Tuesday, September 2, 2008

"Betrayal": Houston Baker on Black Intellectuals

In the eyes of some, the public function of black intellectuals has changed from speaking truth to power to turning away from the kind of social justice activism that was the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University, has turned his critical eyes on this transformation in his book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Columbia University Press, 2008).

Baker looks across the spectrum of black intellectualism—left, right, and center. One of the founders of Black Studies, forty years ago, we talked about the role of black intellectuals, the good, bad and the ugly. We spoke days before Barack Obama accepted the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s heralded speech at the 1963 March on Washington. Below is an edited version of our conversation.


Norman Kelley: Your book echoes Julian Benda’s “The Treason of the Intellectuals” (Les Trahison des Clercs). Benda argued that intellectuals of his era­–the modern era–were increasingly responsible for inflaming the passions of nationalism, racism, and war. He wrote: “Now, at the end of the nineteenth century a fundamental change had occurred: the “clerks” [his word for intellectuals] began to play the game of political passions. The men who had acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as it stimulators.”

If I understand you correctly, your book pivots off his central thesis but in a different direction. You see a betrayal in black intellectuals not fulfilling their public intellectual role.

Houston Baker: That’s right. I had a section in an earlier draft of the manuscript that addressed the treatment of the “clercs” directly, and I remember saying that at least a direct reversal, a mirror image. I remember saying that the situation would find the intellectual outside the grand salon, the dining table that uses them in a public way. While in the present economy black intellectuals are invited to the grand salon and are asked to sit down at the table, and discuss the next issue of neoconservative declaration of bad black behavior. It’s kind of astonishing from a perspective of intellectual history.

Kelley: Now, you cited Martin Luther King as the model of an engaged black public intellectual while most people would see him as a moralistic preacher rather than as a public intellectual, although he did write books.

Baker: Historically, one of the chief institutions of the black public sphere has been the church. I would use an example of an engaging analysis of the public sphere Du Bois’s essay in The Souls of Black Folk, “The Faith of the Fathers.” Du Bois’s claim—well, he doesn’t say it directly but it’s true—because black folks are excluded from politics, from the social policy of the country that suppose to be their native land, he kind of sees that they have had to develop a microcosm within the church and the development of spirituals. So, King’s legacy, heritage, geneology, through generations of black preachers is the start of his unconscious and conscious engagement; made to go to youth groups and prayer meetings during the week; being the preacher’s son.

That would be the beginning of the engagement, and then the other institution, which has fallen upon hard times in many instances but was glorious at the time that King was coming along, would be historically black colleges and universities; his Morehouse years in Atlanta; his father the preacher of the church. I would say his formative years found him in a black public sphere because of segregation through housing. The move into Montgomery, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church would not have been, I think, at all disconcerting to King. This is all speculation, but it would have been seen as a destination church, a destination city, a destination region in the South.

What was unknown to him when he moved in Montgomery was the long history of building a counter public sphere, a black resistance movement, a black liberation impulse that was there and that was rolling through a middle age generation, and I use the middle age advisedly, of Rosa Parks. Bourgeois, wonderfully situated in Montgomery, and as they would say, “You are the chosen one. You are chosen to lead us: you got the look, you got the education, you got the eloquence to do it.”

And I think what was astonishing the kind of background, formative work in the public sphere, the kind of coming together of the public sphere, the ideology, the population, the demographics, the social interconnections of Montgomery; it was an almost natural, organic connection that took place between King and “the people,” although King considered himself one of the people. He was empathetic; he had compassion to go with it.

I have to say people have said this to me, and quite rightly, how can you use King as a model? Those are shoes no one can fill and we have moved temporally to a different plane completely unlike what was going on at the time when he assumed a leadership role. That is true, but as you have pointed out in your book the fact that Leo Strauss as quirky and dead has not stopped Harvey Mansfield from trying to be Strauss. The model is there. You are required to do your own kind of spatial-temporal adjustment. What is critical is that King was so engaged through his entire life that he realized that the stake was his life. “This is really dangerous work, my house has been bombed. I’ve been thrown into jail. I’ve been hit with bricks and so forth.” He’s engagement was full tilt. He lived his life in the midst of American violence, contrarianism. And as you have said, he wrote books.

Kelley: I’ve often mused to myself how things might have been different if he had taken some time off after 1965 or 1968, to think things through. He kept doing the same things he had been doing for the last thirteen years.

Baker: …Even had King delivered on bringing people into the purview of the community, with an effective strategy, it still would have been comprador, brokerage kind of politics. People also have to keep in mind the John Henry syndrome….King was clinically depressed; he was a sick, ill man. People said that he was muttering to himself; all the sexual activity going on; now he’s coming out with all these radical statements… I guess this is particularly true with men in general and specifically with black men. How many of us would admit that we are in therapy and medication?

Kelley: With King as that model—as an engaged black public intellectual-- what is the role of today’s black intelligentsia?

Baker: I think a person like Angela Davis is amazing. The fact that she is not on television all the time is understandable. The fact that she doesn’t get op-ed New York Times pieces is understandable. I think it was Z magazine some fifteen years ago, in an article by Ed Hermann, had counted up—and I’m going to be broad here—the neoconservative spokespersons’ op-ed as seventy, and then he looked over specifically at Cornel West and Manning Marable and they were, like, five [articles] in the same period of time. So we know we have a closed media, but never the less when Angela shows up it’s always SRO; it’s always a mixed audience of people. For example, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts in the prison-industrial complex. It’s scholars; it’s community organizers. I think she’s an example of somebody who has decided “This is what my life is going to be dedicated to.”

I think of Lani Guinier working out of Harvard Law School, and with her father working out of Harvard; it was a generational thing. He was the first director of Afro-American studies there. So, here’s Lani in combination with Charles Ogletree and Henry Louis Gates situated at the pyramid of the academy saying, “I’m sorry, How are you guys counting the black population here? Shouldn’t we think whether or not that the people who you are calling black or Afro American here were slaves or whose grandfathers had been slaves?” Let’s break the statistics down. I’m sorry, but shouldn’t we be talking of insurance companies and their complicity in slavery and see if we can find a way to do a class action suit, which replicated what [President] Ruth Simmons of Brown [University] did. I think the eradication and identification of social amnesia, which America takes great pleasure in, is a function of the contemporary, productive, dedicated and committed black intelligentsia.

Kelley: There’s been a development over the last 40 years a black intellectual academic apparatus, mostly in the humanities, but there seems to be a lack of development of black intellectuals who can develop policy issues positions on poverty, education, declining infrastructure. That may no be a fair question…

Baker: That’s a very fair question…. Institutionally, I think, that the education that is given by Peer-One universities, and that includes in my mind, some beautiful state universities, the kind of education that’s given at the Ph. D. level is hermetically sealed off, for the most part, from what I warily called the real world. There truly are campuses, like the University of Chicago, that are walled off. You are petty much expected to use all those technological resources and to march lock-stepped to meet the requirements leading to the Ph. D. degree. If you wanted, say, to a write a paper on rurality, say English rural studies and Tennessee’s post-forming of agriculture planting era and you wanted to use two books but also use policy planting reports, I don’t think you could find anyone to advise you. There’s the cutoff in the education… You pretty much have to do that on your own

Kelley: But look at how people like John McWhorter and Shelby Steele came out the university and have plugged themselves into the neo-conservative policy apparatus, which positioned them. You don’t seem to be seeing that, by and large, from black intellectuals on the left, per se.

Baker: Dinesh D’Souza, my understanding is, was first connected to Irving Kristol. So, he did that at Dartmouth and then moved directly to the White House [as a White House Fellow] and then to the American Enterprise Institute. So we’re talking colossal financing. So, if some student came to me and said, “Houston, I want to do this something for the left. Could you get me $45,000 just to do an internship somewhere and not have any obligations. I would [laughs] have to say, “I’m sorry, man. I can’t even do that on my credit card.”

So, I think were taking here of the marriage between the corporation and something putatively called disinterested intellectualism. Then you look at Glenn Loury’s career. I’m in the academy. Nope, I’m out of [American Enterprise Institute] mainly because of Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The End of Racism, as I understand it. So, we have to look at the corporate factor.

Kelley: You used an anachronism in your book, “race man” or “race woman.” You referred to Dr. King as being one.

Baker: The reason I used those terms, and I have to be honest about that, it seems to me that when I conceptualized this project 10 years ago, I’d been taken aback by the “Little Tree” essay in the New York Times by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
I began to get concerned about the impulse it seemed to me, to disappear race, the word, and as a variable in analyses in anything to do with the U.S.

Kelley: You mean counter posing that to the whole notion of being “colorblind”?
“We see no color because we are colorblind, but our policies coincidentally just happen to have a greater effect on people of color”?

Baker: Exactly. An unexpected consequence… I began to act like a pre-Raphaelite painter who said, “The more science becomes destructive toward the soul, the more angels shall I paint.” The more people kept saying, “This is old school, brother. We’re going to have to get rid of this race thing. Racial thinking. We have to think beyond race. I’m not sure if is a legitimate term.” In the special issue of Critical Inquiry, on “Race Writing and the Difference It Makes,” edited by Anthony Appiah, I think, and Gates, and I also believe Eric Lott, a white scholar at the University of Virginia, who’s in the current issue of PMLA. Why is race in inverted commas?...

Kelley: This is a reaction to the biological sciences that have begun to argue that there are no basic “racial” differences between blacks, whites, Asians, and others.

Baker: This is fantastic work. I’m engaged by it and enjoy it, but here, too, is the failure of the precision of that work to get out and affect public policy, and institutional and national amnesia. It’s what Langston Hughes said, and I quote him in the book, “I love Ralph Bunche/ But I can’t eat him for lunch.” Hughes again, “The average Negro hadn’t heard of the Harlem Renaissance and if he had, it hadn’t cured pneumonia or lowered their rent or anything.”

That work is fantastic and I don’t want to sound like some stupid, anti-intellectual guy, but one understands, for me, in the forefront of what goes wrong for black people in this country and in the Americas begins with race. Marcus Rediker in The Slave Ship: A Human History—which is a hard book to read; he really goes through the chronicle, and such brutality is perpetuated in the trans-Atlantic slave [trade]—but he says the slave ship is the one institution that is often missed in accounts of slavery. There’s the slave plantation, of course. On the slave ship two things were produced; one was race and the other was labor. They are absolutely brought together in the New World taxonomy and structures of feelings, in politics, economics, and education.

I think, historically, that race has been the over determined area that has excluded and subjected and subordinated the black majority in the Americas and elsewhere. The scientific and empirical work [de-emphasizing race] is great, but on the sociological and day-to-day plane, it doesn’t really stop that store clerk from following you around.

Kelley: Well, let’s follow this up with, How have you seen race played out in this election?

Baker: When Thomas Clarence had his hearing, black people were debating one another in the proverbial places—the barbershop, the beauty salon—“Is he a good man? Is he a bad man? Did he do these things?” “Is she a sister speaking truth to power or is she being used by white feminists?” The debate was on; it was on. “We should support him. We shouldn’t support him.” If I get the percentage right, after he made that remark about “high-tech lynching,” seventy-five percent of black people said, “We got to support him.” If you read his book, My Grandfather’s Son, it’s an outrageous book. The NAACP supported this man. The notion was: he’s just shuckin’ and jivin’ and puttin’ on the mask. Once he gets on the Supreme Court, he’s going to recognize affirmative action for us.

So, I want to get on with Obamaphilia. I don’t understand this kind of thinking already demonstrated at one branch of government, that once in office we’re going to find someone deeply committed to the eradication of the prison industrial complex, a strict addressing to and budgetary allocation targeting the horrible education of black children. It ain’t gonna happen.

Kelley: Why do you think that’s not going to happen?

Baker: It’s not going to happening because, number one, the financing of the presidency; it not happening. The analysis of Norman Kelley regarding blacks and the Democratic Party is shrewd and on point: you’re locked in. You’re a voting component of the Democratic Party. Obama himself hasn’t touched it [a black agenda] and hasn’t been near these disastrous things that have been going on, the devastation of the black majority in this country. He has nothing but a passing interest in it. He’s a centrist. I don’t think he has any interest in it.

Sam Smith of the Progressive Review has a piece. It starts “Let’s imagine you’re a progressive and you’re asked to support a candidate who…” and then he goes through the policies and votes of Obama. And he ends up saying, “This is kind of a trick; who do you think I’m talking about?” Then he winds up saying, [indicating the true reality that Obama isn’t as progressive or liberal as some people think]:

“Look, guys, it’s not going to happen.”




1 comment:

unbekannte said...

Houston Baker looks and acts more like a "Farm animal" than does any Duke University LaCrosse Playver.