Betrayal

How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era

Houston Baker Jr.

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780231511445
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios étnicos

Houston A. Baker Jr. condemns those black intellectuals who, he believes, have turned their backs on the tradition of racial activism in America. These individuals choose personal gain over the interests of the black majority, whether they are espousing neoconservative positions that distort the contours of contemporary social and political dynamics or abandoning race as an important issue in the study of American literature and culture. Most important, they do a disservice to the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and others who have fought for black rights.

In the literature, speeches, and academic and public behavior of some black intellectuals in the past quarter century, Baker identifies a "hungry generation" eager for power, respect, and money. Baker critiques his own impoverished childhood in the "Little Africa" section of Louisville, Kentucky, to understand the shaping of this new public figure. He also revisits classical sites of African American literary and historical criticism and critique. Baker devotes chapters to the writing and thought of such black academic superstars as Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Hoover Institution senior fellow Shelby Steele; Yale law professor Stephen Carter; and Manhattan Institute fellow John McWhorter. His provocative investigation into their disingenuous posturing exposes what Baker deems a tragic betrayal of King's legacy.

Baker concludes with a discussion of American myth and the role of the U.S. prison-industrial complex in the "disappearing" of blacks. Baker claims King would have criticized these black intellectuals for not persistently raising their voices against a private prison system that incarcerates so many men and women of color. To remedy this situation, Baker urges black intellectuals to forge both sacred and secular connections with local communities and rededicate themselves to social responsibility. As he sees it, the mission of the black intellectual today is not to do great things but to do specific, racially based work that is in the interest of the black majority.

A CAPITAL FELLOW FROM HOOVER

SHELBY STEELE

It came from my own heart, so to my head,
And thence into my fingers trickled;
Then to my pen from whence immediately
On paper I did scribble it daintily.

JOHN BUNYAN
Pilgrim’s Progress

President Bush told the congressional black caucus he didn’t know anything about renewal of the seminal 1965 Voting Rights Act last Wednesday [January 26, 2004]. . . . “He said he didn’t know nothing about it, and he will deal with the legislation that comes before him,” Representative [Jesse] Jackson [said].

JOHN BYRNE
“Black Congressmen Riled by Bush Ignorance of Voting Rights Act”

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IT IS DIFFICULT TO imagine a young Shelby Steele (in 2007, a senior research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California) agreeing with the late black journalist George Schuyler that opportunities for Afro-Americans in the United States are legion. Schuyler, a staunch black conservative, insisted (without irony) that blacks in America have access to the “best schooling, the best living conditions, the best economic advantages, [and] the best security” in the world.¹ When Steele was growing up, he found scant evidence to support Schuyler’s claims.

Steele grew up in a bleak working-class suburb of Chicago. His school was rotten in every way. He refers to the institution’s teachers and staff as a “menagerie of misfits.” As for treatment, it seems pretty much to have been what one would expect from a menagerie of misfits. One day when Steele was in the sixth grade, the new physical education instructor (a white ex-marine) ordered him “to pick up all of the broken glass on the playground with my bare hands. . . . [The ex-marine] commandeered a bicycle, handed it to an eighth-grader—one of his lieutenants—and told the boy to run me around the school grounds ‘until he passes out.’”² Steele’s school was so bad that eventually it was shut down.

As Steele recounts his early days, there are few experiences that would seem to connect him with the black American conservatism of Schuyler or of Schuyler’s most famous predecessor, Booker T. Washington. Both Washington and Schuyler abhorred black political agitation and all those black race leaders who perpetuated it, believing that only diplomatic, interracial adjustments of race relations could improve race matters in the United States. Schuyler was unflagging in his condemnation of Civil Rights and Black Power initiatives: “[Their] proclaimed aims are defeated in advance. The prestige given to public nuisance and civil disobedience hurts rather than helps the Negro future. Racial adjustment is delicate and difficult enough without the efforts of all the sorcerer’s apprentices who for the past half decade have devoted themselves to performing miracles that became shambles.”³ Washington proclaimed, decades before Schuyler: “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.”⁴ Then there is the young Shelby Steele, Civil Rights agitator par excellence.

Steele followed the footsteps of his white mother and black father, who were activists. He marched and demonstrated, and was an ardent Civil Rights activist when he left Illinois for Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He met his own white wife at a meeting of SCOPE, a campus affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His inherited bent for black political agitation even carried him into the ranks of a strident black nationalism during the sixties.

A path from Chicago ghetto youth to black nationalist young adulthood scarcely foreshadows the emergence of a middle-aged, black American, conservative Hoover Institution senior fellow. Something seems evolutionarily wrong with such a picture. Yet, Shelby Steele undeniably inhabits the handsome Stanford, California, tower of the Hoover Institution, one of the most sublime peaks of antiliberalism (and, dare one say, antiblack majority interests) in the world. What is one to say of the senior fellow who rode the affirmative action train through college, graduate school, and into a tenured professorship at a state college and now is one of affirmative action’s fiercest public opponents? Steele—in the tiresomely self-serving traditions of American neoconservatism at large—wrote a punchy little book titled The Content of Our Character, where he did a sharp volte-face in the most loathsome American neoconservative fashion on his people and began climbing not Jacob’s, but Irving Kristol’s, ladder.

Steele has subsequently publicly denounced all black strategies of social and political agitation that emerged during the post–Civil Rights era. He has crafted a viciously denigrating portrait of the black majority, its aspirations, claims upon the American polity, and daily life. He has angrily denounced the rhythms, speech, poverty, and everyday life of the black ghetto. Steele stands as the representative anti–race man of his generation. He is ever ready to make a pharisaic display of himself before the white neoconservative lords of the land. The rewards for his labors have been substantial: Emmys, a National Book Critics Circle first, the National Humanities Medal from the hands of President George W. Bush himself.

But Steele’s so-called vision of race in America—even though it possesses a certain captivating charm in its eloquently simple and simplifying formulas—is but a knockoff, a febrile translation, and copybook imitation of white neoconservative dogma as it has unfolded for three score American years. Conservatism seems an unlikely vantage for black American intellectuals. It is a relatively recent European ideology whose origins are generally defined as the English reaction to the French Revolution. Opposing radical and violent changes represented by the French Constitution of 1793, moderate English conservatives called for piety and respect for the elders—the way things used to be. This call for respect for the elders—the old ways—is most eloquently set forth in the writings of Edmund Burke.

Burke insists that state and society must never be overcome by theory or abstraction, both of which can work to turn the natural order of political arrangements into artificial collectives. He also insists that state and society must always be seen as human equivalents of nature. Nature represents a God-ordained ordering of the world, where constancy and change exist in equal measure. In nature, there is harmony and balance of forces. The stability and constancy of state and society, by way of analogy, are guaranteed by balance and harmony among nobility, aristocracy, church. Burke calls these three institutions “estates” and argues that they should always exist in equilibrium.

The “balance of estates” should never be subjected to abrupt or violent change (think: the French and Bolshevik revolutions). The balanced state, in turn, must be handed down as tradition, prescription, and mores. These guide and condition man’s life as a freely governed citizen of the commonwealth. But here’s the rub: Estates endure because they are founded on property. “Property” is a spooky word in Afro-American historical life and collective memory. The founding of the polity of the American Republic designated us, precisely, as property—chattel. And here is the glorification of property by Burke cited from his Reflections on the Recent Revolution in France:

You will observe, that from Magna Carta to the Declaration of Rights, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom [England], without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. . . . By a constitutional policy working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives.⁵

“Property,” “entailment,” and “inheritance” are the defining moments of conservatism’s existence not simply in nature, but also in ownership. Ownership is the fathers’ privilege. The patriarchal family, therefore, becomes for Burke and conservatism an appropriately natural symbol for state and society: “In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchers, and our altars.”⁶ Basically, Burke makes a claim here for the balance of all social institutions, based upon the model of an ideal family where the father is decisively boss, owner, and principal progenitor.

If Burke’s polity is considered in relation to the founding of the American republic, we know that blacks scarcely appear to have any stake whatsoever in the commonwealth—intellectual or otherwise. Why? Because millions of African bodies were brutally transported by the transatlantic slave trade to America. These bodies were considered not citizens, but property. Black bodies as commercial property were not inheritors of anything. They enjoyed no fancy patriarchal rights of entail. In fact, they were the entailed inheritance, belonging by law, mores, and custom to white “fathers.” African bodies were written by the best minds of the founding generation as an inheritance meant exclusively for the service of white inheritors.

The bonding in blood that Burke asserts as essential to the commonwealth family, then, is exactly what was denied to African bodies by American founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson effectively separates “Africans” from the commonwealth family on the very basis of their inferior blood. He writes: “The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.” In Jefferson’s account, African “inferiority” originates in black blood. And the presence of such blood is reflected, says Jefferson, in an “unfortunate difference of [African] colour, and perhaps [mental and imaginative] faculty.”⁷

The visual difference of blackness is thus written along the arterial pulses of America. At the level of blood, a visible blackness presents what Jefferson calls a “powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”⁸ In a very dramatic sense, race is instituted in America by a visual, sanguinary disinheritance. This blood-disinheritance would seem to make conservatism’s pious talk about fathers and justice and balance perversely self-defeating and racial-group-destructive if taken at all to heart (much less adopted as the gospel way) by black American intellectuals.

Burke proclaims that the intelligent citizen who seeks judiciously to reform society “should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe, and trembling solicitude.” “Justice” consists of each individual’s profiting from the “joint stock company” of the commonwealth in accord with his initial investment. Everyone thus has a right to profit—but not equally. “In this partnership,” says Burke, “all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.”⁹ Surely this rings true for African Americans; what did we (always absent forty acres and even a single mule) have to invest? So, in the matter of justice, we couldn’t even inhabit the fringes of the joint stock company’s quarters. And, therefore, logically, blackness could never be an entitled agent in or for the commonwealth.

Conservatism counts us out of investing and common life on the basis of blood, color, and an assumed deficiency of faculty. In light of conservatism’s logic of exclusion with respect to black or African bodies and voices, it would seem that only the most bizarre logic or reverie on the part of a black American would promote the idea that she could assume effective conservative agency. Only a fantasy would convince a black intellectual that he could in any way, under the sanctions of conservatism, transcend race and have equal things in the joint stock company that is WASP sovereignty, power, and domination in America.

In black conservative talk, the masses are the very black incarnation of sin, evil, lawlessness, and disorder. The black conservative labors hard to conform to moderate conservatism’s rules by privileging his or her I/eye before the collective black majority. He believes he has an undeniably greater contribution to make to the stock company than those whom he deems (with rankly condescending self-regard) as less beautiful, less educated, less hardworking, less prolific, less insightful, and less orderly than he. Black conservatives assume they are natural aristocrats in the manner described by F. A. Hayek, the economist beloved by American conservatives:

In the last resort, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others. The liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people—he is not an egalitarian—but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who those superior people are.¹⁰

Black conservatives have no such scruples; they think of themselves as natural aristocrats—lords of the black social order—entitled to far more esteem and money than the black majority.

The Content of Our Character might well have been titled Reflections on the Recent Black Power Revolution in the United States. The book is actually a conservative reverie recounting the decline and fall of the Civil Rights Movement under the baleful assault of a psychopathological Black Power revolution. For Shelby Steele, the Civil Rights era was, in his own words, a time of “character,” a period invested with “morality.” Black men and women valued individual effort and sacrifice over special “group privileges.” The high moral character of Civil Rights’ advocates was evidenced by their generous faith in white America and the inevitability of social change. A harmonious, inter-racial future seemed on the horizon. This is Steele’s story.

The phrase “the content of our character” is drawn, not surprisingly, from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream speech delivered at the 1963 March on Washington. As Steele deploys the phrase, it might be considered a perfect example of conservatism’s longing for the good old days. By defining and emphasizing character in a soft moral frame, Steele attempts to reinforce the by now familiar image of Dr. King as a Christian martyr who concentrated his efforts on quietist moral uplift and American conscience reform. In this image, King is seen as a brave, but gentle and righteous, man of character. Not as a man of race and revolutionary resolve.

Steele’s characterological image of King has nothing to do with the scope, dimension, tenor, and global revolutionary magnitude of Dr. King’s struggles in the whirlwind storm of white racist violence. We must, therefore, read Steele’s interpretation as an interested misreading of the Civil Rights Movement. For the sake and support of his own conservative agenda, Steele imagines and sets before us a Christian icon rather than a flesh and blood, historical Martin Luther King Jr.

In contrast to Steele, Martin Luther King Jr. would have decisively placed emphasis on the adjective our, rather than the noun character. King’s effectiveness as a leader resided in his allegiance to black collective action—the ends and desires of our and we, the collective, the black majority. What made him such a brilliant leader was precisely his rapport with the masses, his relinquishing of personal authority to collective wisdom. Character, then, for King—even in 1963—was defined by collective black majority endurance, intelligence, beauty, productivity, courage, and creativity. This extraordinariness of the black majority was manifested for King by the masses’ stunning capacity to believe (in the face of all evidence to the contrary) that white America did, in fact, possess a conscience and an ability to change.

Steele’s handling of King and the word “character” is exemplary of one of black conservatism’s favorite rhetorical and polemical strategies. The strategy is best defined as a disingenuous rejection of cultural history and present-day fact. What The Content of Our Character attempts to accomplish is a redefinition, for conservative ends, of the most collectively oriented black leadership and social action in the twentieth century. The author blithely portrays King as a sort of Civil Rights Saint Sebastian: a dispassionate, sacrificial black martyr for freedom. According to Steele, King understood that “racial power subverts moral power, and [King] pushed the principles of fairness and equality rather than black power because he believed those principles would bring blacks their most complete liberation. He sacrificed race for morality, and his innocence was made genuine by that sacrifice. What made King the most powerful and extraordinary black leader of this century was not his race but his morality” (Content, 19).

In light of Dr. King’s life and work, how can we characterize Steele’s portrait as anything other than a deliberate distortion of almost every detail of King’s moral life and social leadership? Steele presents a colorless (or is it colorblind?) saint, his body pierced by arrows of merely unenlightened white perfidy, dying nobly after serving a humble, moral apprenticeship for freedom. There is nothing of the whirlwind and frenzy, betrayal and complexity of Dr. King and the actual Civil Rights Movement in this picture. The canvas represents the beautification for hire at which black neoconservatives excel. It is certainly akin to the kind of airbrushed history and photographic leger-demain that marks the work of Edward Curtis.

Black conservatives are always substituting clean, well-lighted places of a fantastical imagination for actual dark corridors of American racial history. Steele’s paean to King’s character reads like a high school offering titled “Dr. King, Christian Dreamer.” At best, his reading of King is inadequate biography. At worst, it is chimerical reverie.

Steele’s beautification of black American reality during the past four decades is deeply allegorical. The Content of Our Character borrows liberally from Christian archetypes, popular psychology, and American free-enterprise mythology. The book is a black neoconservative’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It unfolds as follows. Once upon a time in the mid-sixties, America was graced by an epiphany—a Great Awakening to sin. The white citizen suddenly and miraculously realized he was living in a morally deficient and ethically bankrupt republic. A conscience-stricken white American majority finally acknowledged its “lack of racial innocence, and confronted the incriminating self-knowledge that it had rationalized flagrant injustice. . . . There was really only one road back to innocence—through actions and policies that would bring redemption.” (Content,...