Degradation of the black body and anti-institutional black politics have been rehashed in debate and the public sphere for decades, assuming proprietorship over institutions is necessary

(Adolph, "What are the Drums Saying, Booker?": The Curious Role of the Black Public Intellectual, The Village Voice)

More significantly, the public intellectuals’ style has baleful effects on the scholarly examination of black American life. In rejecting all considerations of standards of evidence and argument as expressions of naive positivism, the cultural politicians get to make the story up as they go along. Graduate students can figure out that this gambit has two very attractive features: it drastically reduces the quantity of digging and thinking one has to do, and it clears the path to public visibility and academic recognition. Of course, it’s not as if black public intellectuals were the only hustlers in an academic world largely defined by the politics of reputation; and all in all it’s good that black people are getting paid, too. So why should anyone be concerned? The answer is that the public intellectuals cohere around a more or less deceptively conservative politics that is particularly dangerous at this moment in our history. Political conservatism is fundamental to the Black Voice busi-ness now no less than in 1895, and Stanley Crouch and Shelby Steele have shown that it is sometimes the sole requirement. One can qualify for the job only by giving white opinion makers a heavy dose of what they want to hear. Gates didn’t get to be a world- class Black Voice until he denounced the bogey of “black anti- Semitism” all over the op-ed page of The Mew York Times and went on to reassure Forbes's readership, that “yes, there is a culture of poverty,” calling up the image of a “sixteen-year-old mother, a thirty-two-year-old grandmother and a forty-eight-year-old greatgrandmother,” noting for good measure that “It’s also true that not everyone in any society wants to work, that not all people are equally motivated. There! Was that so hard to say?” He has since secured his public intellectuality in a series of essays in The New Republic and elsewhere whose main point is to endorse the “vital center,” and he extols the lost Jim Crow world in Colored People, a memoir that could have been tided Up From Slavery on Lake Wobegon. West’s conservative moralism and victim blaming has made him Bill Bradley’s favorite conduit to the Mind of the Negro and a hit on the business school lecture circuit. Most insidious, though, is the retrograde sham that masquerades as a leftist “cultural politics.” Rather than an alternative, deep structural “infra” politics, as Kelley and others contend, the cultural politics focus is a quietistic alternative to real political analysis. It boils down to nothing more than an insistence that authentic, meaningful political engagement for black Americans is expressed not in relation to the institutions of public authority—the state—or the workplace—but in the clandestine significance assigned to apparently apolitical rituals. Black people, according to this logic, don’t mobilize through overt collective action. They do it surreptitiously when they look like they’re just dancing, or as a colleague of mine ironically described it, “dressing for resistance.” In a Journal of American History article, supposedly about black working- class opposition, Kelley asks rhetorically: “If a worker turns to a root doctor or prayer rather than to a labor union to make an employer less evil, is that ‘false consciousness’?” He compares a conjuror’s power favorably to that of the CIO, the Populists, and theNAACP. This is don’t-worry, be-happy politics. Resistance flows from life by definition. There is no need to try to create it because it’s all around us; all we have to do is change the way we define things. Then we can just celebrate the people’s spontaneous infrapolitics and show white people how to find it and point out to them that Gramscianism is an African survival. We can make radical politics by climbing the tenure ladder and feeling good about our collective black selves through the pride of vicarious identification with the embedded theoretical sophistication of the folk. Worst of all, though, the black public intellectual stance derives from and presumes a condition of political demobilization. And for good reason. The posture of the Racial Voice requires—and, as the centennial of Washington’s perfidy should remind us, helps to produce—a black population that is disfranchised and incapable of articulating its own agendas as a citizenry. Thus the black intellectuals’ insistence on defining politics centered in the exercise of state power as inauthentic, which in turn underwrites all the Aesopian interpretive twaddle in black cultural studies. (Interestingly, in chastising proponents of codes prohibiting hate speech, Gates has complained self-righteously about an identity politics that pays no attention to public policy. His point would go down better if it came with a little self-criticism from one whose scholarly reputation— supposedly the source of his prominence—is based on precisely the view that he disparages.) Before disfranchisement in the South black people didn’t have to express their politics surreptitiously; they crafted and fought to realize their agendas through public policy, and after disfranchisement they fought for sixty years to be reenfranchised so they could do it again. And the record of overt black political action outside the South is unbroken. What the current environment demands from black intellectuals who would comment on public affairs is not more whining about disparagement of the “black body” in Western culture (as if that were news) or examination of representations of representations or noodling about how, if we apply the right spin, everything black people do is resistance to oppression. And most of all there is no need for interpretations that presume an uncomplicated, conveniently mute black reality; there’s already a surfeit of analysis propelled by the collective black subject—“black people want, feel, etc.” As is true on the left generally, what is desperately called for is stimulation of informed discussion among black Americans, and between blacks and others, that presumes proprietorship of the institutions of governance and policy processes on an identical basis with other citizens and aims at crafting agendas that define and realize black interests accordingly. We should be in the forefront of the fight against ratification of the balanced budget amendment, crafting responses to so-called tort reform, fighting corporate globalization, and finding ways to counter the assault on the Bill of Rights. The cultural politicians1 fixation on youth definitively illustrates their bankruptcy. Not only are young people the least connected, the most alienated, and the least politically attentive cohort of the black population, they’re also the ones whites are most interested in. “Willie, why do they have those welfare babies? What must we do so that they won’t take my car stereo?” What a felicitous coincidence. (85-90)