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Books by Houston Baker, Jr.
Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader
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Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s /
Black Studies, Rap and the Academy
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
/
Workings of the Sprit:
The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing
Blues, Ideology and
Afro-American Literature /
Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned
the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era
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Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the
Ideals of the Civil Rights Era
Reviewing Houston A. Baker's
Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the
Ideals of the Civil Rights Era
Overview
Houston A. Baker
Jr. condemns those black intellectuals who, he believes,
have turned their backs on the tradition of racial
activism in America. These individuals choose personal
gain over the interests of the black majority, whether
they are espousing neoconservative positions that
distort the contours of contemporary social and
political dynamics or abandoning race as an important
issue in the study of American literature and culture.
Most important, they do a disservice to the legacy of W.
E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and others who
have fought for black rights.
In the literature, speeches, and academic and public
behavior of some black intellectuals in the past quarter
century, Baker identifies a "hungry generation" eager
for power, respect, and money. Baker critiques his own
impoverished childhood in the "Little Africa" section of
Louisville, Kentucky, to understand the shaping of this
new public figure. He also revisits classical sites of
African American literary and historical criticism and
critique. Baker devotes chapters to the writing and
thought of such black academic superstars as Cornel
West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.;
Hoover Institution senior fellow Shelby Steele; Yale law
professor Stephen Carter; and Manhattan Institute fellow
John McWhorter. His provocative investigation into their
disingenuous posturing exposes what Baker deems a tragic
betrayal of King's legacy.
Baker concludes with a discussion of American myth and
the role of the U.S. prison-industrial complex in the
"disappearing" of blacks. Baker claims King would have
criticized these black intellectuals for not
persistently raising their voices against a private
prison system that incarcerates so many men and women of
color. To remedy this situation, Baker urges black
intellectuals to forge both sacred and secular
connections with local communities and rededicate
themselves to social responsibility. As he sees it, the
mission of the black intellectual today is not to do
great things but to do specific, racially based work
that is in the interest of the black majority.—Columbia
* * * * *
Houston A
Baker: The Betrayal of Black Intellectuals
(Interview)
Download MP3!
Professor
Houston Baker joined us in the second hour of the
show this week to discuss the ways in which leading
Black intellectuals have “abandoned the ideals of the
Civil Rights era.” We discussed this, Obama’s impact
and more. What ideals have been betrayed and in what
ways? Is there a viable Black political and/or
intellectual leadership in the public sphere? What is
missing from the perspective of political organization?
And what if the Tea Party was Black? Check it out and
join the discussion!—VoxUnion
* * * * *
Introduction
Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have
Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era
By Houston A.
Baker
(excerpt)
The first home I remember was in “Little Africa.” Little
Africa was in Louisville, Kentucky. It was a seemingly
endless tangle of unpaved streets and makeshift houses
isolated in the deep west end of the city. It was a
bleak compound of blackness where white faces were as
rare as unicorns. Everyone did some kind of work. But
their jobs were usually under the radar of anything
resembling a decent, living wage; jobs were part-time,
nonunion, unregulated, one-shot seasonal, or domestic
moneymakers. Paychecks and their nets were as
unpredictable as English weather.
Little Africa was not cohesively working class in the
manner of Allentown, Pennsylvania, during its boom
years, or Brooklyn, New York, in its rags-to-riches
American fantasy. There were not a lot of mythic success
stories in our world. In Little Africa, “Give us, Lord,
our daily bread” was not a summons for a heavenly
handout, but an earnest, quotidian prayer for ten cents
to purchase a loaf of Bond Bread from my family’s store,
Baker’s Market.
Baker’s Market was a solidly framed and brightly painted
place—my mother and father had secured its title through
sheer moxie. The store’s previous (white) owner had
grown tired of marginal profits and other downsides of
conducting business in the ghetto. My father, with his
solid business acumen and savvy ear to rounds of the
black world, got an inside tip about the owner’s
dissatisfaction and acted on it.
My mother and father were among the select number of
African Americans of their generation privileged to earn
not only bachelors but also advanced graduate degrees.
They were blessed and aided by the generous backing of
my maternal grandparents in purchasing their first home
and, I suspect, in their acquisition of Baker’s Market.
I did not know in my youth that we Bakers were
differently gifted from the general population of Little
Africa. To my young mind, my parents’ bearing toward and
relationship with their clientele offered no hint of
class tension. Their avoidance of displays of assumed
superiority made a great deal of sense. They knew that
in segregated Louisville, Kentucky, there were few
places where they could establish a successful black
business. Little Africa was one such locale, and
alienating customers through condescension would have
been the most extreme folly. But in retrospect, I know
my family’s situation was markedly different from that
of others in Little Africa. My parents, after all, owned
the grocery store; they also had significant educational
and business reserves to fall back on. Still, the fact
that their ownership and business options in a
segregated Louisville, Kentucky, were limited to the
black ghetto made their advantages seem slightly more
than window dressing in the defining economies of race
and class in America—especially the American South.
We moved to Little Africa in 1951. I was eight years
old. Our house (my first remembered home) was a
one-story frame dwelling. It was only about seven
hundred square feet, divided into four small bedrooms
and one tiny bath. But it had electricity and ample
insulation, and my older brother and I luxuriously
shared one bedroom reserved for us. The house had been
built by my maternal grandfather and a cousin. It was
located just behind Baker’s Market. Next door, my friend
Dewy, who was a master of all things mechanical and
thought up the best games, lived with his large family
in a dilapidated structure lit by coal oil lamps and
lacking indoor plumbing. To the rear, Mr. Johnson raised
hogs in a small, grassy enclosure he referred to as his
“stockyard.” When breezes were mischievous, we shared
more of Mr. Johnson’s stockyard than we wished.
I knew the geography of Little Africa by scent and
sense. I listened hour by hour and day by day to black
people. I’m sure if someone dropped me off back in
Little Africa today, I could still walk its geographies
and share its storied textures with the bearing of a
native. But we of Little Africa were “inside” a place
that Louisville’s ordinary white people knew was
scarcely fit for dignified human habitation—not even
close to an amply resourced American citizenship.
Certainly any ordinary white citizen, after overcoming
initial shock at the bleak mayhem of our lives, would
have concluded we must have done something incomparably
evil to deserve such a fate as to be in Little Africa.
After all, there are so many who believe that the poor,
as a result solely of their own deviance, will always be
a burden to society. This seems to remain a conservative
American conviction with respect to places like Little
Africa.
Louisville’s daily, segregated life (in combination with
its saturate air of bourbon and tobacco) was a
frightening whirr of bullies (both black and white) and
soul-killing violence. I shuddered with dark premonition
that I might—in the blink of a southern segregationist
eye—be run over by something, shot by somebody, stopped
and searched at random, punched squarely in the face for
no reason. Irrational as those fears now seem, I suspect
there was something in my subconscious apprehension of
Little Africa that reinforced such trepidation. Even at
that young age I knew that fear and trembling are not
abnormal responses to the terrors of white supremacy:
Jim Crow, colonial malfeasance, apartheid brutality.
Inside Little Africa—locked within the black vale and
veil of desolation—we learned lessons not only in
humility, resistance, and holiness, but also the
rudiments of a justified terror before the worst
offenses of “whiteness” in America. Perhaps pioneering
American frontier dwellers might have felt something
akin to that fearful caution known to the denizens of
Little Africa. Every prairie occasion in the Old West
was, after all, a challenge to bizarre notions of a
violent manhood; the frontier was bloodily exclusionary
in its definitions of national citizenship and human
well-being (ask the few remaining American Indians). I
want to clear up one semantic notion at this point.
There is no such thing as second-class citizenship. The
phrase is a nonsense utterance. Either one is a citizen,
or one is not. Exclusion is a flagrant denial of
citizenship.
I know my youth in segregated Louisville scarred me in
permanent ways—ways that contradict any kind of glibly
disingenuous assertion that oppression leaves no
permanent mark upon the oppressed. The psychological
effect of white supremacy in the United States is
irreversible, and, in my view, unforgivable. No late
apologetics can erase mental terror and tangible scars.
If not the mind, the body always remembers. Much like
the Afro-American writer Richard Wright during his
Mississippi youth, I lived childhood in a haze of
anxiety, confusion, and dread. My early days were spent
in a state of constant emergency. My spirit and
imagination were enduringly under assault by white power
in its myriad dimensions.
The abject struggle for daily bread in Little Africa was
like flame to a tinderbox. It spawned frustration and
produced an impulsive need to strike out at whatever was
nearby, at hand. Everyone in the compound was, of
course, black. Therefore, it was permanently the case
that someone black seemed always ready in my youth to
maim, cut, shoot, or mutilate some other black one,
equally desperate, locked in the cell of Little Africa’s
labyrinth of misery. Frantz Fanon speaks of the “native”
who tolerates from dawn to dusk white superiority and
abuse, but then, in the shantytown black bar after dark
reacts with unmeasured violence against a fellow black
for the most trivial of offenses. Fanon is concerned
with the psychology of such black violence.
Economically, one might be compelled to ask: Where can
the native vent his rage and hope to stay alive but in a
place like Little Africa? White supremacy contains
native violence in its own compounds by killing natives
or locking them away—permanently.
Baker’s Market was one of the few commercial
establishments that broke the winding networks of
unpaved roads and derelict houses in Little Africa.
Lights were almost always on; windows shone with neon
Pabst Blue Ribbon and Falls City signs casting deep blue
and sharp red into the night. The store stayed open late
on weekends (especially payday Fridays and “out to play”
Saturdays) and it boasted one of the few pay phones
within a mile radius.
Bloodied warriors of segregated life in America, with
blood-dripping hands, heads, arms, and faces swathed in
tattered towels and bundled rags often swept into the
store, making a beeline to the pay phone. They dialed
the police (infrequently), an ambulance (out of
unequivocal necessity), or a loved one (most frequently)
to come and help them out. I remember my cousin
Raymond—the man who helped build our house in Little
Africa—leaping over the counter on one occasion, tearing
off his apron, tying it around the hemorrhaging arm of
an improbably large brown man who seemed utterly
astonished that someone had bested him in a brawl at
Dixon’s Tavern. Dixon’s was a mile or so up the road
from our store. Surely its owner’s business world was as
dramatically marked by violence as my family’s.
Less bloody, but no less harrowing, were the stories of
white violence that flew into the store on the lips of
black men, women, and children who had journeyed outside
into the white city. Being called “Nigger!” was common,
as though such wounding hate speech was an acceptable
way to treat human beings. Being bloodied by rocks and
bottles hurled from the cars of whites, or roundly told
to get their “nigger brats” out of the waiting rooms of
General Hospital or Union Station were the tales blacks
frequently recounted in Baker’s Market. There were
stories, as well, of deeply uncaring white absentee
violence. As I turned the labels of canned goods to the
front of shelves in the market, I often heard: “They cut
off my phone, my lights, and my water . . . just because
I missed one damn bill!” The reply in support: “I know
what you mean, man . . . ’cause my wages done been
garnished.” And then with a sigh of weary resignation
from another: “Just ’cause I couldn’t pay that no-good
bloodsucker his rent for February, he put us out! Damn!”
Little Africa was plagued by the violence of American
white supremacist economic uncaring. And it was not
spare in its tales of the resulting wounds to the black
body and spirit. It resonantly told its stories to my
youth. In black gospel lore, the return upon such
economic uncaring rings melodiously forth: “I’m a’gonna
tell about how you treat me one of these days!” And I
shall.
Misery, bloodshed, poverty, despair, and violence were
staples of the Little Africa residents who frequented
Baker’s Market, and of the community as a whole. I did
not learn to love black life under segregation in
Louisville, Kentucky. No, I did not. I developed a
bizarre and incurable form of black American
agoraphobia, a deep and lasting anxiety and distrust of
outside American spaces.
By the black majority I intend to signal those
populations of African, African American, Negro, and
colored descent in the United States who inhabit the
most wretched states, spaces, and places of our national
geography. I mean those who live in census tracks where
more than 40 percent of the population exists at or
beneath the poverty line and unemployment is rampant. I
call to mind and keep in the forefront of concern those
black men, women, and children who have little hope of
bettering their life chances through any simply (perhaps
even “plausibly”) available means, from laboring at jobs
with inhumanely low minimum wage pay or bare subsistence
day-to-day combat with what vestiges remain of an
American security net. The black majority is the almost
inevitably exposed, severely policed, desperately
underresourced contingent of the African American
population currently resident in the United States.
The black majority
is indubitably the majority of Afro-America at the
present time. For we must also bring to the forefront as
part of that majority, those black families of four who
are considered by the census middle class when their
annual, pretax income is as modest as fifty thousand
dollars. This modest-income-defined black middle class,
in fact, draws the interests of the black majority
squarely into accord with American constituencies that
are not of color. Which is to say, middle-class whites
who once endorsed and actually were able to live the
American dream have found themselves nearly completely
abandoned—if not literally dispossessed—by the policies
of the conservative federal plutocracy that has ruled
the United States for the past three decades. Hence, the
black middle class is—to paraphrase an observation by
Richard Wright—“America’s metaphor.” Wright averred that
as the black majority goes, so goes the nation. There
is, therefore, much at stake in attending to the
interests and committing oneself to the enablement of
the black majority. In a sense, one can surely say those
who fail the black majority at the present time are
unequivocally in league with the ruling white elites who
have destroyed not only the middle class but also so
much more that is fundamental to the founding ideals of
our nation.
What “community” means against the backdrop of the
physical, mental, spatial, and emotional deprivation
that marks black life in America is, I think, stark
necessity, brilliant ingenuity, compelling imagination,
unimaginable fortitude, and stern commitment to ideals
forged in the fire of chattel slavery and Jim Crow’s
unforgivable inhumanity. My mother was my own first
instructor in community. She was the model and exemplar.
My father was but a hair’s breadth behind.
As a businessman, my father naturally wanted to make a
profit. The reason he thought he would fare better than
the white owner from whom he purchased the store in
Little Africa was that he was actually going to live
(and persuade his wife and family to live) in the locale
from which his profits derived. (A kind of Lincoln
Heights precursor was he.) His first step was to have
our family home built behind the store. No absenteeism
would do for my father. Second, my father viewed Baker’s
Market as a critical resource for a black community
blighted by neglect. He was an “uplift” disciple of
Booker T. Washington’s heroic Tuskegee dispensations,
focused in his own way on black people farthest down.
“Always speak to people,” he instructed my older brother
and me. “Everyone deserves your respect.” And he was
true to his teaching words. He brought some pretty
bizarre and terribly inefficient black men and women
into our family life in the name of race and respect.
Like “Don,” the self-styled down-on-his-luck black
plumber who left Baker’s Market flooded one cold weekend
long ago. There were handymen who commenced repairs with
less-than-substantial materials, disappeared for weeks
on end, then miraculously reappeared to finish a job and
collect their pay.
In black American life and culture a race man or race
woman is one who dedicates his or her life and work to
countering the lies, ideological evasions, and
pretensions to “innocence” and “equal justice for all”
that prop up America’s deeply embedded, systemic, and
institutionalized racism. Race men and race women (which
I consolidate, and at the same time, I think, usefully
expand to the term “race people”) seek remedy for harms
to the black body caused by the gospel and practice of
white supremacy. Race people contest an ideologically
inspired and profit-hungry white power structure that
still maintains and reaps scandalous billions of dollars
from a traffic in and enslavement of black bodies in the
Americas. (Today’s slavery is disguised as criminal
justice in the form of a vast American private
prison-industrial complex.) Race people model themselves
as sharers of a culture, cause, and community held to be
of African descent and labeled variously “African,”
“colored,” “Negro,” “black,” “Afro-American,” “African
American.” These are the selfsame people the
precociously brilliant poet-essayist Amiri Baraka hailed
as “blues people.” Often patterning their labors after
biblical prophets, race people commit themselves to a
mobile, resounding, fierce redefinition of the state of
race and the race in a troubled American nation. They do
this in the very face of race’s most brutal exclusions.
When they are granted or when they secure public voice,
they use their forum to advocate the interests of what
they define as “their race” at its majority level.
Select black individuals may achieve fame—and a growing
black middle class may work profitably at race-oriented
and affirmative action–induced jobs. Elite blacks may
even find themselves subjects for glossy, high-end
magazines such as Ebony, Sports Illustrated, and
Essence. But to state the unequivocal once again, the
race reaps virtually no benefit from the bling of a
black celebrity “elite” that is often more damning in
its condemnation of the black American majority than
white America at large. Where the majority is concerned,
any real (consumable) public gains or advancement in
America must provide nourishment for all; there must be
a collective harvest. The life and legacy of Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. are rich in acknowledged commitment to
the advance of the race as a whole, as well as to race
as a valued and valuable category for the analysis of
American life and history.
Little Africa and the incumbencies of my parents as race
people thus open this book. This is autobiography, and I
feel obliged to note that one advance reader of this
manuscript asked, “What has Little Africa got to do with
anything that follows in the book?” By way of answer I
suggest that the most adept analytical traditions of
black intellectual critique in America often privilege
autobiography. Autobiography in black American
intellectual traditions has always assumed a huge burden
of evidence and carried a special explanatory power with
respect to race and community. Autobiography has been a
mainstay of black critical memory from time immemorial,
manifesting a preservative reverence for verifiable
historical facts as they have been filtered through the
alembic of personal consciousness and conscience. In the
black world, the self-story has served as self-defense
against white supremacy’s claims to know, statistically
regulate, and police who precisely we are, and where we
must live. It is this autobiographical tradition of
memory, self-defense, and critique that I invoke with
word of Little Africa. When I use the phrase “black
majority,” I refer to those globally ghettoized in
Little Africas that are subservient always to interests
of white power.
Here is what the
famous Kerner Commission, charged with investigating
causes of urban rioting and black community disorder in
the 1960s concluded: “What white Americans have never
fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is
that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto.
White institutions created it, white institutions
maintain it, and white society condones it.”1 This
statement of fact is a capsule account of what I have
called an outside relentlessly pushing the black world
into Little Africa. And I believe it is most effectively
self-story—black autobiographical critique—that
evidences and provides witness with respect to the
subordinating effects of white supremacy in the
creation, and condoning, of Little Africa. This is, in
part, my answer to the query: What has Little Africa (by
which I take my interlocutor to mean autobiography) got
to do with anything that follows in the book?
Now certainly, autobiography in itself does not
guarantee analytical adequacy. That is to say, it is
always problematic to base one’s claims of critical
accuracy exclusively on the evidence of one’s own life.
Even the most intellectually astute partisans of the
self-story have expressed reservations: “Autobiographies
. . . assume too much or too little: too much in
assuming that one’s own life has greatly influenced the
world; too little in the reticences, repressions and
distortions which come because men do not dare to be
absolutely frank.” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote these words.
In Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a
Race Concept he insists his life is not significant in
itself, but only insofar as it is part of a “problem”:
the great global ignominy of the subordination of the
“darker races of the world” by the lighter ones. Despite
his autobiographical caveat, however, Du Bois resolutely
situates his thoughts, speculations, analyses,
reflections, and conclusions within a personal field of
experience. In fairness, one must note that the sage of
Great Barrington—as others were wont to label Du
Bois—self-consciously refused to be reticent about men,
events, ideas, theories, and crises that were decidedly
outside his youthful ken.
What most
distinguishes Du Bois’s autobiographical scholarly
labors in many instances is his candid admission that
only time, scholarly labor, and fortune brought him an
awareness of who precisely he was as a personal self. In
a sense, then, Du Bois acknowledges that the
personal-autobiographical is always after the fact and
avant la lettre. The alchemy and attraction of
autobiography as a platform for critique, that is to
say, consists not so much in claims for a special
knowing that accrues to the writer simply from his
living in the welter of the world. The real gold
standard and most useful autobiographical critique, Du
Bois seems to hold, results from the catalytic
combination of personal recall and scholarly endeavor.
The personal really only becomes effectively political
or critical through disinterested study. Therefore, it
does not make much sense from a Du Boisian perspective
for a writer to assert, “I know it because I lived it.”
Living is not enough. We come fully to possess our
rounded personal histories only through the play of the
intellect and imagination over the wisdom and witness of
the world.
I summon Du Bois here because his analysis and
demonstration of the virtues and liabilities of
autobiographical critique are nonpareil. Hence, I take
Du Bois’s cautions seriously. I do not commence the
present project with memories of Little Africa to claim
some special existential knowledge based on personal
experience alone. Rather, I invoke the world of my first
personal memory as a metonym for certain registers of
majority life whose significance it has taken me years
to understand. World forces did in fact condition the
bleakness of black life in the quarter of the “Negro” in
Louisville, Kentucky. And I have spent almost half a
century brooding over the men, theories, ideas, and
events that, in effect, created all the Little Africas
of the globe. I have indisputably learned that the
significance of my life does not lie in some
mythological ideal of rugged individualism or stout
fantasy of self-reliance. No, the personal in my case is
clearly a function of parents who seized the temper of a
collective black American consciousness and instilled in
their children allegiance not to self but to the
interests of the black majority.
Source:
Columbia University Press
* * * * *
Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the
Ideals of the Civil Rights Era
Reviews
Baker, an esteemed
scholar of African American literature and culture, is
deeply frustrated with the state of—or, rather, the lack
of—racial activism today. Part of the blame rests with
contemporary neoconservatives, who Baker claims have
sabotaged the civil rights and black power movements by
promoting racial injustice under a banner of social
equality. But Baker is most bothered by prominent black
intellectuals who purport to advance the civil rights
movement even though, in Baker’s eyes, their ultimate
aspirations and resultant political strategies diverge
radically and even counterproductively from those of
Martin Luther King Jr. In fiery chapters on each
scholar, Baker lambastes Cornel West, Michael Eric
Dyson, Shelby Steele, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and others
for disingenuous politics, centrism, and above all the
vainglorious pursuit of academic and political influence
at the expense of the broader “black majority,” who
still suffer from social and economic injustice.
Mourning the loss of black unityborn of the communal
struggles of the 1960s, Baker expresses his
disappointment by pulling no punches with his fellow
scholars, a sure recipe for equally harsh rebuttals.—Brendan
Driscoll, Booklist
* * * * *
Baker succeeds in making his
case... How fitting that Baker offers not just words
here but action too.—Erin
Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
* * * * *
A courageous book, raising much
needed questions in this our brave new world.—Lolis Eric Elie, The Times-Picayune
* * * * *
"I highly recommend this
exceptional work of scholarship, for it is worth the
price of the ticket.—Hanes
Walton Jr., Political Science Quarterly
* * * * *
Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the
Ideals of the Civil Rights Era
is a vernacular broadside, brave and funny by turns.
Houston A. Baker Jr. has written as cantankerous and
eloquent a defense of the legacies of the civil rights
movement as one is likely to find anywhere. With
relentless irony, he bares the narcissism, trickery, and
entrepreneurial doublethink of neocon America,
especially its black representatives. Neither do the
black academostars of the Ivy League escape his wrath,
sharing as they do the neocon analysis that the agony of
being black in America has to do with 'pathological'
behavior rather than brutal structural inequalities. An
urgent and persuasive book.—Timothy
Brennan, University of Minnesota, and author of Wars
of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right
* * * * *
Biography
Houston A. Baker,
Jr. is a native of Louisville, Kentucky. He received his
BA (Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa) from Howard
University. He received his MA and Ph.D. degrees from
UCLA. He has taught at Yale, the University of Virginia,
the University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University.
Currently, he is Distinguished University Professor and
Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He has
served as Editor of American Literature, the oldest and
most prestigious journal in American Literary Studies.
Professor Baker
began his career as a scholar of British Victorian
Literature, but made a career shift to the study of
Afro-American Literature and Culture. He has published
or edited more than twenty books. He is the author of
more than eighty articles, essays, and reviews. His most
recent books include Turning South Again: Re-Thinking
Modernism, Re-Reading Booker T and I Don’t Hate the
South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South.
His critique of black public intellectuals titled
Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the
Ideals of the Civil Rights Era is
scheduled for release in 2008.
Professor Baker is
a published poet whose most recent volume is titled
Passing Over. He has served in a number of
administrative and institutional posts, including the
1992 Presidency of the Modern Language Association of
America. His honors include Guggenheim, John Hay
Whitney, and Rockefeller Fellowships, as well as a
number of honorary degrees from American colleges and
universities.—SiteMason
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Gates' Lawyer Challenges 'The Presumption Of Guilt'
Listen to the Story
In 2009, Harvard University
professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested in front of his
home in Cambridge, Mass. on charges of disorderly conduct. The
charges were dismissed four days later but one of the first
people Gates called after his arrest was his colleague at
Harvard, Charles Ogletree.
The Presumption Of Guilt is Ogletree's book about the
arrest and its aftermath. In it he argues that the incident
should serve as a lesson on the abuse of power by police, and
law enforcement's systemic suspicions about black men.
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The Eyes of Willie McGee
A
Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South
By Alex Heard
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Unedited video supports Sherrod’s claim
she wasn't racist—The
full, uncut video of a federal
agricultural official's NAACP speech
purporting racial scheming, told a
different story than the
barely-three-minute snippet that cost
her her job. Despite admitting in the
edited version of the taping that
she once withheld help to the couple on
the basis of race, Shirley Sherrod was
defended Tuesday by the wife of a white
Georgia farmer. Sherrod, "kept us out of
bankruptcy," said Eloise Spooner, 82, of
Iron City in southwest Georgia. Spooner,
in an interview with The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, added she
considers Sherrod a "friend for life."
She and her husband, Roger Spooner,
approached Sherrod for help in 1986 when
Sherrod worked for a nonprofit that
assisted farmers.
Sherrod, who is African-American, was
asked to resign Monday night by a USDA
official after videotaped comments she
made in March at a local NAACP banquet
surfaced on the Web
Atlanta Journal
/
NAACP /
Politico /
Politico 2 |
 |
* * *
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* * * * *
 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
Michelle_Alexander Part
II Democracy Now
(Video)
Bill Moyers Journal: Bryan Stevenson and
Michelle Alexander /
Michelle Alexander: US Prisons, The New
Jim Crow
* *
* * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/ January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
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posted 20 July 2010
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