Stanley Crouch: Gates' Cold Shower on the Reparations Debate
[Stanley Crouch is an essayist and columnist based in New York. He has been awarded a MacArthur, a Fletcher, and was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences. The first volume of his Charlie Parker biography will appear within a year.]
In the world of slang, smack means either heroin or dung. The academy has been overrun by intellectual smack dealers for a good while, but the biggest bust of the game has just taken place.
With intellectual honesty as his intent, Henry Louis Gates Jr. set off a bomb in the black wing of "victim studies" that has long bedeviled higher education and created a lucrative arena of complaint. That is no small hustle, for there is no better business in America than the supposed consciousness raising that goes with self-help. If one is either clever or ruthless enough, a successful career can result.
Overstatement, melodrama, militant distortion and absurd academic theories have dominated the business of racial complaint since the early '60s. Then, James Baldwin and Malcolm X were sought after speakers nationwide, on and off television. One provided eloquent weeping and moaning, the other, impotent saber-rattling. Baldwin encouraged guilt for a long tradition of injustice, the X man terrified as a conveniently impotent boogey monster in the horror movie of race. Intentionally or not, each became an entertainer.
Money and attention are a big part of the interest in such careers. Aspirants have discovered the demographic importance of sanctimonious and hostile pronouncements that resulted in a serious cottage industry specializing in fertilizer for intellectual weeds. The irony is that weeds are not always grown.
Read entire article at The Root
In the world of slang, smack means either heroin or dung. The academy has been overrun by intellectual smack dealers for a good while, but the biggest bust of the game has just taken place.
With intellectual honesty as his intent, Henry Louis Gates Jr. set off a bomb in the black wing of "victim studies" that has long bedeviled higher education and created a lucrative arena of complaint. That is no small hustle, for there is no better business in America than the supposed consciousness raising that goes with self-help. If one is either clever or ruthless enough, a successful career can result.
Overstatement, melodrama, militant distortion and absurd academic theories have dominated the business of racial complaint since the early '60s. Then, James Baldwin and Malcolm X were sought after speakers nationwide, on and off television. One provided eloquent weeping and moaning, the other, impotent saber-rattling. Baldwin encouraged guilt for a long tradition of injustice, the X man terrified as a conveniently impotent boogey monster in the horror movie of race. Intentionally or not, each became an entertainer.
Money and attention are a big part of the interest in such careers. Aspirants have discovered the demographic importance of sanctimonious and hostile pronouncements that resulted in a serious cottage industry specializing in fertilizer for intellectual weeds. The irony is that weeds are not always grown.
Related Links
- Kwabena Akurang-Parry: Some Perspectives on Henry Louis Gates's Reparations
- Stanley Crouch: Gates' Cold Shower on the Reparations Debate
- Ta-Nehisi Coates: What is Skip Gates Thinking?
- David Beito: Henry Louis Gates Jr. Making Sense on Ending the"Slavery Blame-Game."
- Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game