Black Culture: The Golden Mean

Recently, Martin Kilson provided a controversial characterization of black culture and its relation to intellectual performance among black students at Harvard. The issues involved are of utmost importance, but they have been blurred due to the puerile level of the subsequent dialogue with various critics. I shall attempt to delineate the one-dimensionality of Kilson's analysis and the banality of his critics. This delineation is not done simply to suggest that the "truth" of the matter lies in some mystical synthesis, but rather that the level of the present dialogue must be elevated if the issues are to be more fully understood.

The major thesis of the Kilsonian analysis is that black cultural separatism is anti-achievement in orientation, therefore it minimizes the intellectual performance of blacks. This black cultural separatism is a remnant of the ideologically-filled sixties. It is invisibly imposed in order to provide self-security of blacks and institutional leverage over a variety of campus operations. The repercussions of this cultural behavior are national in scope and are manifest on the undergraduate and graduate levels. He concludes that the future quality of the black elites and professionals are at stake. The situation can be rectified by breaking down these separatist restraints, with blacks interacting more fully with their non-black peers as well as inculcating achievement-oriented behavior.

The critics of Kilson's characterization have stated that he believes in the pathology of intra-black association; they claim that he assumes the inferiority of black culture and advocates individualistic acculturation, which would result in the disappearance of cultural blackness. Kilson's critics assert that his analysis is far too negative and is padded by invalid statistics; they ideologically portray him as one committed more to intellectualism than to his own racial identification.

Black culture is the socially adaptive apparatus which embodies and reflects the particular values, folkways and mores of black people. Black culture (like all others) is dualistic; it has a functional dimension and an existential dimension. The functional dimension is characterized by the power-mustering capacity of blacks in the socioeconomic sphere. The existential dimension provides a defense against the culture's adversaries and propagates self-security within the culture. The functional and existential components of black culture are based on the historical experience of blacks, but the latter emphasizes the black ritual tradition. The ritual tradition of blacks is the inherited pattern of symbolic response to various societal phenomena.

The Kilsonian analysis is one-dimensional because it is concerned exclusively with the functional dimension of black culture. The context of his characterization is institutions viewed as sources for blacks of skill-acquisition, not existential meaning. He is interested only in the production of highly qualified black graduates from these institutions, who will in turn become black intellectuals and professionals in order to enhance the black masses.

Kilson's neglect of the existential dimension of black culture leads him to ignore the acceleration of the process of ethnicization in modern society aided by the advent of post-industrial society. This new stage of modernity demands existential response. For most blacks, this existential response is expressed by new self-definition and self-assertiveness in terms of black ethnicity; therefore any holistic and realistic analysis of black culture must not view black cultural uniqueness as a behavior to condemn, but rather as an a posteriori presupposition.

But this new self-definition and self-assertiveness of blacks must more fully enter the functional dimension. For too many black students, "blackness" is defined solely within the ritualistic sphere; that is, being one with the Black Geist deals only on the symbolic level. Black cultural uniqueness must be preserved, but it also must invorporate achievement-oriented behavior that has been universally and historically proven to elevate the power-mustering capacity of a people, thereby alleviating the oppression of blacks.

The inane criticisms of Kilson's analysis have consistently ignored the functional/existential dualism in black culture and thus, ironically, provide tacit admission to the strength of Kilson's position. They intuitively sense the lack of the existential dimension in his analysis, but they fail to analytically account for it. Why? Because the functional dimension of culture cannot be analytically understood solely from the existential perspective--such is the gift of only poets and artists. It is no surprise that Kilson's critics mistake his functionalist cultural assertions to be existential ones.

Some critics have attempted to undermine his argument by pointing out irrelevant invalid statistics, which are innocuous to his major thesis (for the major figure of 52 per cent of blacks at Harvard on the dean's list compared to 82 per cent of all other ethnics still stands). There has been surprisingly little attention drawn to his elitist model. Most criticisms of Kilson's analysis are, in essence, attempts to flee from analysis while ideologizing the flight. They dwindle into psychoanalytic amateurism--futile attempts to explain the content of the articles by the disposition of the author via a crude sociology of knowledge. Such responses hold no intellectual weight and only tricialize the issues. The past decade has hopefully taught us that pure ideology is but a crutch for those who dare not to think, a silkscreen on which to paint one's reality--as if reality is but a fantasy in portrait.

So we must transcend the one-dimensional analysis of black culture which neglects its existential constituent and the insipid exaltation of black culture which ignores its functional component. This transcendence is accomplished by recognizing the existential need to preserve black cultural uniqueness ant the functional demand of achievement-orientedness within the black cultural perimeters--such is the golden mean to which black culture must adhere if it is to meet the challenges of post-industrial society.

Cornell West '73 graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in Near Eastern Studies. He is presently a graduate student in Philosophy at Princeton University.