The Crisis of the African-American Intellectual: What's to Be Learned From West v. Harris Perry

In 1967, Harold Cruse wrote the fabled book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. In the book, Cruse mapped the unsettled space between intellectuals and an increasingly fragmented set of social movements. I argue here we are at such a place, as we have on one hand a pragmatic Obama administration under siege from right wing forces and on the other hand black intellectuals trying to articulate the voices of what are absent mass social movements. This creates a crisis that plays itself out in peculiar ways. The conflict between Professors Melissa Harris-Perry and Cornel West is one such area.

As academics and scholars, our job is to teach and develop scholarship that aids human kind. For African-American scholars we carry the additional burden of trying to provide a deeper understanding of the issues that confront the black community in the United States and sometimes beyond. Our task is to illuminate, to provide analysis and critique that elevates the discussion and provides the public of all races with a better understanding of issues and ideas for a way forward.

But we are ciphers. Unlike W.E.B. DuBois and even some of the intellectuals in the period that Cruse wrote about, black intellectuals are not leaders in the way we once might have claimed. With the access to the ballot, African Americans have elected city councilmen, mayors, senators and even a president. We have supported politicians of all races for ideological and strategic reason. And the African-American community no longer must rely on unelected artists, academics, athletes and entertainers to speak for us. This situation is at once liberating and scary. While we are rightfully angry to decry those who suggest American is post-racial or celebrities who avoid speaking out on issues, it is also liberating for non-elected black folk to not speak for us.

That is why the recent comments published in Diverse Issues in Higher Education about Professor Melissa Harris-Perry by Professor Cornel West so saddened me. West's reference to Melissa Harris-Perry as a "fraud" is bad but the use of the adjective "treacherous" invokes a gender dog whistle that harkens back to the concept sexually available black woman cozying up to the master. Boyce Watkins, in his attack on Harris-Perry, on his website doubles down on the Jezebel stereotype by accusing Harris-Perry of "whoring herself out." What could have been an interesting discussion about black politics in the Obama era, has degenerated into a series of ad hominem attacks. We might have had a debate a la the high minded engagement with Michael Dawson's essay on Black Politics published in a recent issue of the Boston Review. Instead, we have been treated to ever deepening ad hominem attacks. Academic versions of street level put downs.

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