Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
In your opinion, what's the current state of American intellectualism?
American intellectuals are busy writing their hearts out and conversing away, but the real function of intellectualism is to be a broader conversation with the public and particularly with political life. That's clearly where we as Americans seem to be diverging from an intellectual tradition. Intellectualism is disparaged as elitist. I'm thinking particularly of the slashing of the budget of the National Science Foundation, or the stacking of scientific review committees with industry people so that you manipulate the facts to come out the way you want, or the failure to collect data in any number of realms -- that worries me a lot. I don't think this is just a matter of religious fundamentalism, to which it's frequently attributed. I think it's a broader way in which believing something because you want it to be so has replaced research, reservation, caution and critique.
What did you think about Bill Cosby's inflammatory comments on the anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education? Among other things, he said, "In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on ... They're buying things for the kid. $500 sneakers, for what? They won't buy or spend $250 on 'Hooked on Phonics.'"
There was such a brouhaha about what Bill Cosby said about anti-intellectualism in the black community. I disagreed with the way in which he presented that. I actually thought that the more interesting point was that we Americans are undergoing the very anti-intellectualism that he seemed to limit only to the black community. Then again, maybe he wanted to make a point to one community, but I think it let too many people off the hook to say, "See? You black people just don't study hard enough!" This was against a backdrop of a political discussion in which people were saying that one of the presidential candidates speaks in paragraphs that are too long, and that the other is a populist -- not because he supports populist programs but because [of his] malapropisms and because he speaks in split infinitives!
From your family history, we learn about the educated black upper-middle class of the early 1900s. However, this segment of society is not often mentioned as part of America's demography -- as you put it, they're "hidden pockets of history."
There is an ambivalence about that generation. The beneficent gift of education to that class came about because of the generosity of the people who formerly owned them. It's the same situation as Strom Thurmond paying for his black daughter's education. Educating the mistresses' children is always a complicated phenomenon. In the wake of slavery there were missionary schools, schools set up for African-Americans, and the historically black colleges were set up, but it was by and large for the children of a certain -- not class. It's complicated to call it upper class, because often it was not accompanied by a great amount of money; you were upper class in the black community, but the actual salary you earned was way below that of working-class whites. That was part of an invisible dual structure of class; it overlapped with skin color. When you start talking about that it scratches the surface of this deep, horrible history of "colorism," as it's called in the black community, and it overlaps with people like my great-aunt Mary, who really couldn't be bear being black and who disdained her blackness.
A lot of black history gets lost. It's just uninteresting to a larger audience. I was thinking as I was going through books that my godmother left me that there are cycles of literature: There was the Frederick Douglass generation, the W.E.B. Du Bois generation, the Harlem Renaissance, the Richard Wright era, the black-power writers, then the public intellectuals. Now there's a new crop of hip, young artists coming up. But it is as though people forget about that history, that literature, the intellectual voice of African-American culture. It goes in cycles of almost every 20 years, then it gets disparaged, and it's terrible and nobody talks about it and you become this cipher for all things stupid. But then somebody "discovers" that there's a Toni Morrison.
I think that the device by which this is consistently buried and not a permanent part of our history has to do with the fact that African-American contributions to American society -- African-American brainpower, intellectualism, science, math ability as well as literary and art ability -- are always figured as exceptional. The notion of exceptionalism buries us cyclically.
In the book, you attribute your accomplishments as "proceeding from intergenerational gifts of learning from progressively well-educated family members." You then go on to explain that your relatives were "beneficiaries of a world that did not then hoard learning like water in the desert." How is education being "hoarded" today? How do class and race factor into that?
People tend to separate the African-American crisis of access to education from the general American crisis of access to education. There has been a real decline in the quality of education for all of us, whites and blacks. There have been several cycles of destroying our public school education: One was pulling resources out of public schools in the wake of white flight (particularly in the urban North) after migration from the South in the '60s and '70s of blacks to the inner city. But the second was the sort of tax withdrawal, so that you have a system like California's. When I first graduated from law school and moved to California, California had the No. 1 public school system and university system in the country; but it is now at the bottom because they purposefully took money out of it. They destroyed it. Yes, home schooling is fine, and yes, there are private schools. But if that's what we rely on, we rely on something less than a notion of universal access and something other than a system that unsettles a class system. If private schools and home schooling are all we have, we have a much more static society, rooted in generational class stasis.
