Customer Reviews

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

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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)), andThe 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.

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.

"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 fictional Steele to partake of neoconservative persiflage and to "profitable gold of his own authorship." (11) Thus, Steele's actual affirmations of Civil Rights Act measures are reducible to scriptural philistinism, per Baker, because of his heretical belief that "racial power subverts moral power"(12); poetic interpretative license, indeed, as Baker also suggests that MLK regarded the results of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as only paltry gains. And yet, can any honest reader really disagree with this Steelean insight as it ironically comes to reflect the heart of Baker's master morality inquisition. Baker unwittingly gives answer to this question. Let's hear Baker's oration then: "Blacks have not even engineered independent bootstrap programs for their own uplift. Instead, they have continuously insisted--despite what Steele sees as indisputable evidence to the contrary--that they are not yet free. They dare to claim that white supremacist sinners are not genuinely penitent and have yet to relinquish even a modicum of their powerful global supremacy." (12) And so, Baker too--despite his duplicitous accusations directed toward Steele--believes that racial power does indeed subvert moral authority after all although he exempts similar scrutiny of his beloved Black Power.

Of note, "black power" and the politics of "black liberation" trace their roots to 60's marxist-militant, separatist groups whose tactics MLK never embraced or practiced within public or private domains. Though Martin Luther King did describe himself as a democratic socialist, he adamantly rejected Far-Left radicalism as Douglas Sturm's essay aptly makes plain(see endnote, 13a); as a result, Gandhian-based peaceful protests of MLK and radical Black Power represent opposite ends of a racial uplift continuum no matter Baker's rhetoric which co-opts liberal civil rights phraseology--highly indicative, actually, of a reaction formation just as "acting white" represents yet another. Baker like other members of the progressive Black Left, such as Micheal Eric Dyson, engage in willful historical eisegesis in their attempt to portray Dr. King as a liberal Democrat who was transformed into a Far-Left radical during the last two years of his life. As a man of the Left, Dr. King identified many systemic challenges with which radicals could also easily agree while each pursued "radically" different methods i.e. Christian Integrationism vs. Black Nationalism.(13b) Subsequently and with mischaracterization then, Baker projects redemptive value onto the politics of black liberation while he subtly, sardonically misrepresents the importance of `will to power' ideology embraced by such movements.(13c

Thirdly, as with black liberation, so too in like manner, Baker's use of "global supremacy" remains of interest as it captures his overall thematic critique of Steele's examination of "global racism" found in White Guilt, Chapter 6, The New Consciousness; to this end and with unique insight provided by ex-radicals, David Horowitz and Peter Collier, they explain what lies behind his use of global supremacy: "In the intellectual cartology of the Left, the Third World is the oppressed world, the world where the weak are perpetually at war with the strong--of noble blacks and predatory whites, of permanent victims and perennial innocents. Embarrassed by their defense of totalitarian superstates like Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, the progressives have found in the third world an arena in which the banners of the Red Internationals can be taken out of mothballs and again held high. On the third world battlefields, the equations of moral superiority work again. Marxist revolutionaries always appear as guileless Davids, while America and its allies are always guilty Goliaths. Third World peoples are the "victims" not only of present predations by imperialism but victims, too, of the long half-life of its past offences. Thus even when Third World revolutionaries are guilty they are innocent, because of the "imperialist legacies" they inherent. If they embrace terror as a weapon in their struggle, this terror is justified by their accumulated "rage"...In all cases, they are morally exculpated in advance by a single explanation: the devil made them do it." (14)

Continuing, Baker's criticism of Steele in this regard was particularly illustrative of the Left's duplicity. Baker makes two(2) statements which he uses to criticize Steele essentially for proffering a "conversionist discourse"--blaming the victim--and denying agency to African Americans. Here are his statements: a.) Baker interprets Steele as saying, `It is not the agency of the oppressed...but the weakness of the oppressor that creates conditions of possibility for black freedom.' And b.) Baker says, `Instead they(blacks) have continuously insisted that they are not yet free...they dare to claim that white supremacist sinners are not genuinely penitent and have yet to relinquish even a modicum of their powerful global supremacy.' My, how the rhetorical dereliction deepens still further my fellow reviewer as Baker becomes an unwitting protagonist yet a second time; providing support for Steele's global argument in that Baker's statements are actually logical collolaries used as ideological icons promulgated by the Black Left to keep whites on the hook; amazingly still, there is yet more dereliction of rhetorical duty that awaits the reader to be discovered as it is Baker who actually denies agency to those who engage in drug trafficking while piously labeling Stephen Carter as a `trickster' who he describes as someone who speaks `words that seem to mean something they don't.' Textual criticism indeed? Substituting harsh laments for reasoned analysis, Baker once again appears to be completely unaware of the fact that the black left has yet to provide an adequate answer as to when an African American who has benefited from affirmative action yet criticizes it would ever have this critical view seriously considered as part of the ongoing debate--history teaches that affirmative action legislation was debated as only a temporary intervention within a Title VII backdrop.(15) How can such a self-proclaimed textual critic who supposedly possesses critical studies acumen continue to make such glaring, academic philological mistakes? The answer, this reviewer suggests, is found in therapeutic meme.

Fourthly and simply put, "Betrayal" is an example of a critical studies genre for which its revolutionary dogma and storytelling have long since lost any practical connection to contemporary cultural issues of the present day; thus, his readers are subjected to yet more outdated critiques of black intellectuals who have examined, in the public square, current political beliefs and behavioral attributes that continue to adversely effect Little Africa, writ large; it's cultural and political alienation as well as inner city stereotypes of "bad behaviour" addressed by each of the black intellectuals critiqued by Baker which has earned each of them his ire; an alienation, by the way, which is also rooted in a "structuralism vs bad behavior" politics that Baker explores in his attempt to dismiss black centrist critiques of inner city pathologies. However, what Baker does not inform his reading audience of is that his use of "structuralism" traces its genesis to the 1960s Kerner Commission Report which concluded that the plight of Little Africa was both institutional and structural in nature; and within this historical backdrop, black progressives remain religio-politically transfixed and unmovable with the passage of time--even some 45 years later. Thus, his continued reliance upon a 1960s perspective about "structuralism" as an explanation for self-sabotaging behaviour in the black community is yet another illustration of that ever evolving therapeutic meme that McWhorter so eloquently dicussess; and this is why Baker takes aim at McWhorter's use of the meme of therapeutic alienation: it's an incisive poetically-revelatory, rhetorical device.

Baker's response to these writers, without much surprise, basically focused upon Leftist leitmotifs such as the vicissitudes of structuralism, private prison industrial-complex, drug-industrial complex, white supremacy, and other whimsically erudite, yet self-alienating visions; these leitmotifs, this reviewer suggests, are symptomatic of new black double consciousness "in the air", in da' public square. In the words of Horowitz and Collier, "This progression was inevitable. Radicals are the permanently unsatisfied among us, the resentful nihilists of the utopian cause...Marxism long appeared to be free from racist taint because the messianic force on which it pinned its hopes was not an ethnic or racial group but an economic class. In the sixties, radicals lost all hope that the working class would ever become a revolutionary force. Instead, they transferred their destructive faith to substitute candidates: women, gays, and blacks. It was in this crucible that radical feminism and the gay and black liberation movements of the New Left were forged."(16)

In that spirit, Baker's revisionist pen reveals that there is still a governmental white conspiracy against blacks in an America which elected an African-American President; this invective has remained part of a rhetorical arsenal of the Left for well over 45 years now. And so, though members of the radical black bourgeoisie, the Talented Tenth, often feign compassion for the economic plight of "Little Africa" as measured by statistical disparity, this "Tenth" along with their fellow Marxist traitors(read: neoconservative) have together long ago taken flight to suburbia--such "friends like these".(17) Consequently, reading his book provoked a disparaging image of a religious, existentialist fellow-traveler wandering 40 years within an outdated, public ideological desert with piteous longsuffering while so many have already privately chosen to cross Jordan's unimpeded waters into Canaan's plenteous bounty; and of his alienating political desert, well, it's portrayed with Ralph Ellisonian like tragi-comic relief throughout the many pages of his Betrayal which poetically finds its genesis in an epiphenomenal imagination peculiar to his generation of radicals who wilfully continue to refuse to become partakers of MLK's "beloved community". Theatrically bereft of Beulah's land while defiantly forsaking and denying its liberality of manna and freedom, these radicals mostly remain diffident toward King's Dream on the Mall and choose instead to wander in a self-imposed desert of social justice mirages; thematically, inauthentic blackface minstrels of the New Left tragically haunted by an illusionary radical faith which is bound and fixated to an audience and past that no longer even exist.(18)

And so, what then of the elite Vanderbilt University Dr. Baker? Alas, and what say you of the many brutal kleptocracies found on the continent of Mother Africa that still await your poetically interpretative protocols of DuBoisian measure? (19)

"There's matter in these sighs, these profound heaves.
You must translate: `tis fit we understand them."
Hamlet, 4.1.1-2

"By nature free, not overruled by fate
Inextricable or strict necessity...For how
Can hearts, not free, be tried whether they serve
Willing or no, who will but what they must
By destiny and can no other choose?"
Paradise Lost, Book 5.527-534

Endnotes

(1) Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, p. 262.; Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again"; The New Oxford Annotated Apocrypha, Augmented Third Edition 2007, p. 107-108.

(2) Betrayal, p. 182; see Thomas Sowell's, 'Intellectuals and Society', regarding verbal virtuosity as well as his "Visions Of The Anointed".

(3) Betrayal, p. 184, 190, 192.

(4) Betrayal, p. xvi-xvii.

(5a) Winning The Race, p. 5 and p.6: This is therapeutic alienation: alienation unconnected to, or vastly disproportionate to, real-life stimulus, but maintained because it reinforces one's sense of psychological legitimacy, via defining oneself against an oppressor characterized as eternally depraved; Shelby Steele's, White Guilt, p. 34: By the mid-sixties white guilt was eliciting an entirely new kind of black leardership, not selfless men like King who appealed to the nation's moral character but smaller men, bargainers, bluffers, and haranguers--not moralists but specialists in moral indignation--who could set up a trade with white guilt. The most striking irony of the age of white guilt is that racism suddenly became valuable to the people who had suffered it.

(5b) Baker's Archaic Argument: He sardonically accuses McWhorter of using a "naturalistic fallacy" with his introducion of 'the meme of therapeutic alienation'; suggesting that McWhorter is both unscholarly and biased for supposedly inferring non-natural properties, like meme, from naturalistic evolutionary processes. To the contrary, a careful reading of McWhorter shows that his initial use of meme, as an informal cultural-analogue to genes, was clearly explained within a backdrop of both skeumorphy and path dependence. Plus, McWhorter's discussion of other kinds of filters(political viewpoints and worldviews which lead to maladaptive behaviors for the black majority) are commonly found throughout his many other writings. Even a simple review of meme, a concept which is quasi-evolutionary in nature, reveals that cultural ideas are simply transmitted from one person to another via writing, speech, and political ideology--it's actually a very straightforward and commonsensical concept. In characteristic fashion, though, Baker appears to deliberately miscontrue an otherwise simple rendering of meme in keeping with his role as rhetorical redeemer and prophet to the black majority; a prophetic rhetorician who unwittingly preaches such a radical version or gospel of "structural determinism" throughout Betrayal, and with such religio-political conviction, that his structuralism morphs into an allegorical version of genetic determinism; in that sense then, Baker ironically promulgates a very subtle form of mutated naturalistic fallacy as a redemptive measure in keeping with his Duboisian "poetically interpretive protocol." His radical gospel is also revealing in that it exemplifies, very poetically, a dogmatic critical race theory which characteristically uses storytelling and counter-storytelling to explore anecdotal experiences of racial oppression with a bit of political chimera; similarly, such may also be found within the manifesto of the Black Radical Congress of which he is probably affiliated.

(5b) Authentically Black, pps 10,11,12,15,21: "What one is considered to be a traitor against is the unwritten agreement that our job is to keep whites feeling guilty, lest they slide off of the hook...For a few, my breaking the unspoken rule elicits sharp contempt, but in most, just a looming discomfort. That particular discomfort is a keystone of modern black identity: a sense that whites are always just on the verge of taking us back to the past, meaning that we must maintain an aggrieved public presence to remind them of their 'duty'...Just why a people who privately emphasize their inner strength feel so deeply that they must keep this so quiet once they step outside? The reason is a particular outgrowth of the New Double Consciousness, another guiding notion so deeply entrenched in modern black thought as to rarely be explicitly declared: Until all racism is extinct in the United States, there remains a devastating obstacle to success for all blacks except those who are lucky or extraordinarily gifted...The black person may know that the white man is not keeping them down, but tends to assume that he is keeping other blacks down...And what this problem means is that when we are told that the oppressor is at fault, it is a seductive drug...Whenever I read one more commentator griping that blacks "play the victim" as a political ploy, I am dismayed that the person is unaware of a grisly psychological stain on a race. All the black Americans out there grousing about 'white supremacy' and smugly dismissing 'black conservatives' as naive sellouts are speaking from [a] private sense of inadequacy. No one who misses this can fully understand the race problem in modern America."

(6) Winning The Race, Chapter 7, What About The View From The Ivory Tower; "Moreover, I will venture the assertion--albeit ready to see it contradicted with logical argument--that nothing I have seen by way of chi-squares and regressions in sociologists' arguments deep-sixes the conclusions I have come to." p.256.

(7) Betrayal, p. xvi; only three(3) pages before ending the book does he eventually emphasize that he is a "textual critic", p. 214.

(8) Betrayal, p. 182.

(9) Betrayal, p. 129-131; see Stephen R. C. Hicks's, "Explaining PostModernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau To Foucault" regarding Nietzschean Ressentiment, particularly Chapter 6; First Things, Number 204, 'The Trial Of Jesus, pps. 39-46, June/July 2010.

(10) Betrayal, p. 136

(11) Betrayal, p. 154

(12) Betrayal, pps. 133, 149

(13a) "Martin Luther King, Jr. As Democratic Socialist", The Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 18, No. 2(Fall, 1990), pps 82, 91: "The suggestion, in short, is that King became radicalized in social thought partially as he assimilated the impact and significance of the Black Power movement, partially as he encountered massive resistance to his campaigns by established political interests, especially in Chicago, and partially as he was forced to acknowledge the deep tragedy of the Vietnam War and its link with American economic structures...On the contrary, however, I shall contend that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a democratic socialist from his student days at Crozer Theogical Seminary, that the ultimate root of his democratic socialist orientation derives from the black religious tradition that formed the deepest fundament of his emotional and intellectual life, and that the change that is discerned in the final years of his life is but a refinement or, perhaps, a shift in focus of his mission, but not a transformation of his basic orientation...Through Hegel, I would suggest, King refined his socialist perspective--in its social diagnosis and in its theory of social change. He was enabled to discern, in a profounder way than before, the inextricable interrelationship of black and white in racist society and of owner and worker in a capitalist system. To be sure, King's democratic socialism was not Marxist in the classical or orthodox sense of that movement; it was instead a democratic socialism derived through the social gospel of Rauschenbusch, modified by the Christian realism of Niebuhr, and governed by the basic philosophical categories of personalist idealism. More deeply, it was inspired by the sensibilities and spirit of the black religious tradition. But it was firmly fixed in his mind and informed his thought and practice as he moved into his career as Baptist preacher and social activist." See also google search for "Red Vocabulary".

(13b) See Michael Eric Dyson's, "I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.", "April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr's Death and How It Changed America", and his "Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X"; Eric J. Sundquist's, "King's Dream"; Clarence B. Jones', "What Would Martin Say?"; and James H. Cone's, "Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream Or A Nightmare".

(13c) Betrayal, p. 148

(14) Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About The `60s, p.253; see also Google Search for 'PanAfricanism' regarding Baker's use of global supremacy; First Things, Number 204, 'The Morality of Self-Interest', p 54: "Consider the winning policy of the Reagan Administration during the Cold War, which overcame the most prominent collectivist alternative to American Democracy. America did not set out to persuade the Soviet Union to emulate us. We set out to ruin it, and ruin it we did. After Russia repudiated Communism we proposed to assist its reconstruction. In other words, American interest consists of allying with success and containing failure...Washington has swung from a utopian effort to fix the world, to the baffling pretense that the world somehow will fix itself if only America leaves it alone...Instead of a president determined to use American hegemony to rid the world of evil, America has a president determined to rid the world of hegemony."

(15) Betrayal, pps. 143, 206, 157; White Guilt, p.35, 38: "Global racism...is racism inflated into a deterministic, structural, and systemic power...enables blacks to frame racism to the scale of white guilt rather than to the scale of white racism--too weak these days to count for much."; Winning The Race, p.257: 'The problem, however, is that the frames of reference of race now entrenched in academic sociology address only a part of the scene they claim to report from. That is, there is nothing in these works, individually or collectively, that belies a basic observation: They misrepresent the reality of the state of black America, in favor of stressing the bad and almost wilfully neglecting the good, or even the possible.'

(16) Deconstructing the Left: From Vietnam To The Clinton Era, p. 163; Betrayal, p. 14: 'I will never forgive them.'

(17) Betrayal, Chapter 3; only two(2) pages before ending the book does he acknowledge that he is `not claiming to be writing from the black majority trenches.' p.215

(18) Isaiah 62:4 - "No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate. But you will be called Hephzibah and your land Beulah; for the LORD will take delight in you, and your land will be married." Footnotes: Hephzibah means my delight is in her. Beulah means married; The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, 2003; Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison, 1995.

(19) The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence by Martin Meredith, 2006; Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles by Richard Dowden, 2010; Out of America by Keith Richburg, 1997; Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Sterns, 2011.

Baker has done an outstanding job in analyzing the current crop of neo-conservative Black Writers. The work is well documented with quotes and significant background information on Steele, McWhorter, Gates and others. At a time of significant change in the country a review of the work of significant "Black" public intellectuals (Jesters) is long over due. A very good read for anyone interested in a serious discussion of contemporary (public) Black "Intellectual" thought.

There is a great deal of money and esteem to be made by making white people feel good about themselves. Bill Cosby made a fortune during the 60s, 70s, and 80s not talking about race. Raisin in the Sun is extraordinarily popular because it depicts a middle class black family who wants nothing more than to act like a middle class white family. This all goes to explain the high profiles and lavish praises rained upon guys like Stephen Carter and Shelby Steele. Thankfully, there are people like Houston Baker. There are those who care about the black masses and understand that capitalist democracy, American style, isn't an upright moral system.

White supremacy, in body and in mores, pervades the land, and too many black public intellectuals, citizen-soldiers typified by King and able to improve the quality of the entire nation, and have instead, taken the easy pay and kudos available to any scholar who can make white people at ease with the hard work, low pay, institutional alienation which marks too much of the black majority.

In 1968, Harold Cruse fleshed out the problems and responsibilities of the Negro intellectual, and too few scholars have followed in his example. Thankfully, Houston Baker takes on these issues, and American culture, with charm, clarity, and insight, and does not shy away from a thoughtful treatment of the black majority.

His sections on King and Carter were extraordinarily strong, and the entire book portrays an compelling picture of the role of the black intellectual, and how easy it is to renege on that awesome responsibility.