you feel uneasy about many of the black public intellectuals. They are talented, but are they principled? They are well-trained, but are they courageous? (Cornell West, the conscience of the current generation of black scholars--or at least, so he is advertised--is portrayed as courageous, but how much courage does it take to pocket fat fees for giving lectures spiked with Christian socialist bromides to audiences who adore you?)

To whom much is given, as Jesus said, much is expected. And much has been given to this generation of black scholars, far more than any earlier generation ever dreamed of having. And is the product that has been generated the best that can be done with all that this generation has at its disposal? This is a fair question. I feel deeply inadequate myself when I think about it and feel that if Benjamin Brawley or J. Saunders Reddings or Sterling Brown or Alain Locke or any of the earlier black literary critics had been in my position, they would have produced so much more and so much better. (I must admit that I did not aspire to be any of those guys when I was in graduate school and I do aspire to be them now. In graduate school, I aspired to be Edmund Wilson (Patriotic Gore is still the best title for an intellectual book that I have come across), Jacques Barzun, and Van Wyck Brooks. I still aspire to be them, and their work has most influenced me. But can a black intellectual ever get to talk about something like that when white literary and intellectual establishment would rather have him or her write about Malcolm X, or Kwanzaa, or Louis Farrakhan or some such stuff as that? Most black intellectuals, if they are truly reflective, with a few exceptions like David Levering Lewis and Albert Murray and some others I deeply deeply admire, cannot help but think they might be a bit fraudulent.

So, if a book like Africana is an indication of the fraudulence of black intellectuals, or a suggestion of its possibility, then we must ask the question, How has this come to pass? What set of conditions exist that keep black intellectuals from being incisive and as honest and as courageous and as productive as they should be? Some of the compromises from the realm of political correctness I have already discussed. Some of the compromises spring from the need of racial solidarity, either as opportunism or misplaced loyalty. I do not speak and never have spoken for black people and do not want to. Some of the compromises are the normal sorts of difficulties that all intellectuals face--from over-edited writing meant to make easy any difficult idea to the need for excessive conflict in order to make the work "interesting." Some are the result of whites who box blacks into a certain corner as public intellectuals.

You raise a good question about who is reviewing this book. (I have been asked to review every book Gates has written. I feel as if I am his personal reviewer.) Blacks go into black studies for a number of complex reasons, some good, some not so good; and whites respond with opportunities and enticements that are bound to keep them there. The niche becomes a trap. The various white intellectual establishments, moreover, tend to buy the kind of black that best suits them ideologically, which means they buy the kind of representative black person they themselves think they would be if they were black. And most of the time, they never buy more than one, and so black opinion-making tends to become reduced, funneled, constrained, and strained, either in its liberal or its conservative manifestations, in ways that are not especially useful either to blacks or black intellectuals but are very useful to the white intellectual establishments as they distribute their spoils. I don't say this to suggest anything sinister or racist about whites. (Although racism and conspiracy cannot entirely be discounted, either.) The pressures of commercialism and prestige combine to make this rather unpleasant situation, both of which--commercialism and prestige--are condemned by intellectuals as they lust for what they can offer. And black opinon-making, I think, becomes, as a result, highly distorted, and black intellectual publications do not help as they are even more restrictive about the kind of commentary and judgments they will tolerate. They are usually even more anti-intellectual in their insistence that the black experience must have an orthodoxy and that all intellectual matters must be subordinate to social do-goodism and political protest--the more shrill and demagogic, the more heroic.

All of this, I think, explains why black public intellectuals are the way they are and why so few have said much that really matters in intellectual circles. Moreover, even more so than whites, black intellectuals tend to give in to the worst sorts of anti-intellectual impulses because of social do-goodism and political protest. Even the most sober-minded black thinkers indulge in a bit of racial hectoring and demagogic posturing to remind the folks whose side they are on.

I know that Gates and West get your dander up. I like them and admire them to some degree, although I do not think they have worked up to their capacity. I think Gates particularly is a very smart guy and a good writer, if he were to give himself the time to write the way he can. I like Appiah, too, and think him very smart. What is curious about Africana is that they both--Gates and Appiah--are doing a book that I think, in its current manifestation, is beneath them. Another type of encyclopedia, one that might have taken 10 or 15 years to do but would have been far more intensive, and far more usefully selective, might have been much more worth the effort. For you, I know, Gates is a hustler and West, worse still, is a sanctimonious hustler, which means, dangerously, he actually takes what he says seriously and takes himself very seriously, to boot. But I think the real problem is over-exposure and too little to say. I think your impatience stems from that. There is far too much Gates and West and there is far too little in what they are saying to justify their demand for your attention or for the culture's attention. This is a fair enough criticism, if I read you rightly, and one I would agree with. I think both men need to stop churning out work and think about a kind of settled obscurity in working long and hard on some project that would absorb them completely and passionately, and simply quit producing for public consumption a series of well-financed distractions.

But even when I find myself frustrated by their work, I find that I would rather have them doing what they do than doing nothing at all, and if it is not, in the end, greatly advancing black intellectualism or not advancing it as much as they think it is, it is probably not doing the cause of black intellectualism any harm, either, or any more harm than I or any of the rest are doing in our bumbling way. West's essay on Du Bois in Africana seemed a re-working of his essay on Du Bois in The Future of the Race. There is nothing new said in his Africana essay, and his presentism, his insistence on judging a historical figure by current moral standards, I find fatuous, just poor scholarship. I agree with you that Lewis should have done the Du Bois essay and not West. (Any one of a number of persons could have done a good job with the Harlem Renaissance.) I would have preferred having West discuss something more on the order of the impact of pragmatism on black philosophers or an essay on the whole black philosophy movement.

Don't throw the book at your television. Televisions are expensive these days. And Monday Night Football is one of the reasons to have a television. (The baseball season is another and AMC is a third.) If you really can't stand the book, probably someone on your Christmas list would appreciate it as a gift. It is a great-looking book despite its shortcomings, and there is a lot of good information in it. My bottom line is that I would recommend the book to students and colleagues and I hope it does well, despite its anti-intellectual p.c.-isms and its contempt for opinions it does not favor. Probably this book could be done better, but no one is going to get an opportunity to do that, so you might as well live with what you've got, warts and all. Besides, 10 or 20 years from now, when it needs to be done again, it might very well be better. And Gates and Appiah would have to be thanked for opening the door. Maybe black stuff is still so suspect that we need celebrities to get reference books. I hope things aren't that bad!

I agree with you about book-reviewing. It is not a glamorous job at all, but someone has to do it. Besides, when I was boy, I dreamed, as all boys do, of running off to the circus. One of the things that stopped me was that I was afraid I would wind up shoveling dung. The task has caught up with me anyway and at last. Be Well.

Gerald Early

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

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.

SPONSORED CONTENT