June Jordan and the New Black Intellectuals

In Race Matters, Cornell West states that is past for black political and intellectual leaders pose as the voice for black America. contemporary black political and intellectual leader should a race-transcending prophet who critiques the powers that be . . . and who puts forward a vision of fundamental social change for all who suffer from socially induced misery (70). If we are believe a series of articles in popular American magazines,(1) a whole generation of African-American intellectuals is making the transition from experts on race matters the more broadly defined role of the public, national intellectual, and in the process redefining means be an intellectual in the United States (Berube 73). Whether or not these intellectuals, as Robert Boynton names them in Atlantic, are or should be race-transcending, or if they are reincarnations of the black spokespersons whose West says is past, has spurred some acrimonious debate. Adolph Reed argues in Village Voice that these public intellectuals trade on their blackness gain authority with their white, academic audience, while blacks look these intellectuals and their success at garnering a white audience for models of how make it in the white world. Thus the black intellectuals can use their roles as certified black spokespersons to avoid both rigorous, careful intellectual work and protracted committed political action (Reed 35). And Sean Wilentz similarly claims that these black writers are really a product of the needs of left-leaning white critics who find in the fact of their popular colleagues' blackness chance affirm their anti-racist bona fides (294). For Reed and Wilentz these new black intellectuals are not something at all, but are rather the same old token blacks gaining prestige by explaining blackness whites. Michael Berube, Robert Boynton, and others, however, argue that the sudden visibility of a group of black thinkers is a sign of changing American concerns and values, and the diversity of perspectives within this group signals a turn away from the spokesperson a complexity in the role of the African-American intellectual. At the center of these competing interpretations of the media attention lavished on the New Black Intellectuals are different understandings of the African-American intellectuals' audience, purpose and, responsibilities. Thirty years ago Harold Cruse, in Crisis of the Intellectual, argued that the role of the black intellectual is necessarily dual in nature: The intellectual must deal intimately with the white power structure and cultural apparatus, and the inner realities of the black world at one and the same time (451). Cruse's call for a synthesis of the intellectual relationship with and responsibility both a black and a white audience, like West's race-transcending prophet, echoes the turn-of-the-century argument and rhetorical project of Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois famously defined the African American as possessing a double-consciousness, as being split between an essential sense of self and an identity reflected back through the power of the white gaze. Du Bois's difficult task, and the task of all African-American intellectuals that follow him, is address both aspects of this definition. As Du Bois wrote in his critique of Booker T. Washington, racial inequality is not a problem that can be located within and solved by a single race, when in fact the burden belongs the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies righting these great wrongs (94). Du Bois's worry was that Washington was focusing too much on what blacks could do address their situation, thus letting the white power structure ignore its responsibility for the Negro Problem. Today, critics like Reed and Wilentz wonder if the black intellectuals are gaining their national reputations at the expense of losing sight of the inner realities of the black world

Ancient history · Art · History · Race, History, and American Society

• Producing Their Own Literature

  Open Access•Danica Savonick•MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of…•2020

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