Race, celebrity, and intellectuals

...Today, television of the bookish Cavett variety remains an important component in achieving a certain literary stature...

...d) none of the above...

...But this failure leaves the existential and psychological realities of black people in the lurch...

...The work of both the New Yorkers and the younger black writers, for example, has a tendency to interpret politics in cultural ways and culture in political ways, a tendency that has been limiting as well as illuminating...

...Willis, meanwhile, sees West as a coddled academic eminence who has gotten too far too fast, and who, besides, is imprisoned in Christian dogma and puritanical bourgeois morality...

...Thus he discloses that still another black writer gets the most amazing blurbs for his books, including one from the rapper Chuck D. Thus Boynton likens appearances by black authors on Today or the Charlie Rose Show to the writings of Trilling and Alfred Kazin...

...The grandest puff appeared last winter in a group review by Michael Berube that turned up in the New Yorker...

...By the mid1960s, some individual writers had come to understand the uses of a well-crafted television persona, in promoting their words and ideas...

...And the celebrity cult is peculiarly treacherous for everyone—readers and writers, editors and publishers, of all colors— where the young black writers are concerned...

...In the mid-1980s, American politics began turning back to issues of race and racism—and here was a group of young well-educated, highly articulate black voices, burning to speak out on these matters and many others...

...many of the leading new black writers, although always concerned with issues of race and identity, have followed approximately the opposite trajectory, moving from 1960s black power to a rejection of pat racial labels...

...And there are additional likenesses as well, which neither Berube nor Boynton examine...

...On the one hand, the right is ready to trash the National Endowment for the Humanities...

...What started out as a historic change inAmerican intellectual life has been turned by the celebrity pieces into a glamorous artificial ghetto, where the writers' most salient characteristic is their skin complexion...

...Like so many stories these days," Boynton remarks, "this one is about blacks and Jews," a point he then develops at great length, suggesting the blacks are moving into the Jews' old turf, resulting in the usual tension...

...More or less at the same time as Berube's and Boynton's pieces appeared, Leon Wieseltier delivered a harsh review in the New Republic of Cornel West's political and philosophical writings, and touched off a large row...

...But West is just as tough on the other side, those he labels "liberal structuralists," for what he calls their "failure of nerve" in owning up to the ravaging effects of addiction and criminality among poor blacks: They hesitate to talk honestly about culture, the realm of meanings and values, because to do so may seem to lend itself too readily to conservative conclusions in the narrow ways Americans discuss race...

...It will not be easy because of all the ways in which the world has changed since Harrington first arrived on the national scene...

...West may succeed in these things or he may fail...

...Wieseltier approaches the writings as those of a formal political philosopher and theologian, and he finds them extremely wanting—contradictory in their pragmatic premises, scatterbrained in their Social Gospel Christianity, and woefully inattentive to matters of moral responsibility...

...And they're black...

...As time passed, additional hype began to build around specific black authors, helped along by the commercial efforts of their agents, editors, and publishers...

...Then comes the plot synopsis, one that without too much caricaturing can be read along the following lines: once upon a time, there was a group of intellectuals, mostly New York Jews, who ruled the world of ideas...

...The rise of both groups, broadly speaking, represented an entry of ethnic outsiders to a degree of public notice as respected thinkers...

...many of the young black writers feel at home writing about black street culture and mass culture, treating them as if they were at least potentially liberating forces...

...Stanley Crouch, for example, has made large contributions (to my way of thinking, his largest) in his writings on jazz...

...But he was primarily a spellbinding orator, an organizer, and in his books, a provoker, one whose provocations (above all The Other America) left a strong and honorable mark on our time...

...Traditionally, most authors enjoyed limited resources, and were restricted to banding together with a few like-minded souls, adopting a collective label, and making their presence felt with a manifesto or, even better, a magazine...

...The trashing and the anxiety—these are related symptoms, indicative of a deepening split in the American soul, a soul that has never lived easily with the life of the mind...

...By these lights, all that the two groups seem to have in common is the critics' determination to force them into congruence with each other, in the manner of one of the old MillerAnalogy tests given to prospective college students— Trotskyism is to Irving Kristol as black nationalism is to: (a) Stanley Crouch...

...Berube also brings this up, but more cursorily...

...Most writers, critics, and scholars undertake their work with neither the expectation of becoming nor the desire to become celebrity hot shots (although it is difficult not to experience at least occasional flashes of envy, especially when one's friends or colleagues make it big...

...Thus Berube informs us, with no trace of irony, that another black writer publishes her books "in apparent accord with the Bruce Springsteen approach to product placement," that she drives a BMW, and that she now holds the same title that Irving Howe once held at the City University of New York...

...It's a stirring story, but it's also simple enough to be summarized in the form of a movie trailer...

...Media hype about the new black intellectuals has been building gradually over the past decade, marking the arrival of a generation of black writers and academics who came of age in the wake of the civil rights movement...

...But the main thing about this brand of journalism is that it has little or nothing to do with ideas and everything to do with personalities...

...But if his undertakings are not as exalted as some of his admirers claim, neither are they as trivial as some of his critics claim...

...and on the other hand, more liberal Americans are anxiously trying to bestow on some group of "progressive" writers and critics the mantle of supreme intellectual authority...

...Du Bois reflected on the ironies of reaching the academic heights, always sensing his racial distinctiveness, always confronting the hesitant curiosity of sympathetic whites, always coping with their unasked question: "How does it feel to be a problem...

...As Willis points out, much of the media oversell of the younger black writers bespeaks a kind of "reverse Bell Curvism," in which the fact that a black person earns a Ph.D., let alone writes a book, gets greeted with exaltation and virtually uncritical reviews...

...The New Yorkers, in flight from 1930s left-wing philistinism, mistrusted folk culture and mass culture (although they were not above occasional spritzing in the vernacular...

...Nevertheless, the structures of celebrityhood have impinged more and more upon American writers, including those in the world that I know best, the university humanities, where conversations about "superstars" and stupendous salaries and the art of the deal (sometimes involving actual movie contracts) have entered into everyday shoptalk with increasing frequency...

...Yet no matter how honorable the critics' conscious intentions may be, the formulas and imperatives of celebrity writing have become so deeply entrenched that their commentaries wind up sounding depressingly familiar even when they appear in the best magazines...

...the black writers have had a lot to say on the first subject and relatively little on the others...

...c) Randall Kennedy...

...rather, it will also require the individual and cooperative efforts of the poor themselves to rid their neighborhoods of cynicism and self-destruction...

...In this way, liberal structuralists neglect the battered identities rampant in black America...

...Stephen Carter's reflections on religion in American life, to take another example, have larger purposes than to remark on race relations, yet these purposes remain vague in Boynton's essay...

...Television changed all that...

...Now, however, it seems as if celebrity coverage is reinforcing those misperceptions and helping to create new ones...

...black writers who do not do so (or who do not do so enough) do not turn up in the reports on the new black intellectuals...

...In 1963, it was possible to open the New Yorker and find Dwight Macdonald there descanting thoughtfully and at length about The Other America...

...Part of what is missing has to do with West's main intellectual and political preoccupation, improving the plight of the urban black poor...

...The prospects are not encouraging...

...Now in place of Macdonald there is Michael Berube celebrating Race Matters and works by the other new black intellectuals—a case of misjudgment, no doubt, but also a sign about more general trends in intellectual reportage...

...The politics of conversion, he writes, "shuns the limelight—a limelight that solicits status seekers and egomaniacs," but instead "stays on the ground among toiling everyday people...

...Insofar as they have cohered as distinct groups, the New Yorkers and the younger blacks have spoken in remarkably different ways to different publics and about different subjects...

...Are we doomed to be a land of the idiot culture at one end and of celebrity thinkers at the other end...

...But that will not be easy, and not just because of his habit of speaking and writing all over the map...

...But it is not simply a matter of whether this writer or that group of writers will succumb to some abstract force...

...But is it the most important thing...

...The two critics differ in tone: whereas Willis is cool and wry, Wieseltier is aggressive, even fierce (and made to sound all the more fierce by the New Republic 's inflammatory cover announcing "The Decline of the Black Intellectual...

...The racialized subtexts that have emerged of late only make this syndrome all the more troubling...

...But the racialism also runs deeper than that, and is embedded in the very category of "black intellectuals...

...Those features reveal something of the SUMMER • 1995 • 293 Comments and Opinions parlous state of our culture in general...

...Yet they object to the same passages in West's books and articles, places where West's logic falters, where his writing turns to attitudinizing, and where he seems to be composing his own press releases, likening himself to Du Bois or Ralph Ellison...

...The cumulative effect is at once to slight various individuals and 296 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions to promote a very narrow conception of intellectual life—a conception that no one could dare associate with nonblack writers...

...Not every critic, however, has been impressed, either by the growing air of celebration or by all of the writers being celebrated...

...Early on, it appeared as if all the attention might reduce old racial misunderstandings of the sort that Du Bois had to deal with...

...Rather, it is a matter of choice, of whether all of us—readers and writers, editors and publishers—can calmly reject the ghettoization and glamorization that go along with celebrity journalism and try to sustain a strenuous interracial intellectual life, based on disagreement as well as assent...

...But in other parts of the culture, including print culture, the celebrity-writer cult has sunk lower and lower, fastening on to every sort of author, from novelists to social critics to professors of literature, and portraying them like movie stars or rock stars—famous for how they act or look, their ideas reduced to performance shtick...

...Since then, after enormous tumult and struggle, race relations in the intelligentsia have improved enormously, but not so enormously that the question does not linger...

...Whereas Harrington could count on tough remarks and rebuttals as well as praise, especially from his closest associates and friends, West and many of the other prominent black writers have been treated (at least until recently) to the sort of tumultuous acclaim that suffocates their better intentions...

...others are honorable men and women who have chosen, if only momentarily, to be distracted from their honorable labors...

...There is plenty of this sort of thing in West's prose, and it deserves the scrutiny that his critics give it...

...Harrington wrote thoughtfully on philosophical matters and political theory, always with an eye on current dilemmas and possibilities...

...many of the leading black writers won their early reputations SUMMER • 1995 • 295 Comments and Opinions as academics (and they are still best-known by other academics).The New Yorkers started out indifferent (and in some cases resistant) to their Jewish background and identity and only later became curious and even obsessed with these subjects...

...Yet neither view does justice to West's contributions, above all his attempts to break through the prevailing political impasse between conservative bootstrap moralism and leftistliberal indifference to psychological and moral breakdown among the poor...

...To Wieseltier, West is the sort of leftist who excuses the moral failings of the deprived by blaming those failings on capitalism...

...With the pitch completed, the analogy gets developed (along with the side references to other celebrities) less on the basis of what the new writers think than on the basis of how well known they are, what jobs they have held, who their friends are, how they dress, and what they own...

...Writing in these pages on the theme of "Nihilism in Black America," West has contended that it is useless to discuss the wretched conditions of the black poor simply in terms either of moral deficiency or material deprivation...

...There are numerous points where celebrityhood converges with those older forms of literary and academic fame in which reputations derive from the power of one's thoughts and expressions...

...The New Yorkers, in general, only attached themselves to the academy after they had won their reputations, and the attachments were usually weak...

...yet Boynton pays these only passing notice...

...Many of these writers fit the desirable celebrity profile, with their youth, stylishness, and outspokenness...

...Robert Boynton tries to raise some of these issues toward the end of his essay, when he won298 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions ders whether, in a country where "anything can be marketed," the new black writers will succumb to mere celebrity status...

...Furthermore, well outside the celebrity mongers' gaze, he has also tried to open up lines of reasonable conversation where practically none exists anymore, or where the lines have become frayed—between black churches and elite universities, the democratic left and the U.S...

...West's critics also slight what Wieseltier disSUMMER • 1995 • 297 Comments and Opinions misses too quickly as his "homiletic" endeavors...

...q SUMMER • 1995 • 299...

...In part, this ghettoization involves grouping together under the same heading authors who have little enough in common with respect to style or outlook or even talent...

...What's more, it was, as should have been expected, a complicated group, united in rejecting America's racist past but divided about almost everything else, with viewpoints that ranged all the way from Reagan conservatism to Afrocentrism...

...From the same people who brought you The End of Ideology and A Walker in the City comes a new intellectual blockbuster...

...Consider, for example, the recent critical discussions of West's work by Wieseltier and Willis...

...One can win approval from the celebrity venues or one can be subjected to a hatchet job, like the one Vanity Fair recently performed on Leon Wieseltier...

...Fortunately Wieseltier and Willis do not stop there, but go on to consider West's more substantive remarks through their very different frames...

...Change the political labels and the same could be said about West or Gates...

...Yet by the time the comparison is played out, it is hard to see what the story has to do with the ones about blacks and Jews...

...But that side of things doesn't fit with the celebrity story line, which is and can only be a racialist story line...

...Soon after came Michael Lerner's attack on Wieseltier in Tikkun, followed by Jon Wiener's attack in the Nation on Wieseltier and the New Republic, followed by Ellen Willis's assessment in the Village Voice of both West and Wieseltier's review of West, followed by rejoinders, rejoindersto-rejoinders, and adjudications that are still being composed and printed as I write this in early April...

...If there are models for the sort of intellectual that West is striving to become, one writer who comes to mind strongly is not any of the New York Jewish intellectuals or even any of West's black predecessors, but rather Michael Harrington, a man whom West acknowledges as one of his major influences...

...Still, the encroaching combination of celebrity temptations and writerly egotism, in all of its forms, has created a new and treacherous standard of desire and accomplishment, especially for younger scholars and authors, both inside and outside the universities...

...Is there not some loss of critical perspective when established scholars get lumped together with aspiring academic pundits and popular journalists as black intellectuals...

...This, at least, the New York Intellectuals were spared...

...And that departure, he claims, will fail if it relies only on calls for liberal government programs...

...Even more invidious is the liberal racialism that lurks within the celebrations—nothing as sinister as outright racism, but a distortion that grows from a fixation on race...

...Writers and critics have always wanted to draw attention to their words and ideas, and for many this has involved joining with others in an identifiable group...

...Thus Berube compares Cornel West's collection of popular essays, Race Matters, to Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, not because of their respective merits or arguments, but because of how many copies they sold, how influential they have purportedly been...

...The philosopher Richard Rorty, for example, need not comment on contemporary racial politics in order to qualify as an intellectual...

...294 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions One requirement in this kind of writing is the pitch, delivered Hollywood-style in the form of a question: What previous group does this new group remind you of...

...But this one, given the touchiness of the issues involved, and given that it broke out against a background of the celebrity cult, also has had features that make one wince...

...Or, as the Atlantic Monthly announced on its cover: "Suddenly, they're back...

...The troubled connections between intellectual camps and celebrityhood are, it is true, nothing new...

...That was the promise when the hype began a decade ago...

...And, of course, they are black, a fact that gives left-leaning white critics the chance to affirm their anti-racist bona fides...

...The black writers' other thoughts—which may be their most powerful thoughts—get short shrift...

...and it is still not too late to redeem it...

...To Willis, he is the sort of (fellow) leftist who has forsaken the cultural radicalism of the 1960s and who espouses repressive Protestant values...

...Both groups, again broadly speaking, have managed to straddle the academy and the world of commercial book publishing, the magazines and reviews, and even (in some cases) politics...

...b) Stephen Carter...

...Indeed, both Gates and West have spoken on numerous occasions about their close ties with mentors, colleagues, and associates, black and white...

...If there is a hidden taboo among liberals it is to resist talking about values too much because it takes the focus away from structures, especially the positive role of government...

...At another level, those black writers who do comment on these subjects get described and judged mainly on the basis of those comments, as when Boynton offers thumbnail sketches of various authors' thoughts on issues like racial essentialism and American citizenship...

...Cutting through all of the dilemmas and evasions and misplaced emphases of the celebrity mode is a difficult business, and not just because doing so is almost guaianteed to offend the celebrities' fans...

...Surely their appearance was an important, even a historic event, signaling a longdelayed turn in our national intellectual life...

...And Harrington, although courted by the powerful, did not have to contend with the mounting and corrupting temptations that beset today's aspiring intellectuals across the board—the jet-set lecture tours, the huge fees, the glare of glitzy publicity...

...And Harrington, although an atheist, was also an ethicist in a strongly Christian mode—influenced by his Catholic upbringing and his association with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker group—one whose later writings, especially, raised the same sorts of moral issues that West, the black Protestant, is exploring...

...At one level, black scholars and critics and artists are expected by the media (and sometimes each other) to express their views publicly on the current state of race relations, an expectation that is not placed on white colleagues...

...By and large, the New Yorkers said little about race relations and a great deal about high modernism and communism...

...He is impatient with conservative moralists who, he notes, "talk about values and attitudes as if political and economic structures hardly exist," who discount the cumulative effects of black subjugation as if history did not matter, and who rarely mention the countless numbers of black poor "who act on the Protestant ethic and still remain at the bottom of the ladder...

...it also has a kind of confused liberal nobility about it...

...granting celebrity retrospectively is sufficient to the task of creating a framing analogy that will grab the attention of editors and readers, and make the newcomers seem bankable...

...We have, as a nation, come to a strange pass...

...The celebrity cult has, to be sure, hardly conquered every corner of American literary and academic life...

...This problem is compounded by a double bind in which too many black writers find themselves trapped...

...For all of his media celebrity—highlighted by his appearances with everyone from Bill Moyers and Oprah Winfrey—West does not restrict himself to the celebrity circuit, or to academic pow-wows, or to left-wing circles where he can call his political comrades to assembly...

...Senate, blacks and Jews...

...Ironically, however, the critics, in trying to separate the work from its context (and celebrity hype) and to describe its intellectual core, end up missing some of its important facets and nuances...

...or they turn up only as secondary figures...

...To discuss, say, the work of Thomas Sowell, as Berube does, with only a perfunctory reference to his links with his white conservative colleagues is fundamentally to distort the context of his work and theirs...

...More important, the celebrations have ignored how many of their subjects have thrived in part because of their close working relations and intellectual affinities with nonblack writers and critics as well as with blacks—a closeness that has invigorated all involved, regardless of color...

...Instead, we are treated to more sensational and sometimes invidious themes...

...An old-fashioned intellectual donnybrook, fought out in the high-brow weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies, is always exciting...

...Both Berube and Boynton, the most prominent celebrants, have a ready answer— the New York Intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s...

...Their academic degrees and seriousness of purpose offer an authentic touch of intellectual class...

...West has not yet written anything nearly as politically effective as Harrington's best work, although he might do so if he allows himself the time...

...And by the rules of celebrity journalism, seizing upon the black writers not only makes sense...

...They approach the matter of West's celebrity in very different ways: Wieseltier ignores it almost completely, and judges West's work on its own, while Willis pokes exasperated fun at West's fame...

...West calls instead for a new departure, a politics of conversion—one that intellectually situates ghetto nihilism within cruel social conditions but does not, therefore, exonerate it...

...Some are plain poseurs...

...Think of such modern academic figures as Camille Paglia or, on a smaller scale, Andrew Ross—both of them formally professors, both of them cultural critics, but both of them also media celebrities of a kind hardly imaginable forty years ago...

...In the world of media celebrity, it is easy enough to transform a group of authors with disparate views into a coherent camp, simply by calling attention to their appearances—in the case of the black writers, the color of their skin—and declaring that it is so...

...There are, without question, plausible grounds for likening the younger black writers to the older New York Intellectuals, as Boynton takes pains to explain...

...They grew older, some of them died, and it seemed as if we would never see their like again...

...Shortly thereafter, in the Atlantic Monthly, came Robert S. Boynton's essay, "The New Intellectuals," a more thoughtful piece than Berube's, but not free of celebrity mongering conceits...

...It matters little that the pitch confers upon the older New York writers a kind of media celebrity that they never enjoyed in their prime...

...In short, he did not have to confront today's cult of celebrity writerhood, a cult that has rewarded fakes, seduced honest but seducible writers, and garbled intelligent thought and debate...

...his record thus far is mixed both with respect to defining his "politics of conversion" and to putting them into practice...

...The two critics are also worlds apart in their political stances, which comes as no surprise to their longtime readers...

...And some of the mongering has managed to slip into some unexpected places...

...But to develop the last of these comparisons would require being more substantive and more critical of both sets of writers than the structures of celebrity journalism allow...

...Nor are the celebrity writers innocent fodder for the celebrity machine...

...And alongside Du Bois's painful old question there has arisen a new one: "How does it feel to be a celebrity...

...Over the past year or so, however, the hype has been picked up by writers for the national media and turned into more disturbing forms of celebrity mongering— the latest example of a trend that has gripped almost every field of artistic and academic endeavor...

...And so, with the aid of literate talk-show hosts such as Dick Cavett, a new figure, the modern celebrity writer, was born...

...Indeed, in the end, it appears that the entire analogy between the New York Intellectuals and the young black writers is shaky...

...Although West does not always follow through on his own prescriptions, he follows through more than his critics describe, not least when he has taken to the pulpit on Sunday mornings in parts of Brooklyn and other povertystricken areas to challenge the racist demagoguery that has taken hold in growing portions of innercity black America...

...And the same could be said about some of the best new journals edited by younger black writers, like Randall Kennedy's Reconstruction, an ambitious interracial venture in political and cultural commentary...

...Enter, somewhat unexpectedly (and in the nick of time), the new black intellectuals, men and women, Berube tells us, "who can leap from Kierkegaard to KRS-One in a single bound...

...Although the number of black scholars and non-academic writers is now greater than it was, one chronically feels the strain of racial perplexity, of psychological projection back and forth across the color line...