PARADOXES OF BLACKNESS: NOTES ON THE CRISIS OF BLACK INTELLECTUALS

...Morally, the black aesthetic is presented as a way of maximizing humanity's peaceful and humanistic character, though black ethnocentrist theorists do not profess pacifism...

...The problem, then, with black ethnocentrists is a matter of perspective, a matter of place and history...

...The paradox of blackness in American society, then, is plain enough...

...It surely will take time...

...There is a lot of naive nostalgia about Africa that doesn't connect with the Africans that exist at all, [Africa] isn't seen as a political entity.' But even among black intellectuals who are returning to pluralism—or affirming it for the first time—some will continue to inhabit a hybrid status between cosmopolitanism and ethnocentrism...

...Precisely how fast Afro-American intellectuals will avail themselves of this new opportunity for a pluralist identity—a cosmopolitanizing of their creative networks—is uncertain...

...Instead, the black-aesthetic movement favors an ethnocentric hegemony over blacks' cultural and expressive forms, as well as a radical politics (a sort of romantic Marxism...

...Ugly too...

...74 brilliant figure in the 1920s New Negro movement, shed his left-wing ties in the 1940s and '50s in favor of right-wing networks, becoming in the postwar era the first black intellectual associated with a major conservative journal— William Buckley's National Review...

...Since the 1920s, some of the major black intellectuals have followed this route to pluralism— such intellectuals as Ernest Just (biologist), George Schuyler (novelist), June Jordan (poet), Lorraine Hansberry (playwright), Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (playwright), Julius Lester (critic), St...

...It is more often seen as a platform for the egalitarian renovation of American life...

...Whither Afro-American Intellectuals...

...Such ambivalence, indeed, is fundamental—a defining motif—to the classic products of Afro-American culture...

...In some respects, the pluralist posture of right-wing black intellectuals differs from that of their left-wing counterparts...

...Accepting the cosmopolitan aura of blackness is, then, essential to weaning a new generation of black intellectuals from ethnocentrism's balm—a balm that soothes psychic wounds inherited from America's racist legacy while stunting creativity and experimentation...

...For Afro-American intellectuals, what is minimally necessary for a new creativity is to discard what Michael Harrington has called "mystical militancy . . . that mood of eschatological excitement which renounces common sense...

...In reality, such a crude linkage between aesthetics and politics produces ideology, not that cluster of reflective human concerns we call aesthetics...

...And for the black ethnocentrists, Addison Gayle writes, black politics gains validity only insofar as it enhances "the de-Americanization of black people [which] lies at the heart of the Black Aesthetic...

...Black intellectuals have nonetheless packaged their pluralism in intricate varieties...

...There are now powerful persons and groups in the white establishment who nurture black neoconservatives and join with them on many social issues, while rejecting the antiblack posturing of the rabid racists...

...Furthermore, there are now more conservative black intellectuals in the fields of policy analysis, financial analysis, and business management...

...The bitter truth is that African ruling and ritual strata—and others not so elevated—nurtured the slave trade for generations...

...And, historically, there have been many such arenas for black intellectuals...

...If colored people are pleased, we are glad...

...But the striking feature of a pluralist intellectual identity is that it is seldom used simply as a way of gaining an elitist isolation from one's ethnic group, class group, or national membership...

...But there is no way in a free society that the law can be used to the advantage of one citizen at the expense of another without infringing on the rights of both...

...The ambiguous status of blackness—designating an ethnic group that is both stigmatized and culturally pervasive— both excites and offends Afro-Americans, especially the intelligentsia...

...A black soldier has been charged with joining his white compatriots in the murder of innocent Vietnamese women and children...

...But in the '70s Walker's marginality changes, away from a white spouse to a black lover, and away from civil rights to feminist activism—a feminism that Bradley says displays "acidity [toward] black male writers [and] black men who are attracted to light-skinned women . . ." (though Walker's black mate, too, is light-skinned...

...The white's attitude toward blackness stops short of a cultural rejection of the presence noire in American life—a very different cultural dynamic from fascist Germany's total rejection of the presence juive...

...This need arises out of the political effectiveness blacks have so painstakingly achieved over the past 20 years...

...My own scenario sees the typical black intellectual moving from ethnic parochialism to cosmopolitanism by fits and starts, while a few black intellectuals—those seeking deeper commitment to the life of the mind—will make a clean-and-sharp break with black ethnocentrism...

...Thus the imposition of ideology upon creativity— or, put another way, the politicizing of the aesthetic—often leads to a mere travesty of the aesthetic experience...

...This growth is aided by the pluralist elements in the Reagan administration who have recruited talented, conservative black intellectuals such as Allan Keyes, a Harvardtrained political theorist who until recently held the post of ambassador to the Economic and Social Council of the U.N...

...This group includes novelists 73 such as Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, and Ann Petry...

...The mainstream of ethnocentrist black intellectuals, however, has been aggressively secular, ignoring responses to the crisis of blackness that emanate from religiously oriented forms of black ethnocentrism...

...There have always been at least two roads for this journey—the populist or ethnocentrist, and the individualist or deviant...

...Circumstances of time and place can bring out the beast in us all...

...In the 1970s there were record-setting rates of black/white marriages—well over 100,000, compared to less than half of that in the 1960s...

...Faced with the combined impediments of white racism and black ethnocentrism, the black intellectuals who yearn for personal autonomy are forced into a number of deviant paths...

...For example, by the Garveyites' African Orthodox church in the 1920s and '30s and the Black Muslims in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, who favored, as a solution to the crisis of blackness in white society, migration to the African homeland, rather like Zionists favoring migration to Israel...

...Above all, Afro-American culture is a composite culture, an interaction of contrasting aesthetic elements...

...If the white folks seem pleased we are glad...

...But the precarious amalgam of cultural identities and feelings in American society permits no such painful clarity...

...Black, Pluralist, and Conservative WHILE THE PLURALIST INTELLECTUAL IDENTIFICATION was typically realized through liberal and left-wing networks, there has always been an alternative route...

...out of the growth and deghettoization of the 76 black middle and upper strata and, above all, out of the persistent crisis of unemployment and poverty that now grips a third of AfroAmerican households...

...As a result, neoconservative black intellectuals now have more visibility as partisans of intellectual pluralization among blacks than do progressive black intellectuals—a reversal of the historical pattern...

...More recently, however, a preference for fission in black/white cultural relations has gained prominence, especially in the form of the black-aesthetic movement of the late 1960s and '70s...

...but also attracted to much of its hedonism and gaudiness...

...The black intellectual's quest for self-identity might have been easier, one wryly reflects, had the cultural and aesthetic boundaries between black and white Americans been rigidly sustained, like those in South Africa...

...However, with time, the American establishment has opened up just enough to attract some autonomy-seeking black intellectuals...

...Simply put, there is this central contradiction: while black intellectuals work within the aesthetic limits of a pariah-like ethnicity, this ethnicity's cultural forms are used and exploited—both intellectually and commercially—by the dominant white culture...

...This entry of black intellectuals into the neoconservative circles was made possible by the earlier penetration of these circles by Jewish intellectuals in the late 1960s and early 1970s—an event, extraordinary in many ways, that ended the long-standing taint of anti-Semitisin in the conservative establishment...

...Some bourgeois blacks will, alas, take pleasure in the fact that black Americans now have their Norman Podhoretzes and Pat Buchanans...

...Neoconservative black intellectuals such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Eileen Gardner, Glenn Loury, and Robert Woodson have broken free of the stultifying uniformity in life-style that is so pervasive among bourgeois blacks in general and among the black intelligentsia too...

...3 Similar chauvinistic boundaries around blackness are proposed by theorists of black theology, an offshoot of the black aesthetic movement that first surfaced in the late 1960s...

...Traditionally, deviants among American intellectuals make a working milieu for themselves by migrating to the periphery of both American society and their ethnic group...

...And when, as is inevitable, this crudely utilitarian aesthetic gets generalized into a strategy for judging society as a whole—that is, gets politicized—the black aesthetic becomes, in Addison Gayle's eyes, "a corrective—a means of helping black people out of the polluted mainstream of Americanism...

...What else is one to make of My Lai, Vietnam...

...At the bottom of this policy split is the rightwing black intellectuals' fidelity to laissezfaire, or marketplace capitalism, an approach that is as widely rejected by the black establishment as it is accepted by the white one...

...Furthermore, black ethnocentrist intellectuals believe that the dehumanizing tilt of the white aesthetic dictates its ethical and critical canons, which are formalistic in design, aesthetically arid, and prone to celebrate artistic creation as a thing-in-itself...

...For example, while the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro movement among the post-World War I generation represented the first assertion of the cultural salience of blackness vis-àvis white America, this movement was also a milieu or agency through which Afro-American intellectuals gained some creative autonomy vis-a-vis their own ethnic group...

...She was married to a white, indeed, a Jew...

...On the other hand, the insecurity surrounding social status in the American establishment ranks (usually dominated by WASPs) has severely limited tolerance for pluralist life-styles among intellectuals...

...Even while committed to ridding American life of its bigotry, some major Afro-American intellectuals have tried, ever since the 1920s, to take this "privatistic" route...

...Blackness, therefore, is intrinsically cosmopolitan...

...Thus, in time (and rather sooner than later), a growing number of black intellectuals will come face to face with Ralph Ellison's searching pluralist imperative—that a black monopoly on blackness is both unattainable and undesirable in American society...

...78...

...And in The Other Side of Racism (Athens, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1981), Anne Wortham offers a sophomoric polemic against the basic precepts of modern civil-rights and human-rights agitation, claiming that . . . the [Rosa] Parks and [Lester] Maddox cases [re segregated buses and restaurants] show that, having rendered human rights arbitrary, legislators and courts have progressively evaded the difference between public and private property...

...In Britain and Europe, conservative and even aristocratic classes have facilitated cosmopolitanism, cross-ethnic relations, and intellectual experimentation...

...Racial exclusiveness characterized the intellectual life of blacks during the period 1967-76, organized through such magazines as Black World (now defunct) and the Black Scholar as well as in black caucuses within national academic associations...

...The black aesthetic differs fundamentally: "The question for the black [artist] is not how beautiful is a melody, a play, a poem, or a novel, but how much more beautiful has the poem, melody, play, or novel made the life of a single black man...

...This is why it is basic to the crisis of the black intellectual...

...71 Flaws in the Black Aesthetic: Ethnocentrism as Ideology LIKE ALL ETHNOCENTRISTS, the black-aesthetic theorists neglect a most elemental fact about human beings, white and black, Jew, Christian, and Muslim: their shared and seemingly infinite capacity to dehumanize their relations...

...Response to Crisis: The Black Aesthetic THESE ANXIETIES have confronted every generation of black intellectuals with a gnawing dilemma: how to invent a response to white competition for the cultural and market values of blackness, especially since appropriating them is race-bound (politicized) in the whites' favor...

...Though it is doubtful that the ranks of right-wing black intellectuals will expand very much in the near future, the skill with which Sowell has navigated their emergence will ensure at least a modest growth...

...4 These and related efforts by black ethnocentrists to cordon off blackness within chauvinistic boundaries are made dubious by the everyday realities of black cultural elasticity—its vivid acculturating propensities within a framework of resilient aesthetic norms...

...See E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment (New York: Random House, 1964...

...A new generation of college-educated Americans is freeing itself of the racial neuroses of American civilization...

...and now is assistant secretary of state in charge of international organizations...

...the rock, disco, country, and punk variants of jazz and blues (rhythm and blues) since the 1960s...

...A good measure of this change is found in the high rates of cross-ethnic marriages...

...Only ideology pretends to do so...

...And despite the American racist heritage, some facets of white American identity have been nurtured by the market-induced pop-culture artifacts of blackness—minstrel shows and songs of the early 20th century...

...Typical is economist Glenn Loury, a neoconservative public-policy analyst who gained a professorship at the Kennedy School of Government in 1984...

...For such black intellectuals, this amounts to double jeopardy, for it comes on top of the constraints of American racism...

...The ethnocentrists, who are always more popular in Afro-American society than the individualists, want hegemony over the market value of blackness by insinuating a hidden agenda (through populist rhetoric) into everybody's agenda...

...5 This was Alice Walker from circa 1960 till the early '70s...

...For while both share a measure of alienation from mainstream sectors in their ethnic group—that is, from the cultural ethnocentrists and the black bourgeoisie— the left-wing black intellectuals are viewed more favorably by the black establishment, owing to the broad consensus they share on public policy...

...The entry of black intellectuals into the American conservative establishment may well be a harbinger of an evolving "Americanistic" legitimation of the black intelligentsia...

...Progressive intellectuals—black and white—should take this challenge seriously, for neoconservatives such as Sowell and Williams are pathetically uncritical of the American establishment's plutocratic pretensions— pretensions aggressively reinforced under two Reagan administrations...

...72 rejection of white cultural values, it affirms the political 'otherness' of black people...

...While coming together under the umbrella of the Harlem Renaissance movement, some black intellectuals simultaneously latched onto a homosexual subculture (Countee Cullen...

...77 fact that classical Negro cultural-expressive patterns were fashioned through intense crosscultural relations...

...Some black intellectuals realize pluralism through "privacy"—they keep apart from formal cosmopolitan networks and seldom express their pluralist posture through political activity...

...Ralph Ellison has rightly chastised black ethnocentrist intellectuals for gravely underestimating the interplay of inclusiveness and resilience within black culture—its adaptive and acculturating capacities—when they present this culture's relation to white society simply as a matter of power and opportunity...

...Thus the emergence of a small cluster of neoconservative black intellectuals marks an important crossroads in the life cycle of the Afro-American intelligentsia...

...She was . . . a feminist who was also a wife and a mother...

...For example, black intellectuals who supported the Garvey movement's preference for complete fission in black/white cultural relations during the 1920s found themselves promoting the Communist party's preference for partial fusion in the 1930s...

...The importance of this cerebral disengagement from ethnocentrism is that it depletes the ranks of those black intellectuals who hanker after the bourgeois pretentions of monopolizing blackness...

...Yep, you done taken my blues and gone...

...In their assumption that aesthetics and politics are virtually interchangeable, the black ethnocentrists misconstrue this relationship...

...and sometimes just quiescent and dismissive of human needs...

...After all, many black intellectuals have gained academic jobs and influence in those Black Studies programs...

...ARENAS FOR DEFINING A PLURALIST IDENTITY in America are more plentiful for black intellectuals today than they were in any earlier period...

...For example, Stephen Henderson claims that the aesthetic valuation of a black poem "cannot be resolved without considering the ethnic roots of black poetry, which I insist are ultimately understood only by black people themselves...

...Here they find the marginality or autonomy that is always a cutting edge of pluralism for American intellectuals...

...There are a variety of routes to a pluralist intellectual identity...

...The more typical route to pluralism for a black intellectual is rather like the one that David Bradley has recently described when writing of Alice Walker: Alice Walker was black, a pacifist but a rejector of the organized religions to which that tradition belonged...

...It exhibits powerful appeal across ethnic, racial, and national boundaries, even for those who would denigrate blacks and their ways...

...The key to this new situation is a generation of college-educated whites who, because of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and '70s, are shaking off the psychocultural impediments to cosmopolitan life-styles...

...Thus, if black ethnocentrists believe that Afro-American art forms—whether folk or individual— are merely outcomes of black/white power dynamics ("ethnic roots," in Stephen Henderson's phrase), they can never grasp the elliptical meaning and quality of Negro spirituals, the Negro dance, and Martin Luther King, Jr...

...It plays an important role in the socialization of white youth and is strong among young adults too...

...Or, as George Dickie has put it, aesthetic awareness is "disinterested attention...

...Clair Drake (sociologist), Jamaica Kincaid (novelist), and Alice Walker (novelist), to mention a few...

...and some flirted with all of these (Langston Hughes...

...The dialectics of this dual response are always intricate, as Harold Cruse shows in his book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967...

...The horrible fact is that the Atlantic slave trade was voluntarily and extensively assisted by African societies...

...If they are not it doesn't matter...

...Historically, European intellectuals carrying a pariah stigma (Jews, Irish, Bretons, and others) could sometimes gain creative autonomy through a conservative-mediated pluralism...

...the jazz of the big band era...

...The more gregarious black intellectuals will seize the new opportunity for pluralism, aided by the earlier examples of such disengagement set by Maya Angelou, Julius Lester, and Larry Neal in the 1970s, and more recently by the playwright Ntozake Shange...

...For Addison Gayle the Vietnam War is a metaphor for dehumanization, especially the American variety...

...The fusion viewpoint was also prominent in the 1950s and '60s, as exemplified by LeRoi Jones's role in the beat movement and by modern jazz innovators (such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis...

...As Langston Hughes wrote in a 1920s poem, Note on Commercial Theatre: You've taken my blues and gone— You sing 'em on Broadway And you sing 'em in Hollywood Bowl And you mixed 'em up with symphonies And you fixed 'em So they don't sound like me...

...Thus, if the white aesthetic dehumanizes, the black aesthetic generates the humanization of power and authority...

...Though some black intellectuals since World War I have sought aesthetic strategies for limiting the boundaries of blackness in such a way that blacks would control its market value, there also persists a strategy of acculturation that favors blacks shaping and sharing in white Americans' appropriation of black70 ness...

...So defined, the black aesthetic is, I think, essentially devoid of the cultural introspection that for centuries has been part of humanity's aesthetic quest...

...In The Black Aesthetic, Addison Gayle, the main black ethnocentrist writer, argues that the white aesthetic tries "to evaluate the work of art in terms of its beauty and not in terms of the transformation from ugliness to beauty that the work of art demands from its audience...

...In The State Against Blacks (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), Walter Williams attacks several areas of government intervention on behalf of the poor, such as minimumwage policy...

...sometimes sycophantic and garish in the face of wealth, authority, and power...

...The mainstream among black ethnocentrists has also ignored an even more salient aspect of Afro-American cultural forms, what Ralph Ellison and Orlando Patterson have characterized as their inherently modern dimension: the Quoted in Moremi Charles, "This Side of the Rainbow," West Africa (London), June 4, 1984, p. 1165...

...The best aesthetic achievements of Afro-Americans—the Negro spirituals, early gospel, jazz, and blues—reflect this fully...

...Another turn toward right-wing networks by black intellectuals seeking pluralist paths to creative autonomy occurred in the last decade, when the Afro-American economist Thomas Sowell began to figure prominently in neoconservative ranks...

...Such a new focus is one of the major needs of today's black intelligentsia...

...In white hands, blackness can be converted into sizable commercial (and even intellectual) value...

...But as racism in American life grudgingly attenuates and as Afroization permeates ever deeper into American culture, black intellectuals can eventually resume the essential burden of the intellectual: to take one's mind seriously...

...Sowell's example has led a few other black intellectuals toward neoconservative networks—intellectuals such as Anne Wortham, a conservative sociologist at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government, and Walter Williams, a conservative economist at George Mason University...

...Thus cultural attitudes in the American establishment have often been parochial and aggressively anti-Catholic, antiSemitic, and racist.' So the typical black intellectual in search of creative autonomy usually gravitated toward left-wing networks...

...some reached out to the political left, both socialist and communist (Claude McKay...

...A veritable "Afroization" has occurred...

...some nested with elite bohemian circles (Zora Neale Hurston...

...Chauvinistic cultural doctrines (Garveyism, the black ' James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), p. 6. aesthetic movement, and so on) come to serve both the power-craving of their spokespeople and as an ideology (rhetoric) for the liberation of all blacks...

...What is unique about rightwing black intellectuals like Sowell, Williams, and Wortham is their sharp divergence from the black establishment's policy orientation...

...This reflects the awesome power of a market-value pragmatism: the white money-making legitimation of blackness (the blues, jazz, and gospel) is quite natural...

...The complex pattern of both progress and poverty among black Americans lacks a major journal that could serve as a forum for discussion, appraisal, and prescription...

...This lack reflects, I fear, a terrible malaise at the core of the Afro-American intelligentsia: it is a pathological drag on releasing the talents of a new generation of black intellectuals from the cathartic chains of ethnocentrism, especially now that the white-racist barriers, once so fierce and neurotic, are weakening...

...Thus the presence noire, while still searching for full political parity, is culturally ubiquitous in American life...

...Need I add that the distinction between ideology and aesthetics is fundamental: the former rationalizes, the latter civilizes...

...They must, in short, confront the fact that no valid aesthetic can provide a complete solution...

...s For an intelligent example of the "hybrid" black intellectual, see Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984...

...James Cone, a leading black liberationist theologian, asserts in The Spirituals and the Blues that "black music is political because, in its George Dickie, Aesthetics (New York: Pegasus, 1971), p. 52...

...8 This, then, is a sort of cerebral disengagement— broadening the creative resources as the intellect reaches toward the pluralist turf, while the emotions cling to ethnic catharsis...

...Yet while it can be identity-enhancing for some Afro-Americans, this same black ideology is constrictive for those black intellectuals who seek creative autonomy...

...Through song, a new political consciousness is continuously created, one antithetical to the laws of white society...

...A viable aesthetic will always have an ambivalent relationship to the human condition— sometimes responsible for awesome elevations in action and spirit...

...A MUCH-NEEDED ASSISTANCE to this shift from ethnocentrism to pluralism could be given by new journals—journals committed to rigorous pluralist aesthetic innovation and societal appraisal...

...She was a rejector of black middle-class education and pretentions, and an acceptor of white upper-class education—but not pretentions...

...Gayle asks...

...Over 50 percent of Jewish males in some recent years have married gentile women (70 percent in Colorado), and a comparable proportion of Japanese-American males have married white women...

...Of course, any intellectual's pluralist posture has inconsistencies, which are often tied up with one's biography, as Bradley's essay on Walker demonstrates...

...How far has the Americanization of black men progressed when a southern black man stands beside white men and shoots down, not the enemies of his people (white men), but the niggers of American construction...

...Stephen Henderson, ed., Understanding the New Black Poetry (New York: Morrow, 1973), pp...

...Though basing their chauvinistic and mystical notions about the aesthetic uniqueness of blackness (that is, its inaccessibility to nonblacks) on the political economy of the slave trade and slavery, theorists such as Addison Gayle and Stephen Henderson are rather ill-informed about the painfully ironic facts surrounding Afro-Americans' dehumanizing entry into American society as slaves...

...The road back from such a shambles is long and arduous, as witnessed in the aesthetic decay wrought by fascism and communism in Europe, and more recently by kleptocratic capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America...

...From this vantage point, black music, viewed over time, displays a variety of postures toward white society—repelled by white authoritarian chauvinism (racism) and the denial of human rights, yes...

...The white aesthetic is seen as obsessed with power, reflecting a proclivity to dominate and destroy...

...Instead, the black aesthetic is outward-looking, deriving its purpose, elan, and meaning from activism rather than contemplation, from politics rather than norms...

...This pluralist imperative has been recognized for some time by leaders of the religiously oriented forms of black ethnocentrism...

...The focus of such journals, run and shaped by black intellectuals, should be both black and American, and interracial in participation— offering a new generation of black intellectuals a range of cross-ethnic and pluralist relationships...

...In an interview in London in May 1984 Shange commented on the intellectual parochialism of some black American college students (she had in mind members of what she called "a neoblack nationalist sixties-type group"), especially their political naiveté about Africa's authoritarian patterns: Black Americans have a lot of catching up to do...

...Nor will they ever intellectually resolve the crisis of blackness, for aesthetic ambiguity is at the heart of blackness—something only the pluralists among black intellectuals fully grasp...

...When finally realized, this legitimation—only recently accorded the Jewish and Catholic intelligentsia— would mean that black intellectuals are capable of satisfying the WASP establishment's nationalistic and ideological predilections...

...Pluralist Intellectuals— Antidote to Ethnocentrism THE CRISIS OF BLACKNESS lies deep in the modern American past, criss-crossing every aspect on the identity continuum along which any given black intellectual moves, from being black American to just-plain American...

...In addition to left-wing groups, black intellectuals have gained pluralist networks through eccentric elite circles (for instance, Carl Van Vechten's bohemian clique in the 1920s and '30s) and through homosexual and feminist subcultures...

...The black-aesthetic movement shares the Garveyites' antipathy to the pluralist hope for parity in black/white cultural relations—a preference popular in the liberal mainstream of American intellectuals...

...If they are not, this displeasure doesn't matter either...

...In a rather naive article on a policy agenda for Afro-Americans, Loury chides "prominent black leaders [who] cluster at the left wing of the Democratic Party . . . ," and he considers it a major weakness of black politics today that "those moderate and conservative blacks, who might be able to find common ground with . . . President 75 [Reagan], have no standing as leaders either with the press, or with the masses of black people...

...This movement has the allegiance of more black intellectuals than any other ethnocentrist development among Afro-Americans in this century, including the Garvey movement of the 1920s whose hope for control of blackness involved an exodus to Africa...

...In exchange for their grisly services they received the means for greater power within African societies, especially guns and money, but also such frivolous wares as beads...

...What is particularly bad about "Americanism," as the black ethnocentrists see it, is that the power that lends it content is "opposed to humankind, against the dignity of the individual . . .: to be an American is to lose one's humanity...

...In short, the claim that blackness sustains a unique power-effacing ethos is dubious...

...Yet this ethnocentrism has declined among black intellectuals since the 1970s, as witness the aesthetic pluralism of black dance groups (such as the Dance Theater of Harlem), of screenwriters and filmmakers such as Ernest Dickerson and Spike Lee, and of such black feminist writers as Alice Walker and black science-fiction writers as Samuel Delany...

...The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs...

...Thus George Schuyler, a David Bradley, "Novelist Alice Walker," New York Times Magazine, January 8, 1984...

...In this intermediate position black intellectuals will gradually surrender chauvinistic pretentions, borrowing some of their aesthetic and ideological canons from new pluralist milieus but not yet joining forces with them, owing to their persistent ties to ethnocentrism...

...At some of the white colleges interracial dating is widespread (80 percent for black males and over 60 percent for black females at Harvard College) and a survey of several thousand students in Boston found that only 17 percent of black students, 13 percent of Hispanics, and 7 percent of white students considered this behavior stressful...

...In several books, including Markets and Minorities (New York: Basic Books, 1981), Thomas Sowell criticizes the use of affirmative-action policies to advance job opportunities for blacks...

...We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know them, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves...

...Blackness belongs to everybody, impervious to chauvinistic claims...

...WHAT, THEN, ARE THE PROSPECTS for quickening the pace of cosmopolitanization for a new generation of Afro-American intellectuals...

...Disengagement from black ethnocentrism— emotionally and ideologically—will therefore take time...

...Pluralist ties are also available through interracial or cross-ethnic cohabitation and marriage—sometimes a prominent conveyor belt into pluralism for black intellectuals...

...It is precisely this complexity of the intellectual pursuit that Langston Hughes had in mind when he wrote the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance in a famous 1926 Nation article ("The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," June 23, 1926): We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame...

...It extends even to such elements of sacred culture as white Pentecostalism, of both the Protestant and the Catholic charismatic varieties, which borrow numerous expressive rites from Afro-American religious observance...

...For many the experience of ethnic politicization through Black Studies programs— usually at predominantly white colleges—precludes sudden disengagement...

...2 Ideology, on the other hand, is contingent—it functions as an excuse, recognized or not, for a hidden agenda...

...We know we are beautiful...

...A new feature of the small cadre of rightwing black intellectuals is that for the first time they have respectable political allies among whites...

...To begin with, the black-aesthetic theorists posit a black/white aesthetic standoff...

...Addison Gayle, The Black Aesthetic (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971...