Three, Wilentz worries that fame, fortune, and celebrity will corrupt black intellectuals. In the attempt to help black public intellectuals avoid such seductions, why wasn’t Wilentz writing about black intellectual work a decade ago, before the market mandated it, before celebrity occasioned it? He would then look like a critic motivated by nothing save the best interests of black intellectual life, the academy, and so on. As it stands, he’s the big winner. Since writing in Dissent (a public intellectual venue) about the pitfalls of too much press and exposure, he’s written for the New Yorker, an even larger public intellectual organ, and gained more opportunity to express his views in public. I think Wilentz owes black public intellectuals some royalties!
The “Hoops At Harvard” Award. This award goes to Henry Louis Gates Jr. Skip said he feels like the coach of the Dream Team, luring to Harvard such stars as Cornel West and William Julius Wilson to join team members like K. Anthony Appiah, Evelyn Higginbotham, and Orlando Patterson. Let’s face it, a lot of people are just plain jealous of what Gates—a gifted scholar, writer, and administrator—has been able to do at Harvard: gather big names at an elite institution to think hard and long about the problems black folk face. They have the juice, and some people just can’t stand it: they’re smart, sharp, sophisticated scholars. They deserve to be on The Team.
The problem comes when it’s said like the other places have, well, scrubs, folk that ought to think about retiring or who can only come off the bench, streak scorers who can’t really start at their positions. Boy, look at how the metaphor just goes downhill, Skip. Hey, Princeton’s team ain’t so bad, and neither is Yale’s. I hear Michigan’s going to the playoffs this year, and that Emory is one of the teams to watch.
Harvard’s is a great team, but maybe it’s not the Dream Team. Because then Gates would have to explain why David Levering Lewis—arguably the most virtuosic contemporary black intellectual, what with his books on Africa, the Harlem Renaissance, Martin Luther King, Jr., and W.E.B. Du Bois—isn’t signed. Or why Nell Painter, a formidable historian of the South, is missing. He’d have to tell us what happened to the erudite Africanist, V.Y. Mudimbe, or the learned historian of religion, Charles Long. Or why the astonishingly smart Patricia Williams isn’t suited up in crimson.
Besides, if Harvard’s faculty is really the Dream Team, they have an extra burden: they’re expected to win the gold every time. More than that, they can’t play every pick-up game (conference, television show, lecture appearance, and the like) they’re offered. They can’t produce sloppy, insubstantial work. They’ve got to generate serious, thoughtful, well-wrought books and articles.
And if, as West and Gates have repeatedly claimed, the days of HNIC are over, then both have to do a difficult thing; spread some of the influence and surrender some of the power by which they’ve managed to affect the careers of other black scholars. Otherwise, saying they don’t desire to be HNIC becomes a cover for reinforcing their privileged status.
On the PR front, Skip, you’ve got to get together with Cornel so he can give you some lessons in Humility 101. (I definitely need to sit in on these as well!) First thing you learn is that from now on you say, “I’m pleased that we’re assembling a marvelous collection of scholars here at Harvard. We’re certainly not the only place where such good intellectual company may be found, but we’re proud to be one of them.” Then I’m voting you Coach of the Year. That is, if you can sign Dennis Rodman!
The problems and possibilities of black public intellectuals are huge. We’ve got a chance to make a difference in the world—something a lot of folk can’t say, a chance a lot of scholars don’t get. We shouldn’t allow pettiness or jealousy to stop us. If black intellectuals keep bickering, bellyaching, and bitterly attacking one another, we’ll blow it. And we shouldn’t allow the forces and resources of the marketplace to set us against one another. We should be using our minds to shine a light on the real foes of black folk and democracy: poverty, capital flight, rightwing extremists, religious fundamentalists, and the politics of conservatives and neoliberals that hurt the working class and the working poor.
NOTES
CHAPTER 4. THE LIBERAL THEORY OF RACE
1. My argument here is based on the important work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant in Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
2. Cornel West, “A Genealogy of Modern Racism,” in Prophesy Deliverance! An AfroAmerican Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), pp. 47–68; West, Prophetic Fragments (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1988).
CHAPTER 8. LEONARD JEFFRIES AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BLACK MIND
1. Michael Bradley, The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man ’s Racism, Sexism, and Aggression (New York: Kayode, 1978).
2. Richard King, African Origin of Biological Psychiatry (Germantown, Tenn.: Seymour-Smith, 1990).
3. See Frances Cress-Welsing, “The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy),” in Cress-Welsing, The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors (Chicago: Third World Press, 1991), pp. 1–16.
4. Ibid., p. 4.
5. Ibid., p. 5.
6. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
7. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (Knoxville, Tenn.: Whittle Communications, 1991).
CHAPTER 10. THE LABOR OF WHITENESS, THE WHITENESS OF LABOR , AND THE PERILS OF WHITEWISHING
1. There is a growing literature on the socially constructed meanings of whiteness. For some of the best of this literature, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control (New York: Verso, 1994); Fred Pfeil, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (New York: Verso, 1995); Jessie Daniels, White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1997); Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and L. Mun Wong, eds., Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society (New York: Routledge, 1997).
2. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1983, 1993), pp. 68–87.
3. For a small sample of such criticism, see Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995); Michael Tomasky, Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York: Free Press, 1996); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (Whittle Direct Books, 1991); and Richard Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America ’s Future (New York: Knopf, 1994).
4. See Michael Eric Dyson, Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996).
5. Tomasky, Left for Dead, pp. 10, 15–17.
6. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.
CHAPTER 12. THE PLIGHT OF BLACK MEN
1. For a look at the contemporary plight of black men, especially black juvenile males, see Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species, ed. Jewelle Taylor Gibbs (Dover, Mass.: Auburn House, 1988).
2. See William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
3. See Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged. For Charles
Murray’s views on poverty, welfare, and the ghetto underclass, see his influential book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic, 1984).
4. This section on gangs is informed by the work of Mike Davis in City of Quartz (New York: Verso, 1991).
CHAPTER 15. “GOD ALMIGHTY HAS SPOKEN FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.”: AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CHRISTIAN FAITH
1. Stanley Hauerwas and Michael Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ: Why Freedom of Belief Is Not Enough,” DePaul Law Review 42 (1992).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. For a sampling of Hauerwas’s criticism of Christian ethical defenses of democracy, see “A Christian Critique of Christian America,” in Community in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart, eds. Charles H. Reynolds and Ralph V. Norman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 250–265. See also The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 12–13, 111. For claims about prophetic black Christianity’s contention that democracy is a fundamental norm of prophetic black Christianity, see Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), pp. 18–19.
5. George Will, “Scalia Missed Point but Made Right Argument on Separation of Religion,” Durham Morning Herald, Apr. 22, 1990, p. 5. I am not suggesting that Hauerwas’s treatment of the First Amendment is limited to this essay, or that the tension between church and state, and religion and politics, is a new subject for him, or one exclusively pursued in this essay. Anyone familiar with Hauerwas’s work will know of his long-standing views on such matters. See in particular Hauerwas’s books, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Ethic (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Minneapolis: WinstonSeabury, 1985); and Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World and Living In-Between (Durham, N.C.: Lambrinth, 1987). I am treating, however, the specific context of Hauerwas’s (and Baxter’s) remarks as they relate to points they make about Will’s interpretation of the First Amendment.
6. Hauerwas and Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ.”
7. See Walter Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, ed. Robert H. Horwitz (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), p. 208.
8. See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967), p. 260. Also see Martin Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (New York: Penguin, 1984), pp. 162–163.
9. James Madison, quoted in Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, p. 260.
10. Ibid.
11. See Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” p. 220.
12. Ibid.
13. Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” pp. 219–225. For an exposition on Locke’s views of Christianity, see Michael P. Zuckert, “Locke and the Problem of Civil Religion,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), pp. 181–203.
14. For Madison on religion as opinion, see Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land, p. 163.
15. Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Hauerwas and Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ,” p. 4.
16. As Robert Bellah defines it in “The Idea of Practices in Habits: A Response,” in Community in America, eds. Reynolds and Norman, Constantinianism is the danger that “Christianity will be used instrumentally for the sake of creating political community but to the detriment of its own authenticity” (p. 277). As Hauerwas understands the term (building on the work of John Howard Yoder), which is drawn from Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, it is the assumption that “Christians should or do have social and political power so they can determine the ethos of society. . . . Constantine is the symbol of the decisive shift in the logic of moral argument when Christians ceased being a minority and accepted Caesar as a member of the church.” See Hauerwas, “A Christian Critique of Christian America,” in Community i n America, eds. Reynolds and Norman, p. 260.
17. See Hauerwas’s works cited in notes 15 and 16.
18. For the pressure these groups brought to bear upon the colonies for freedom of religion, see Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, pp. 257–258.
19. Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” p. 206.
20. Interestingly, Hauerwas raises the possibility of challenging the ideals that underlay the Jonestown community, but only through intellectual or religious debate or criticism of the community; even in light of the atrocities committed there, he doesn’t entertain the possibility of state intervention, or active Christian intervention, to protect the exploited victims of Jim Jones’s practices. He says in “On Taking Religion Seriously: The Challenge of Jonestown,” in Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 103: “Our tragedy is that there was no one internal or external to that community able to challenge the false presuppositions of Jones’s false ideals. Our continuing tragedy is that our reactions to and our interpretations of the deaths of Jonestown reveal accurately how we lack the convictions to counter the powers that reigned there.” On the other hand, John Bennett sees Jonestown as an indication that freedom of religion is not absolute and as an example of the difficulty of determining when and if state intervention into religious practices should occur. Unlike Hauerwas, however, he concedes the possibility that state intervention is a plausible course of action under admittedly difficult-to-define circumstances. In “Church and State in the United States,” in Reformed Faith and Politics, ed. Ronald H. Stone (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983), p. 122, Bennett says: “That . . . religious freedom from any limitation by the state is not absolute is well illustrated by the terrible events in Jonestown. After those events it is easy to see there should have been protection of people against such exploitation and even lethal abuse by a religious leader, but it is not easy to say exactly at what point and by what method the state should have entered the picture.”
21. This view among the Founders is characterized in Martin Marty’s summary of Benjamin Franklin’s views on established religion in Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land, p. 158: “Yet [Franklin] attacked churchly establishment: when a religion was good, it would support itself. If a religion could not support itself and God did not care to come to its aid, it was a bad sign if then the members had to call on government for help.”
22. Bennett, “Church and State in the United States,” pp. 121–122.
23. It must be admitted that religion under the First Amendment becomes a matter of private choice versus public coercion, but that meaning of privacy is not in question here. Rather, it is whether religion under the First Amendment is rendered necessarily and exclusively private without the possibility of its public expression.
24. Of course, Hauerwas and Baxter might argue that the Founders viewed religion primarily as an aid, and not a critic, of the government. That may be the case, but as they point out in regard to the freedom of religion in their discussion of Will earlier in their essay, the intent of the Founders is not as important as what has occurred in practice. Similarly, what has occurred in practice is that persons and groups have appealed to their religious beliefs to challenge American government, ranging from the civil rights movement to antinuclear activists.
25. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land, pp. 155–156.
26. Ibid., p. 157.
27. Ibid., p. 158.
28. George Washington, quoted in Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” p. 213.
29. Jefferson, quoted in Berns, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” pp. 217–218.
30. Ibid., p. 213.
31. Admittedly this distinction between functional
and moral subordination doesn’t completely resolve the tensions created by conflicts of conscience over legally established political practices. In such cases, of course, it is clear that moral insubordination takes precedence; but the violation of the law in the name of conscience results in the Christian acknowledging the conflict created by her religious beliefs by accepting the penalty of breaking the law until the law is changed, either as a result of civil disobedience or through shifted public consensus, or reconstructed public practice, later reflected in law. The examples of Christian participation in the civil rights movement, feminist movements, and antinuclear war movements stand out.
32. For instance, Ronald Thiemann has argued that Hauerwas represents one of two unacceptable options in developing an effective public Christian response to the crises of North American civilization. In characterizing the first option, represented in the thinking of theologian Paul Lehmann, Thiemann, in Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1991), summarizes Lehmann’s position, expressed by Lehmann in an essay entitled “Praying and Doing Justice”: “Arguing out of the Reformed tradition’s close association of faith with obedience, Lehmann asserts that proper worship always has as its goal the accomplishment of justice in the world. The righteousness of faith must result in transformative justice within the public realm. Thus Christian worship is essentially political, and the lietourgia of the church extends naturally and directly into political action” (p. 114). The second option is represented by Hauerwas in his book, A Community of Character. According to Thiemann, Hauerwas contends that “by being faithful to the narratives that shape Christian character, the church will witness to a way of life that stands apart from and in criticism of our liberal secular culture. Christian worship, then, must be an end in itself directed solely toward the cultivation of those peculiar theological virtues that mark the church as a distinctive community” (p. 114). But Thiemann concludes that neither of these options “provides us with the theological resources we need to face the distinctive challenge presented to North American Christians” (p. 114). He continues: “Neither the politicization of worship nor its sectarian separation from public life will suffice in our current situation. . . . We must find a middle way between the reduction of the Christian gospel to a program of political action and the isolation of that gospel from all political engagement” (p. 114). And in an essay, “Justice as Participation: Public Moral Discourse and the U. S. Economy,” in Community i n America, in which he clarifies the position of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in their pastoral letter on the economy, David Hollenbach juxtaposes their belief that “the church has a responsibility to help shape the life of society as a whole” to Hauerwas’s position on such matters (p. 220). Hollenbach says: “Hauerwas concludes that the church should cease and desist from the attempt to articulate universal moral norms persuasive to all members of a pluralistic society. . . . [The letter’s] disagreement with Hauerwas is with his exclusive concern with the quality of the witness of the Christian community’s own life. In the traditional categories of Ernest Troeltsch, the bishops refuse to take the ‘sectarian’ option of exclusive reliance on the witness of the Christian community that Hauerwas recommends” (p. 220).
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