Race Matters / Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy / Challenging the Civil Rights Establishment

...F ortunately for all of us, there are a number of black intellectuals with the courage and wisdom not to hew the racialist line...

...For Baker, a cigar is never only a cigar...

...Again, one feels that for Baker, the only true things that exist are artifacts of language, and if nobody actually uses the term wilding, then the horrible assault might as well never have happened...

...It was the answer to the question that could have been formulated anytime during the past decade by almost anyone over the age of thirteen and breathing—the answer to the question: "What will happen next in the great contestation marking northeastern American urban, public spaces...

...Concerning the rape itself, he writes: The reason the Central Park jogger incident yielded no credible "whys" was precisely because the incident itself was the answer...

...Everybody knows that language-gaming has destroyed much of intellectual life in recent decades...

...While the rhetoric of oppression is carelessly bandied about by professional activists with their own axes to grind, Conti and Stetson note that the evidence often supports the assertion that even inner-city blacks have more opportunity than is customarily believed...

...In the essays that introduce Challenging the Civil Rights Establishment, the editors delineate the parameters within which the struggle for control of black public policy must be fought...

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...This is the strident ignorance that sells newspapers...

...It's a hell of a deal by any measure...

...In an effort to help• more urban youth, however, students who maintain a C+ average there are offered four-year scholarships at USC covering 100 percent of tuition...

...Like West he saddles up the rap hobby-horse...

...If a student's financial standing is bad enough, USC will increase the stipend beyond tuition costs, which alone are currently $63,000 for four years...

...West's ranting also helps to gloss over the rather poor quality of his writing and thought...

...No matter that these myths are publicly discredited (and privately affirmed) by members of both races...

...And then race will sadly have mattered very much indeed...

...For black intellects to feed our young a diet of Frenchified jargon—and pretend it is a way of studying the plight of American blacks !—is especially perverse and irresponsible...

...The relative scarcity of blacks among the chattering classes has traditionally ensured that one or two public figures serve as spokesmen for the entire race...

...Unfortunately, if the Wests and Bakers of the world continue to distort the intellectual life of the academy, the blacks who end up there will emergeas uninformed and unprepared for reality as the uneducated poor in South-Central...

...Except for the unfortunate few students who get suckered into believing the diacritical mumbo-jumbo amounts to anything, and then end up parroting it in graduate school and beyond, the white kids by and large have little tolose from the depredations and bizarreries of their professors...

...H ouston Baker, professor of English and "Human Relations" at the University of Pennsylvania, bolsters his bona fides bysubmerging himself in the impenetrable blather of post-modernist theory...

...Ice-T generated such controversy precisely because he had been embraced by the mainstream, not because of the color of his skin...

...Los Angeles Southwest admits anybody in the community, with or without a high school diploma, for an astonishing $5 per credit...

...Sounds like a white-boy rock type of thing...

...Five dollars per credit and a C+ average at community college will get you a $63,000 scholarship at USC...

...And as black society has developed the striations of class that are proof positive of both economic gain and at least some degree of equal opportunity, race has become a less and less predictable measure of everything from income to education level to political affiliation...

...That they are finally the subject of study can only be seen as a good sign...

...Joseph Conti and Brad Stetson remind us that a cadre of thinkers and public policy advocates have attempted to steer the mainstream of black thought away from the shopworn formulations of identity politics and the civil rights establishment...

...Instead of celebrating this independence, however, by which upwardly mobile blacks are freed from being inevitably lumped with gangster hoodlums, an appalling number of black intellectuals continue to insist that the world be seen through the distorting lens of color...

...In South Central Los Angeles, at ground zero of the 1992 riots, stands Los Angeles Southwest Junior College, which offers associate degrees and general education...

...Affirmative-action programs are discharged to expunge white guilt, he argues, but as such programs have helped a relative few, their overall social cost is rather a steep one...

...But of course race matters when you deem society to be, as West does on almost every page, a tool of oppression by which white folks degrade and subjugate blacks...

...If you told white college students that they were just the same as the white kids in the ghetto, they could easily laugh it off...

...When conservatives point hopefully to black success stories, he accuses them of "a vulgar rendition of Horatio Alger in blackface" and says that "after centuries of racist degradation, exploitation and oppression in America, being black means being minimally subject to white supremacist abuse...

...Intellectually underdeveloped, they will be stuck in the tragic mode of self-pity, and instead of having the world as their oyster, will discover themselves ill-equipped to do anything but beat incessantly upon the race drum...

...but as almost all black public figures are quick to point out, blacks remain in sore need of intellectual leadership...

...About the brutal Central Park wilding incident, he can muster up only more linguistic folderol, spending several pages on how the police who handled the incident must have misheard "wild thing" for "wilding," and all the while having a laugh at whitey's misunderstanding of black street culture...

...And if West doubts that the shocking remarks of prominent blacks are not often 'met with deaf ear, he ought to read some Louis Farrakhan or Gus Savage transcripts...

...I, having risen from a Chicago ghetto to a tenured post at Harvard, most emphatically do not feel excluded from the "land of opportunity" tenet of America's civil religion...

...Then again, responsibility is evidently a quality not dear to Baker...

...Like the Woodstock radicals who spent their finest years smoking hashish and copulating in the back of Volkswagen buses, only to end up as litigation attorneys anyway, the typical white Ivy Leaguer is off to a relatively cushy start...

...Filling the minds of black college students with this blarney serves only to divert their energies into a semantic cul de sac...

...but that Thomas Sowell, now in his sixties, could be considered part of a "new vanguard" is testimony to how strong and strident the opposition to black conservatives has been...

...The absurdity of such an arrangement is readily understood by imagining who might possibly "speak for" all white people...

...West knows the radical, racial boilerplate sells books, makes reputations, and cowers those afraid to call—West's phrase—a spade a spade...

...Just as when Houston Baker refers to Allan Bloom as "Alan" and journalist-screenwriter Nelson George as a "scholar," we are given just cause to wonder if the "intellectuals" in question really have the goods...

...Describing the Los Angeles riots that left fifty-four dead as "justified social rage," he harrumphs incessantly about "white racist society...

...That Princeton now boasts the preeminent Afro-American Studies department in the nation says little about the quality of research being done there—Cornel West, the department head, freely admits that he shunned Harvard because Boston radio stations don't play enough soul music—and rather more about the shoddy standards of contemporary academic life, which champions identity politics and continental jargon over real scholarship...

...The mountebankery of black intellectuals is a separate and unequal matter altogether...

...Chess is "the Western board game of war" and "the notion of preserving infinite historical value and unquestioned excellence in the referential files of the English department is at best a quixotic extension of Arnoldian cultural economics...

...Cornel West, one of the most charismatic and forceful black intellectuals of his generation, declares unabashedly: Race matters...

...But as black middle-class identity is still at a rather new and fragile stage, the racialist crowing of West and his fellow travelers serves only to harm the young blacks who have the most to lose by squandering their university education on identity politics and passé radicalisms...

...Jealously protective of their outdated role as race spokesmen, they encourage various stripes of radicalism and racial chauvinism, which are absolutely the last things a young black student presented with a college opportunity—be he at Harvard or Howard—needs or ought to care about...

...But instead of pushing this program, Conti and Stetson note, community leaders keep haranguing everybody with a "rhetoric of hopelessness...

...The white radicals often had Daddy's money to fall back on after their experimentation on the commune went sour...

...I have carefully described the many similarities between present day USA and early stages of the Nazi Third Reich in pre-war Germany...

...By rejecting distinctions of occupation, class, education, and social prominence, West underscores his belief that the rapper and the professor are but two sides of the same (devalued) black coin...

...he believes it is fully impossible to engage young minds in literature without recourse to rap...

...He describes a street festival as a "collaged multiplicity of sound and image" and the university as "a metonym for social chaos...

...They are more successful at assuaging white guilt than at advancing non-middle-class blacks...

...He quotes with approval a Village Voice article in which a young man says, "I ain't never heard of [wilding...

...It is not only the academic perversion of the age, of course, that causes a tenured black professor at Princeton to fritter away his energies blaming the white man...

...Only an absolute know-nothing could believe such bogus polemics...

...Even so, student loans are available...

...Rather like saying you can't teach a person to read music without a boom box, of course, but not a surprising argument from an intellectual who seems incapable of comprehending either word or world without the aid of a technological apparatus—in this case, the jargon machine of post-modernism...

...But the fraudulence promulgated by white meta-theorists under the thrall of Parisian poseurs, no longer taken seriously even in their native land, is a mostly harmless one...

...Responding to a New Republic editorial by Hendrik Hertzberg (now the Comment editor at the New Yorker), Loury writes: Quit trying to imagine what it's like for a black person "to experience contemporary American political culture...

...Got it...

...If he emerges after four years knowing more Derrida than Dante, it hardly leaves him at a significant disadvantage relative to his peers...

...Every sentence is stuffed to the gills with hybridities and axiologies, renominalizations and reverse cyborgisms...

...The prevailing myths of black sexuality," he writes, for example, "are part of a wider network of white supremacist lies...

...Race not only matters...

...it is the only thing that matters...

...The bottom line, however, is a Princeton professor of religion defending his intellectual arguments with the seditious rantings of a street hood rapper...

...And when he, writes that "rap performer Ice-T is harshly condemned while former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates's anti-black comments are received in polite silence," he glosses over obvious evidence to the contrary...

...Of course, the era in which we might expect an Ivy League professor to write clearly and accurately is long past, but we shouldn't laud the decline...

...Scholars all (except for Woodson, who founded the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise), these men have refused to cast the struggle of black Americans within the too-narrow framework of race...

...He writes "of a [sic] inchoate xenophobia" and claims, "If there is a hidden taboo among liberals, it is to resist talking too much about values" (his emphasis) when, of course, he means to say the very opposite—that the liberals' taboo is to talk about them, not resist doing so...

...Steele's writings, for example, offer a sophisticated analysis of affirmative-action, which causes blacks to feel "the stab of racial doubt" and tends to overuse the political capital of accumulated white guilt...

...Meanwhile, Glenn Loury, professor of economics at Boston University, takes issue with the rhetoric of impossibility and pessimism of complainers like Baker, West, and the white liberals who echo them...

...West insists that society was established to keep blacks down...

...The Los Angeles Sentinel, the largest black-owned newspaper in the West, featured a column after the riots in which the writer claimed that the United States is on the verge of becoming a police state, if it is not there already...

...But until blacks have garnered sufficient capital with which to be utterly frivolous (and the radical intellectuals are the first to point out that blacks haven't), the temptation of the black middle class down the road of racial radicalism by their intellectuals represents a trahison des clercs of catastrophic dimensions...

...Conti and Stetson offer analyses of four major contrarians—Sowell, Shelby Steele, Robert Woodson, and Glenn Loury...