Let the Debate Begin

This editorial will appear in the inaugural issue of the Seymour Society Bulletin.

In 1967, historian Harold Cruse observed that "the Negro intellectual [was] a retarded child" whose thinking was still committed to mimicry and racial integration. Well, it is now 1985 and things have changed considerably--they're worse! Let us for example consider Harvard. Here we have one of the most prestigious collection of invisible minds north of Yale's Afro-American Cultural Center. Yet this obvious fact conceals a deeper truth. Unlike the principal protagonist of Ellison's novel Invisible Man, their invisibility is not due primarily to the refusal of others to see them. The reality is more tragic. They refuse to see themselves! Instead, many take refuge in the rhetoric of "racism at Harvard" as though matriculation at such heavenly institutions as Howard University or the University of Liberia was not an option. Still others wax "cosmopolitan" (borrowing Milton M. Gordon's term, read anglo-conformist) partaking of that sacred cultural narcotic: interracial mating. These equally counterproductive behavioral patterns serve predictable cathartic functions. For example, the word racism has immense deflective utility. It is frequently an excellent semantic device for obfuscating the internal roots of group failings. Thus it may facilitate avoiding personal responsibilities. And it is therefore dangerously close to the welfare system in that it can, under certain circumstances, retard disiplined group reliance and initiative. The second reality-avoidance strategy seems to find its most pathological expression among black males. Diagnostically speaking, interracial mating is for many elites an individual act of existential and psycho-cultural expatriation. Accordingly, it frees one from confronting certain unpleasant realities. In this context this means escaping from perhaps the most painful and historically complex aspect of blackness: the quality of life between black men and women. On this delicate subject it may be presumed that reasonable individuals may differ. Yet in the absence of morally and intellectually active role models, Harvard students' confused responses are in many cases quite understandable. Thus today in the eleventh hour of the "other America" these students' major contribution beyond filling unspecified quotas is their odious indifference to their poor and to important questions of culture. These failings are symptomatic of much deeper moral and cultural crisis. It is a crisis that no amount of affirmative action can correct since it involves deep questions that they alone will have to address.

In connection with these questions let us comment briefly on the matter of Martin Kilson, Professor of Government at Harvard University, and the controversy surrounding his critisism in the Harvard Crimson of certain black students' activities. First it should be understood that Kilson is, to paraphrase Churchill's remark about the Russians, an inscrutable enigma wrapped in a mystery. In other words, anyone even casually acquainted with Kilson's political and intellectual history recognizes immediately that he is a figure of considerable complexity. His intuitive and scholarly comprehension of obscure dialects of black life is frequently brilliant and shrewd. Yet his analysis has also been, on occasion, intemperate in tone and mistaken in judgment. In our view, however, his rich insights are unquestionably worth the accompanying imperfections. For example in the recent series of exchanges with black students we tend to concur with much of the substance of his critique. It is true that many black students do not intelligently utilize Harvard's extraordinary resources and its cosmopolitan environment. It is also indisputably true that much of the intragroup fraternizing is not generally very productive. These criticisms are entirely reasonable. There is also another aspect of this controversy which has not received adequate attention. Kilson's criticisms are rooted in a vision of politics and culture from an earlier generation of intellectuals whose political life was, unlike these "Jack and Jill" revolutionaries, learned and serious. It was a vision shaped in the shadow of eminent black scholars such as Horace Mann Bond, Oliver Cox, Rayford Logan and St. Clair Drake, Kilson is from a later generation of intellectuals who stood their ground as young black radicals during the McCarthy era and as a consequence know only too well that real politics requires intellectual clarity and considerable sacfifice. It is for this reason and many others that Kilson "goes off." In his judgment black students are simply irresponsible and possibly immoral to squander such exceptional resources when the black community so desperately needs a mature and policy-oriented intelligentsia.

The theme of the irresponsibility of these elites runs throughout all of the informed sociological and cultural commentary on Afro-American life. In the work of Frazier, Cayton, Drake, Bunche, et al., this theme is consistently pressed. In the serious literature which analyzes the organizational revolution of black urban social structure and its stratification system, the opportunistic behavioral patterns of this class is presented as a defining characteristic of the group. W.E.B. DuBois, for example, noted in an 1899 sociological study of the black community in Philedelphia, that the local elites were in general politically and intellectually bankrupt. They were, he wrote, "not leaders of the idealmakers of their own group in thought, work or morals." By 1932 little had changed in his view. When addressing the graduating class of Howard University, DuBois charged that college-educated, elite Blacks were "on average untouched by real culture," and were at best "indifferent to scholarship and the hard grind of study and research." He concluded his address on a discouraging and, it seems, prophetically accurate note, commenting that in our colleges we were witnessing "a growing mass of stupidity and ignorence." As is well known, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier also made this point repeatedly in his own work. Fifty-three years after DuBois' Howard University address, these elites' sense of vision continues to be in inverse proportion to their degree of inherited privilege.

Let us return to the example of Blacks at Harvard as a model of Afro-Americans in elite educational institutions across the country. Anti-intellectualism is for too many a way of life. And partying has traditionally been their most successful organizing activity. Also at Harvard one may read The Crimson, The Independent, The Harvard International Review, The Harvard Political Review, The Advocate, or any number of other student publications. Yet for over a decade now they have failed to produce a decent student publication. The students, however, have not been alone. Black faculty and administrative staff represent another curious example of DuBois' conception of the "talented tenth". Certainly with Harvard's unparalleled resources and influence, one could have expected black faculty and staff, say in conjunction with the Harvard Foundation and the W.E.B. DuBois institute, to have organized to produce a serious publication. True? False! There is nothing. As The New Republic reported in 1983 with uncharacteristic accuracy:

The black professional class, the black professional, the black entreprenerial vanguard have simply not taken responsibility for their own. There is not at this crucial stage in the development of the black community even a single thoughtful and deeply honest publication among black intellectuals--there is hardly a forum of any sort in this vein--willing to engage in those necessary acts of painful self-criticism without which neither intellectual clarity about the black social condition nor concrete understanding of how to alter it will be attained.

Even at Harvard, there have of course been exceptions. For example, the now defunct Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs was a high quality periodical which, under the influence and sponsorship of Dean of Students, Archie C. Epps III and Professor Martin Kilson, ran for approximately four years (the Dean was then a graduate student and tutor). These exceptions however, merely underline the rule. To this should be added the extraordinary organizational efforts of Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes who has sponsored the biannual William Belden Nobel lectures, and those of the William J. Seymour Society which has sponsored a yearly lecture series since 1981.

These criticisms may, on the surface, appear somewhat harsh, but the pervasiveness of the realities discussed are in our view considerably worse. The failures described above are merely one regional and class-specific example of an underlying malaise that encompasses Blacks at every level. It is this underlying unity that our established intelligentsia has historically failed to grasp, thus accounting for their increasing irrelevence. Furthermore, this malaise has also produced new leadership opportunities for a young group of ambitious new mandarins. Hard-nosed "policy analysts" such as Professor Glenn C. Loury of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, or Dr. Alan Keys of the United States Department of State, have achieved a considerable measure of prominence. There is an irony in this. Their prominence, in view of the quality of the analysis, seems to belie the very existence of the mysterious meritocracy which they purport to endorse. There is an unmysterious reason for this. The empirical and historical work of Bourdieu, Jenks, Bowles, Edwards and Karabel, et al, demonstrate that educational and occupational advances are largely, although not exclusively, determined by the structural needs and inequities of the system. Loury, Keys and Co. seem to empirically validate the conclusions of the aforementioned intellectuals. For without any analytis of scholarly contribution of intellectual depth or originality to the important social policy debates, they have managed to market themselves as architects of a new policy consensus. Consequently, these courageous young servants of the people are rented, and then imported to the White House for photographic sessions with the Gipper. It is im- portant to note that this constructive engagement was undertaken at the very moment Reagan was escalating his domestic policy war against the poor.

This, no doubt, is indicative of a rather unique sense of moral responsibility to which we can only hang our heads in shame. Yet to be fair, Loury is in some respects morally indistinguishable from his liberal counterparts, since they too presuppose the moral validity of corporate capitalism. Differences where they do exist, are generally more on matters of technique and management. As a rule, elite academics can be bought cheaply. Loury is a minor footnote in this tradition. He is therefore a symptom of our malaise. And for that reason we must look elsewhere for examples of moral integrity and new intellectual leadership.

At the heart of the crisis among Blacks is the death of a sacred understanding of the world. It was this ethno-theocentric vision which provided the foundation for moral and cognitive order in our communities. We have lost a meaningful sense of the transcendent or the Holy, and the consequences have been in our judgment, utterly catastrophic. This is the essence to the growing crisis of moral and cultural authority that is engulfing our entire community. Why? There are many reasons. We shall simply outline a few which are outstanding but overlooked.

In addition to urbanization, one of the primary forces behind secularization in the United States has been the push by the consciousness industry to create receptivity for artificial appetites in consumers. To establish new social space for the imposition of consumer needs, capital has advanced the delegitimition of the emphasis on God that is central to precapitalist social systems.

Consider for example, the entire concept of style and fashion which is today so central to the average person's sense of identity. During the second decade of this century the expansion of market relations into new spheres of social life generated major shifts in the cultural outlook for thousands of young Americans. This was the product of a deliberate attempt to equate consumption and the satisfaction of prefabricated desires with freedom and youthful rebellion, thereby facilitating the production of new conceptions of personal identity which were almost completely dependent upon the possession of status commodities. As cultural historian Stuart Ewen has noted, the object was to capture the interest of the younger generation "since the youth were in general far more receptive to the rhythms of the market than their elders whose concerns were in general, more budgetary." In the process people's values gradually shifted from those generally associated with religion and family to self-expression through hedonistic consumption. These developments inspired the eclipse of a theocentric worldview, and a devaluation of qualities such as a communal solidarity, self-sacrifice and commitment to the future through marriage and nurturing of children.

It was in the shadow of these events that the first modern elite leadership class came of age. With the decline of a sacred world view and the political and cultural ascendance of corporate liberalism we note the erosion of an integrated normative world view. Thus "the growing mass of stupidity and indifference" at Harvard becomes more comprehensible. For the time being, however, let us pray and then begin the debate