- Originally published by the New York Press [here]. Link via DissidentVoice.org
July 17, 2004
By Norman Kelley,
Author of The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome: The Dead End of Black Politics
Black Cultural Criticism, Inc.
Once upon a time, not too long ago, a wise minister pondered a paradox.
He wondered, how is it that black intellectuals more than 100 years
ago, "endowed with few resources, facing every imaginable form of
racial disenfranchisement, living in a world of routine racist
lynchings--conducted an intellectually serious program of cooperative
and engaged research, focused on the basic life conditions of Black
Americans."
The Rev.Eugene Rivers, who raised this issue, probably never received
an adequate answer. Possibly frustrated at the posing
of so-called black public intellectuals and the
do-nothingism of the civil rights industry, Rev. Rivers, concerned
about the deteriorating lot of young blacks, signed
onto the Bush administration's faith-based
initiative. Rev. Rivers was decidedly old school ; he
wanted to improve the lot of urban bantustanistas by
focusing on issues like employment, education, health
and spiritual impoverishment.
Today's black public intellectuals understand that if
help is going to be extended it has to be done within
the context of culture , something that an
old-schooler like Rivers wouldn't get. The best way
to assist in this program, they say, is to provide
the mainstream with interpreters of the urban cris de
coeur that is often at the center of rap music. And obviously, those
who can best do this kind of work are those public
intellectuals who have been trained by the
universities' theoriocracy, which has come to influence
academic discourse and studies in elite, middle and
bottom-feeding rungs of academia. It's all about
cultural criticism as a means of understanding the
sinews of power that course through the body politic
and its culture.
Academic cultural criticism is the coin of the realm
for a fair number of post-civil-rights-generation
intellectuals. Schooled in the humanities (literature, feminism,
critical theory, cultural studies), it has produced
Afro-literary theorists like Houston A. Baker Jr. (
Blues, Ideology, and Afro American Literature ) and Henry Louis
Gates Jr. ( The Signifying Monkey ) and oppositional
critics like Cornel West ( Prophesy Deliverance! ),
bell hooks ( Black Looks ) and Michael Eric Dyson (
Reflecting Black ). This rising tide of voices has even
lifted the profile of an old-school paradigmer (i.e.,
Marxist or neo-Marxist) like Manning Marable ( How
Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America ).
Some have risen to new heights: posted at elite
universities (Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia),
feted on television, sought after for knowledge about the black
world or blackness, the recipients of large book and
television contracts, with positions on boards of
prestigious institutions, these intellectuals--some, at
least--are living large. The term "public
intellectual," however, has been appropriated by some
not in the pursuit of disseminating truly critical knowledge (as
in the case of a Noam Chomsky, Edward Said or
Christopher Hitchens), but to become market intellectuals who present
themselves as "experts" about or interpreters for
those too disenfranchised to speak for themselves.
This is made possible by the fact that the "public,"
so to speak, has ceased to exist, and has been
replaced by various discrete markets in a society
that reduces everything to dollar signs. If by some
chance black public intellectuals know nothing of the
subject matter they are called upon to explain, that
is beside the point. The point is they have engaged
the public--which is usually white and has money.
Never have so many theorized about so much and said
so little. This has led some of these intellectuals
to embrace the cause of hiphop, which, to some degree, has
made today's market intellectuals relevant. For
beyond blackness and black issues, black market
intellectuals have really little to offer.
Criticism of black intellectuals as "frauds,"
"failures" or miseducated has been issued by the
likes of Harold Cruse, E. Franklin Frazier and Carter
G. Woodson. "The philosophy implicit in the Negro's
folklore," wrote Frazier in his essay "The Failure of
Negro Intellectuals," "is infinitely superior to the
opportunistic philosophy of Negro intellectuals who
want to save their jobs and enjoy material comforts." Frazier also
laid bare the shortcoming of the pre-civil-rights
black middle class in his classic Black Bourgeoisie . Today's black
intellectuals are part and parcel of a new black
bourgeoisie, making up a "niggerati," if you will.
(If you have a problem with such a term, go see Randall Kennedy.)
Rap, for better or worse, has allowed some of the
niggerati to bolster their black credentials before
both black audiences and white markets. After all, if one is a
black intellectual, particularly a black market
intellectual posing as a public intellectual (but functioning as a
"native informant"), rap offers a chance to both
interpret and profile (as well as profit). But black
intellectuals have not, at least according to Cruse,
been able to "see the implications of cultural
revolution as a political demand growing out of the
advent of mass communication media. Having no
cultural philosophy of their own, they remain under
the tutelage of irrelevant white radical ideas." One
only has to peruse some of the above titles to
confirm this view. They're full of the usual academic
spouting about "commodification," which is obviously
refracted through Frankfurt School critical theory, French continental
theory or British cultural studies. It seems that
American intellectuals, both white and black, have a
theoriority complex.
Black "public" intellectuals have engaged more in
pimping off rap than actually delineating how it is
situated within the political economy of the multibillion-dollar
music industry--an industry that rests comfortably and
unquestionably on black talent. A case in point is
Manning Marable's online essay "The Politics of Hip
Hop" (athena.tbwt.com/content/_article.asp?articleid=91) In
that article, Prof. Marable, director of the
Institute for Research in African-American Studies at
Columbia University, performed the role of stenographer to
Russell Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network
(HHSAN). The article was primarily a recitation of
the mogul's agenda (or initiative)--concerns about the
"prison industrial complex, the death penalty, voter education,
and music censorship"--and a primer regarding the
politics of hiphop.
Missing was an analysis of how rap, particularly
Simmons' brand, fits into the music industry. This is
somewhat astounding considering that Prof. Marable is
the author of How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America ,which
analyzed how the capitalist mode of production gutted black America
.But Motown is only mentioned once in that entire book, and that's in
the accepted framework of black capitalism, which,
according to Marable, has the possibility of pushing
the "advocates of black capitalism into the political
camp of the most racist and conservative forces of white America."
Indeed, music for most market intellectuals is an
afterthought, which they use as a means to an end,
and that end is seldom about understanding the entire
political, economic and cultural nexus of the various
art forms that blacks have produced but have no real
control over. Most independent rap record labels are
partially owned by one of the five major labels--AOL
Time Warner, Sony Music, Bertelsmann Music Group,
Vivendi Universal, EMI--and serve as compradorian depots
for the recruitment of young, naive artists who form
a black Rhythm Nation that comes from the inner
cities. Issues regarding the transparency of
recording contracts, health benefits, work-for-hire
clauses and Internet royalties are not raised at most
hiphop summits, especially the ones formed by Simmons.
The supreme irony is that white groups like the
Recording Artists' Coalition and the Future of Music
Coalition are beginning to organize around these
bread-and-butter issues that affect all musicians.
But these aren't seen as black issues, and certainly not black music
issues.
Black cultural criticism is, then, a dubious
enterprise. Black Popular Culture , a book project
organized by Michelle Wallace, introduced a truncated version of
black culture, basically reducing it to two
art/entertainment forms, rap music and film. The book
was the product of an alleged black intellectual debate
about culture that was, once again, refracted through
then-current academic prisms like "pleasure,"
identity politics, theory and cultural criticism.
Another book, Soul: Black Power, Politics and Pleasure , edited by
Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green, primarily
treads the same path.
What's missing from these books is any sense that
"black culture" or "soul" is defined by social,
political and economic environments that came out of
a basic folk culture, an ethos based on a "structure
of feeling" about a certain time and place in
history. An academic from the social sciences may be
present among the contributors, but generally one gets the impression
that these cultural critics are high on the octane of
questionable theoretical importance.
Given the lack of insight that black intellectuals
have brought to rap, it's not too surprising that
Michael Eric Dyson chose, in addressing rap, to write
a book about Tupac Shakur ( Holler If You Hear Me );
it's part and parcel of the martyrdom hagiology that
unfortunately defines African-American political
culture. If you want to read a truly riveting interrogation of the
cultural text of our time, you should see bell hook's
April 1997 interview with Lil' Kim in Paper
("Hardcore Honeys"). hooks gets totally deep with the
faux-bad gal of hiphop.
bh: What was your line on Hardcore, "take it up the
butt"? Don't be funnin'. What do you think about
that?
LK: I think it's real.
bh: Tell me what you mean when you say it's real--that
a lot of people are getting fucked in the butt?
LK: Exactly...
Kim wasn't speaking metaphorically, either. Later,
hooks, supposedly a feminist, says this about her
mother and the women of previous generations: "My mother
and other older generations felt that in exchange for
the pussy, you should get marriage, you should get
something. I'm not that kind of girl, though. I think
real sexual liberation means that you're in charge of your
pussy; you don't have to exchange it for anything."
Whenever hooks tried to steer the interview toward
Kim's persona being dictated solely by men or a
marketing gesture to male fantasy, girlfriend didn't
completely swallow.
If Kim doesn't have much to say about love (and she
doesn't), hooks sure does in her latest work. To
date, hooks has written three books about love: Communion
,All About Love and Salvation , with another one on
the way. It was only a short but logical hiphop from
"pussy" to "love," and in taking that step hooks has
followed Cornel West, her fellow intellectual poser,
to the zone of profitable marketability--the ultimate goal of market
intellectuals--under the rubric of "cultural
criticism."
"In all modesty, this project constitutes a watershed
moment in musical history," West's website trumpets,
touting his own rap/_spoken-word collection, Sketches of My Culture .
Here West, who has always sounded like a bad version
of Richard Pryor doing his preacher routine, has produced a moment
of profound Afro-kitsch. The CD offers nothing more
than smooth "jazz" confections with words on top. It
will easily find rotation on black radio stations for
years to come during Black History Month, which has already been
reduced to a time for selling black tchotchkes (as in
the case of Kwanzaa).
In so many ways, West is representative of the
paper-thin intellectual apparatus that is the
hallmark of today's black intelligentsia. This uplifting,
"elevating" CD clearly answers the question Rev.
Rivers was pondering at the top of this article. And
that answer is that, unlike 100 years ago, today's black
cultural criticism is merely a performance mode for
"public" intellectuals who, while presenting their
anemic offerings as discourse on subjects like rap,
profit while they prophet.
Moreover, black cultural criticism, and the opposing
black pathology-bashing hyped by black conservatives,
are mirror images of each other. Both conveniently
mask the fact that the post-civil-rights generation
of black intellectuals has devised cynical ways to
peddle its wares to a white market. That market prefers
blacks to be either funny or dangerous, but seldom
fully formed beings who exhibit the good, the bad and
the all-too-human.