Stranger in His Own House: A Reply to Phillip Richards

...These strike me as strained and forced...

...In his view, Colgate's black students cannot complain if white students have rekindled pre-Civil Rights era prejudices...

...Now what precisely does this mean in terms of the origins of black alienation at Colgate...

...The soft-core set includes Hilton Als, Randall Kennedy, Henry Louis Gates, K.A...

...For example, at one point Richards tell us: "The climate of this college encourages black students to see the meaning of their blackness as estrangement from upper-class American life...

...And what's the big discovery...

...Curiously enough, at one point Richards pretends that his response to Colgate's black students today is similar to the response of progressive black faculty during the 1960s and 1970s...

...Appiah, Daryl Michael Scott, and Gerald Early...

...The tenacious neoracism that prevails throughout post—civil rights era American society—reinforced everywhere by broad classism—is of little moment in his thinking...

...I helped to organize and finance one of the earliest black student journals on a white campus, and I sustained close friendships with activist black students...

...That is, I endeavored to help African-American students sort out their black cultural or ethnic activism along pragmatic and progressive lines...

...But his estrangement is not from the white realities of Colgate, with their tenacious neoracist patterns: these are realities that Richards has easily accommodated to...

...Above all, because affirmative action practices enabled a sizeable number of black students to enter Colgate University with "[lower] social class [attributes] and test scores," white students and faculty inevitably look down upon and become prejudiced toward black students, who in turn "appropriate a deeply consensual image of blackness...

...But for me what is worse is that Richard assumes that African Americans in general are not as pragmatic in articulating and choreographing their anger as white groups such as Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, and Italian Americans have been...

...Richards's tales of everyday life in race relations at Colgate exhibit a kind of "I've-made-a-big-discovery" tone...

...I believe that Richards wants to tell his Dissent readers that African-American students are themselves to blame for their alienation from the everyday life of Colgate...

...It is, I submit, patently clear from Richards's article that his thinking about and behavior toward African-American students at Colgate is devoid of simple respect for the parity of black with white culture...

...The early set of conservative black intellectuals can be called "hard-core" or "true believer" conservatives, for they cherish laissez-faire American capitalism, while the newer set can be called "soft-core" or "ambivalent" conservatives, for, while they are enamored of American capitalism, they hesitate to give it a full love-embrace, so to speak...

...Be this as it may, he tells his Dissent readers that the alienation exhibited by most African-American students at Colgate has little to do with Colgate's white realities and everything to do with Colgate's black realities...

...Clair Drake (at Stanford University), and myself at Harvard University, to mention just a few...

...Namely, that we respected them—even while we also insisted they come to grips with the need for a pragmatic mode of managing black activism within the modern achievement-oriented society...

...There are no serious data that Richards or any other conservative can adduce to sustain this rubbish...

...Most of my students, even in the advanced African-American literature seminars, were white...

...As he puts it: "For when she opened her mouth to comment on Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, she spoke in the high analytic mode that one expects from a senior philosophy major in . . . this school...

...Is Richards charging that the racist realities at Colgate sparked estrangment among black students...

...At the time, the majority of African-American students I encountered were taken up with the Afrocentric study of black religions...

...In this variant of blaming the victim, Richards claims that "blackness .. . appeals to white racist prejudice [at Colgate]," and that it justifies a "political apartheid" that in turn reinforces the maladjustment of Colgate's black students as Richards views it...

...That there is an intrinsic malfunction in black cultural activism— namely, the inability of its adherents to adapt to the processes of secular achievement (in science and technology, humanities and aesthetics, and so on) at the foundation of modern Western civilization...

...During the formative days of black students' ethnic activism on white campuses, I was one of the progressive African-American faculty who got involved pro-actively...

...If this is his claim, he could have put it more directly...

...For better or worse, my experience has plunged me into the white academic culture of the school...

...89 ARGUMENTS FWALLY, Richards gilds the lily when he writes about the only African-American student at Colgate whom he considered on an intellectual par with Colgate's white students...

...This is in contrast to Richards's neo-accommodationist discourse, which posits the generic inability of black cultural activist patterns to be anything other than irrational, culturally intolerant, and xenophobic...

...Her literary insights and analytic prowess stunned not only me but also the white fraternity boys...

...Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida Wells Barnett, and James Weldon Johnson...

...MARTIN KILSON is Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government at Harvard University...

...Moreover, neither Richards nor his ARGUMENTS white conservative confreres would dare articulate this view vis-a-vis cultural activism among white ethnic and religious groups...

...Emphasis added...

...It is rather an estrangement from the black realities of Colgate—realities that Richards considers maladjusted to the high-knowledge milieu of the university...

...Lacking the space for elaboration, just let me state baldly that this claim is absurd...

...Black Cultural Activism At the core of "A Stranger in the Village" is Richards's antipathy to black cultural activism, an antipathy that he packages curiously or not quite candidly, for he never tells his readers that the "Village" where blackness is so very distressful to him is Colgate University, where he is an associate professor in the English department...

...She did not see herself as black, and attributed her academic success partially to this view...

...See Werner Sollors et al., eds...

...IN PURSUIT of these goals, progressive black faculty at white institutions did not hesitate to chastise black students when their cultural activism turned extremist or mean, small-minded, and twisted...

...They recognized that an activist commitment to black culture can be realized along pragmatic, rationalsecular, and culturally tolerant—that is, non-xenophobic—lines, just like activist commitment to Jewishness, Irishness, Italianness, Anglo-Saxonness, and so on...

...Prominent personalities among the hard-core set include Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Alan Keyes, Walter Williams, and Glenn Loury (though Professor Loury has for two years or so now been recasting himself into a pro-active, liberal conservative...

...They were often better students of black literature than African Americans because of their self-consciously cultivated ability to detach themselves from a text and to analyze it...

...Are Irish, Italian, Polish, and WASP cultural activist patterns similarly dysfunctional...

...The story line of his article is his personal tale of a decade of dissatisfaction with what he views as Colgate's culturally alienated African-American students: At my first [black studies] faculty party, the black studies department was explained to me as the embodiment of the black students' worldview...

...In Richards's curious discourse, immigrant origin guarantees that black students on white campuses—or even at black colleges, for that matter—will "reject the consensual black ideology...

...he lacks the storytelling felicity that instinctively attracts and convinces...

...He is writing a book on the making of black intellectuals...

...In short, that black cultural assertion is an obstacle to social achievement...

...Long before Richards's Dissent essay, progressive African-American intellectuals drew attention to the need for pragmatic choreographing of black cultural activism so that social achievement is respected...

...90 n DISSENT / Spring 1999...

...They brought to my classes a variant of the white academic culture that gives the school its [elite] reputation...

...Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe [New York University Press, 1993...

...Richards elaborates by relating tales of everyday life at Colgate...

...This has involved a steady growth of conservatism among black intellectuals and, more recently, some ideological differentiation within conservative ranks...

...DISSENT / Spring 1999...

...In the passages where he's celebrating his favorite student, Richards informs his readers that if there are other intellectually rigorous black students at Colgate, they're more likely than not to be immigrant in background too...

...And I must—my memory is not clear on this—not have fully approved of some of the extravagant interpretations that I was hearing of Langston Hughes's blues poetry in my African-American literature class...

...CLEARLY, Richards relishes the core precepts of Bookerite accommodationism...

...Although this student did share outward solidarity with black cultural activists (for example, she wore "the striped knit caps that were common to the West Indian cultural nationalists in the college"), Richards informs us that "her resemblance to them ended there...

...One such precept is that African Americans should let go of their anger about their dehumanizing experiences under America's two centuries of racism, because it distorts their career opportunities...

...Her presence there meant that she paid little attention to the black [cultural activist] diatribe against my courses...

...Is he charging that Colgate's black students obsessively, neurotically immerse themselves in an activist cultural style as a way to mask their individual and group insecurity complex, a complex stemming in part from their dependence upon affirmative action...

...But Richards reports that he had a second reason—more important to him, it seems, than the first— for his attraction to this student...

...They came to Ralph Ellison and Richard DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 87 ARGUMENTS Wright without the crippling feelings of alienation, inevitably experienced by an outsider in a closely knit community [like Colgate University...

...But we also let them know one thing clearly...

...Although hard-core conservatives believe in a natural or automatic capacity of American capitalism to correct its century-and-a-half racist marginalization of African-American citizens, the soft-core conservatives specialize in criticizing mainline African-American intelligentsia and institutions...

...Lacking this pragmatism, Richards believes, African Americans require a hand to guide them in their dealings with white American institutions...

...Second, we emphasized that African-American students had an obligation toward a kind of dual fidelity: fidelity to modernist achievement and rigorous academic behavior, on the one hand, and to black folks' honor—to the best traditions of black culture—on the other...

...It is here, then, that Richards's "A Stranger in the Village" looms as intellectually inauthentic...

...During the formative era of black activism on white campuses (the mid-sixties to mid-seventies), progesssive black intellectuals who challenged militant black students in this regard included Kenneth B. Clark (at Brooklyn College), Hylan Lewis (at Brooklyn College), W. Arthur Lews (at Princeton University), Harold Weaver (at Rutgers University), John Hope Franklin (at University of Chicago), John Blassingame (at Yale University), Nathan Huggins (at Columbia University), Charles Hamilton (at Columbia University), St...

...Which is to say, it is little more than an exercise in blackness-phobia...

...Richards proceeds to compare Colgate's black students to its white ones...

...88 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 Blaming the Victim Richards's way of packaging his tales of everyday life in black-white relations at his "white" college doesn't make it easy for his Dissent readers to understand the development of black students' alienation...

...And in the leisure afforded by their [black students'] absence [from my classes], I had time to write and to work with a series of excellent white students who, perhaps predictably, went on to excellent graduate or professional schools...

...Groups of estranged minorities are often close-knit and sectarian at places such as this...

...Furthermore, he informs his readers of another of this student's key attributes—that she is not of domestic black origins, but of immigrant black origins, a Caribbean black American...

...I have written about the era of formative black student cultural activism at Harvard...

...A recent addition to the soft core is Phillip Richards, as demonstrated most recently in his Dissent article "A Stranger in the Village: Coming of Age in a White College" (Summer 1998...

...And despite some real intellectual disagreements— which I always preferred to be candid about—I sustained close mentoring ties with many of the militant black activists at Harvard in the mid-sixties to mid-seventies...

...To wit: trust in the natural workings of the democratic ethos enshrined at the core of our American Republic and reject the challenge to white racism fashioned by the founders of black national consciousness at the dawn of the modern era—Alexander Crummell, Martin Delaney, W.E.B...

...But never mind...

...First, we impressed upon activist black students the need to infuse one's commitment to blackness with a spirit of cosmopolitan humanism, so that one is able to guard against chauvinistic and mean-spirited forms of ethnic activism...

...For some reason, I fell foul of this apparently shared understanding early on...

...So Richards offers African Americans an updated version of the accommodationist conservatism of Booker Washington...

...Richards elevates his high-achieving black student's rejection of her blackness to a general cultural principle...

...So in that formative phase, progressive black faculty at white institutions did two crucial things...

...Is Jewish cultural activism as such dysfunctional to social achievement...

...But Dissent readers should not take this bid seriously, because it is simply groundless...

...In her intellectual excellence and her quirky individualism this student represented a very impressive protest against the college's [black students'] debilitating ideology of blackness...

...Here he is pandering to the pernicious propaganda line common among white conservatives: that immigrant blacks possess some intrinsic intellectual gifts not common among domestic blacks...

...For Richards, no doubt, elitist and conservative white guiding hands are preferable...

...But unlike Richards's essentially rejectionist demeanor toward cultural activism among black Colgate students today, these progressive intellectuals exhibited basic respect for black folks, for blackness...

...Thereafter, the black students dropped me...

...Although I am aware that Richards is a cogent American studies scholar, I was not at all aware that Greek letter fraternity white males as a group possessed special talents in this field, talents that would encourage Richards to use them as measuring rod...

...No doubt this explains, at least in part, his curious bid to conceal the actual university where, during the past decade as a black American assistant professor in literary studies, he has considered himself "A Stranger in the Village...

...Richards tells his readers that he first encountered this student—a black female—" in my American literature survey class...

...When intellectual differences didn't interfere, I was faculty adviser to the black students' association...