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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
My Head Hurts--Time for a Black Caucus on Black Power, October 7, 2009
This review is from: Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Hardcover)
My head hurts. After enjoying and reviewing Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics yesterday evening, I was not anticipating the firestorm of erudite adjective-laden brow-beating that this author delivers. Minus one star for beating several (black) horses to death, and as Reviewer Carter notes, not without meriting some of the same himself.
First off, this is a book that had to be written and must be read. There are, amidst the "wordier than thou" broad brush critiques, some real gems, some really engaging turns of phrase. It is unfortunate that the nature of the inquiry demands fairly personal explicit attacks on avowedly great black intellectuals, but there is some meat here.
Page 104: "Centrist territory is a rhetorical demilitarized zone where honest, committed, and historically informed proclamations on cause and effect regarding race, culture, morality, and gender in the United States can be studiously avoided, fudged, or simply made to suit the audience on hand."
High points for me as a reader (white, Hispanic, seriously-angry populist):
+ There is a divide between black intellectual and political leaders and the bulk of the black population that lives in the most wretched of places where 40% or more are below the poverty line. The author also refers to the divide between those blacks who achieve college education, and all others.
+ Martin Luther King was about equality, reparations, and anti-imperialism. King embodied an integration of progressive "philosophy, ideology, activist logistics, coalition politics, and personal conviction." As I go through the book I see a continuing stream of references to King that make this book in some ways a recounting of the King legacy and the King methods, and I learn for the first time that King called in 1963 for a domestic Marshall Plan as part of his concept of reparations.
+ The black working class is the center of gravity for true progressive reform, and nothing the Democratic Party has done under Clinton or Obama has been beneficial to that group (Clinton in particular is slammed for destroying welfare and exporting jobs).
The author provides a riveting discussion of Chicago in 1965 with one million blacks caught "in a nightmare of acquisitive white real estate owners, callous labor leaders, corrupt political officials, and morally blind social welfare adherents." (p. 37). In this context Barack Obama is clearly far removed from the black movement, and very much an elite who has betrayed the black people.
Among my notes:
+ "Wait" means "Never"
+ King ultimately sought and represented "racial, social, distributive, Christian justice," and what I like about this is its comprehensive integrative notion. I am reminded of the DVD Bonhoeffer.
+ Uncle Tom a stereotype of the Negro that will wait, and a depersonalized substitute for real people.
+ 15th Amendment passed in 1865 required 100 years and a Voting Rights Act to be sort-of-real in one small area
+ True compassion demands restructuring, and I agree with this, see also Redesigning Society (Stanford Business Books) and The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. The USA today is a corrupt society, a cheating society, with concentrated wealth to the point that a revolution is long overdue.
+ Race is an analytic construct that cannot be ignored.
+ Paul Robson, Lani Guinier, Manning Marable, Angela Davis, Patricia Williams, Troy Duster, Eliajah Anderson, Greg Thomas and others not named are explicitly labeled the authentic black leaders. I personally see a lot of value in Cornell West and found his Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism to be a Nobel-level endeavor, but I have no standing to contest the author on this point.
There is a great deal of repressed anger in this book, and while I have been calling for two Truth & Reconciliation Commissions for some time (one for what US Government has done to its own people, another for what the US Government has done "in our name" to everyone else on the planet), this book made me realize that an absolute top priority, RIGHT NOW, must be to have an internal black community truth & reconciliation circle in which the political leaders of note (my favorites are Cynthia McKinney, Carol Moseley-Braun, and Al Sharpton) bring together Cornell West and others on both sides of this argument for a good old-fashioned clearing of the air. Certainly the The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen needs to be engaged, and the common sense of the community brought to bear. I also feel there has been a real unwillingness to document the realities such as are portrayed in Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor and there is a need for a brutal stock-taking that can be publicized and not denied.
Not addressed by the author, but well worth the time of the Cynthia McKinney's and Lani Guinier's of the world is the plight of the upper blue collar and lower half middle class in the white community. Books such as Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - And What We Can Do about It (BK Currents (Paperback)), and The Working Poor: Invisible in America must be absorbed by black leaders, and a coalition created across Independent, Libertarian, Green, and estranged two-party tyranny lines.
My head still hurts. Too many words, too much anger, but essential if we are all to come together again.
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4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Little Too Easy, May 11, 2009
This review is from: Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Hardcover)
In this book, Houston Baker reclaims his radical credibility at the expense of several moderate and neoconservative African-American intellectuals. And on one hand, I find his critique to be inspiring. First of all, he eloquently reminds us that Dr. King was a tougher activist than we sometimes remember him to be. In the opening chapters and throughout the book, Baker posits as his ideal for the black intellectual Dr. King's integrity and indefatigable commitment to justice, his populist commitment to all people and his willingness to enact the sacrifices necessary for a leader to bring people to act. And he reminds African-American academics (of whom I am one) that, if we imagine a socio-political ideal to our scholarly work, we must remember that such work must be as committed as possible to a large percentage of black people, most of whom we may never see in our classrooms. Get out of the ivory tower and its televised seminar rooms: a helpful demand.
On the other hand, though, Baker sometimes makes his argument a little too easy on himself. While he consistently offers incisive critiques on the actual arguments of the people he examines, too often he bases this criticism on the self-serving assumption that a black person is conservative only to please white people. Here his argument shifts from ideological analysis--at which he is often quite good, and wherein he can make persuasive cases about how a mainstream institutions of cultural authority prefer and reward certain kinds of work from black folk--to a criticism of assumed motivations of individuals. There is a long history of black people calling each other out in this way, and at times it is valid. But what too often happens is that dissent within the community is squashed. I am no defender of the McWhorters of the world, some of whom do seem to be interested in profiting from their conservatism more than doing rigorous thinking and writing. And some of their arguments actively and purposefully misconstrue how social power operates and are not more objectively substantiated than Baker's book, despite one previous Amazon reviewer's implication to the contrary. But I am a defender of black conservatives' ability to claim their beliefs as sincere ones, even as I vehemently disagree. It is too easy to take potshots at people with whom we disagree and to misconstrue their motivations. Baker would have done better to focus more on dynamics of power than on sometimes petty critiques of the sometimes deserving targets of his ire. McWhorter's discussion of hip hop, for example, does lack the kind of rigor that would make his concern about victimization valid. He underestimates the creation of personae and the agency people derive from performed aggression. Still, instead of close readings of individual books by individual writers, which is what Baker does, he would have made a more powerful case with a positive example and a greater engagement with common conservative themes and common institutional issues.
White supremacy is hardly a phantom--its effects are subtle and insidious, from educational curricula to biased drug laws. And Baker's zeal for intellectuals to confront this power is admirable, as is his call for privileged blacks to align themselves with "the black masses." But he does slide too easily into that comforting portrait of "the man" that prevents him from making the best use of his considerable intellectual gifts. Still, his well-written book is well worth reading, both for its insights and for its shortcomings, both of which reminds us of how we all can be better.
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12 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Art of Betrayal: Radical Lamentations of Therapeutic Alienation, March 5, 2009
This review is from: Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Hardcover)
"Nothing is easier to find than sins and shortcomings among human beings, regardless of their race. The question is: How much of a causal factor these moral failings have been in history and to what extent have they been effects rather than causes?" Thomas Sowell "O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe." Langston Hughes "Honor and dishonor come from speaking, and the tongue of mortals may be their downfall. Do not be called double-tongued and do not lay traps with your tongue; for shame comes to the thief, and severe condemnation to the double-tongued. In great and small matters cause no harm, and do not become an enemy instead of a friend; for a bad name incurs shame and reproach; so it is with the double-tongued sinner." Book of Sirach 5.13-6.1 (1) With ideological sophistry and a penchant for "verbal virtuosity", Baker engages his readers with boorish, garrulous, anecdotal, radical, and "autobiographical critique"(2) of both black centrist and black neoconservative intellectuals. Without surprise then, given his overall theatrical posture, he also displays throughout the book a mostly unforgiving spirit toward them simply because of their public square critiques and portrayal of pre-civil rights and post-civil rights black America which he implicitly suggests is a betrayal of Dr. King's "progressivism"; specifically, any unfavorable portrayal of the black majority, short of pictorial clenched fists raised in the air against white supremacist amerikkka while in pursuit of civil rights, yields accusations of blackface minstrels, house slaves, and Amos n' Andy sellouts seeking white approval. In this regard, Baker's fiery retorts are in keeping with a long standing taboo in the black community which often leads to cultural excommunication for those blacks who criticize the black majority where "whites" may also hear in the public square. Curiously, "The Future of the Race", coauthored by Henry Gates and Cornel West, eloguently attests to this very tradition. With some surprise on the other hand however, this reviewer found that his overtly expressed appreciation for supposedly empirically based racial discourse to be particularly disingenuous as he eventually leads his reader to an epiphanic moment of his very own: that black plight is due to plutocratic phantoms such as "national deterioration", "white supremacy" and the Reagan/Bush Compromise of inverted values while "black structures of feeling" remain oppressed. (3) Meticulously searching the endnotes for even one grant funded quasi-experimental design rigorously testing his religio-political beliefs will leave the reader bereft of any such empirically-based studies. Instead, the reader will encounter only antiquated though somewhat imaginative epideictic rhetoric suffused with radical convenantal fealty. Consequently, for purposes of this abbreviated review, my common sense analysis of his discourse and treatment of the works of John McWhorter and Shelby Steele should suffice as templates with which to dissect the many other analytical embellishments he proffers as "hermeneutical and poetically interpretive protocols of Dr. Du Bois"; indeed, a more authentic disciple of Dr. King no less with a profundity of "earned conclusions" steeped in a "stern commitment to the best practices of the humanities". (4) Firstly, with respect to the essay critiquing McWhorter's major theme found in "Winning The Race", that of `the meme of therapeutic alienation', this reader surprisingly found very little of a direct refutation; ironically instead, one will find an almost deliberate evasion of such by Baker because alienation, the real issue that he ignores even while attempting to deconstruct meme, is nevertheless manifest throughout the black community i.e. as is commonly found even in his political laments for "Little Africa"; thus, any public square critiques shared by these particular black centrists and neoconservatives which specifically hold members of the black community collectively and individually responsible for culturally alienating tendencies he manifestly regards, throughout the book, as unfairly 'blaming the victim'. And for this sin, in particular, he issues forth very harsh rebukes with selective political excommunication. Well, what then is this therapeutic alienation: "The nut of the issue is that these [informed race warriors] want neither justice nor healing. What people [like Baker] are seeking is sadly not what they claim to be seeking. They seek one thing: indignation for its own sake. And that means that the alienation that they are expressing is disconnected from current reality." Interestingly, along with alienation, this concept of meme also parallels another McWhorterian discussion pertaining to 'New Double Consciousness' found in his "Authentically Black", Chapter 1, pps 1- 5: "Black America today is permeated by a new kind of double consciousness that has strayed far beyond the one DuBois examined in 1903. To wit, a tacit sense reigns among a great many black Americans today that the authentic black person stresses personal initiative and strength in private but dutifully takes on the mantle of victimhood as a public face...In daily life this assumption is encapsulated in the often heard phrase, 'We can't let whites off the hook'...Many ideological tendencies in the black community are based neatly in this 'whites on the hook' idea, virtually unquestioned and spiritually resonant."(5a) And so with both alienation and double consciousness in mind, Baker's critique strategically digresses to an inaccurate focus upon and criticism of the quasi-evolutionary concept of "meme"; meme being only one of several analogues used by McWhorter to better understand how ways of adaptation may begin as purposeful action but may devolve into lingering, reflexive and sometimes self-defeating gestures or theatrics even after conditions prompting such have changed. As a result, his criticism subtly leads his reader into an archaic philosophical argument based on a strawman premise; this is so because with judicious indifference, Baker seems to conscientiously detach McWhorter's actual use of meme, properly understood as a religio-political "filter", from therapeutic alienation which characterizes much of black-leftist race-based psychology. Even more specifically, regarding Baker's development of this strawman detour is the fact that it's the Black-Democrat-Left which argues "racism in the air" via white supremacy in 21st century America; further still and curiously, Baker specifically does not inform the reader of McWhorter's previous discussion of skeumorphy and path dependence, found in the same chapter, as a backdrop to understanding how these cultural filters may lead to alienation. Again, this is key to understanding Baker's overall thematic critique as he appears, throughout the book, to be in denial of his own therapeutic alienation all the while criticizing black intellectuals who have chosen to address this cultural phenomena within the public square.(5b) Similarly and again with yet another layer of irony, his essay also fails to note that a significant part of "Winning The Race" includes a meta-analyses of all black sociological thought from the prestigious American Journal of Sociology, beginning in 1991 to 1999 (6); this is extremely pertinent to this review as Baker made clear from the onset that "in this book I always ground my analyses in critical, rhetorical, cultural studies readings of actual texts published by the black intellectuals I critique...[,yet] I freely state that the present book is not bound by methodological protocols considered de rigueur by a number of putatively empirically based scholarly disciplines that have been vastly influential in the modern academic world."(7) To wit, while accusing McWhorter of non-academic stewardship in the area of racial dialogue despite his clearly delineated meta-analyses specifically addressing alienation, Baker on the other hand simply excuses himself, without explanation, from presenting vaguely beloved correlational studies which substantiate his own critiques--again, only a vain search will result by reviewing the endnotes; thematically speaking, this reader's impression is that his use of these very types of political shibboleths are probably mostly sustained by a wayward dialectic of outdated, mothball revolutionary dogma and therapeutic meme. Secondly, with respect to the essay critiquing Steele's "Content Of Our Character" and "White Guilt," one finds exemplified a radical(8) racial theodicy employing allegorical villainy with invidious transgressions of political identity and Nietzschean ressentiment. Here, having entered stage Left, the audience initially listens to airbrush lamentations of historical Burkean conservatism, most foul, conducted within a political-theatrical backdrop in which dark parodies and corridors of US history are vociferously recounted; ah yes, the sins of dead white males are once again revived with liturgical piety where they remain in the cherished annuals of perpetuity. A piety often mimicking the accusatorial rhetoric found in historical Jewish-Christian dialogue involving the charge of "deicide" and locus of responsibility.(9) Slowly emerging from such a Bakeran stage, a dialectic of master morality(read: White Corporate Amerikkka) and slave morality(read: Black Power) become diabolically intertwined for which Steele initially becomes willing purveyor if not but tentatively; if not but with rudimentary competence; alas, as this melancholic story unfolds though, Baker's fictional Steele succumbs, yea, commits sins of "fortunate fall"(10); traitorous, duplicitous, and self-serving interests lead this...
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