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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2003
Black/Red ViewToday's 'talented tenth'
by John Alan During February's Black History Month celebration, the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE published an illustrated article, "Meet the next generation of African-American achievers." Among the CHRONICLE’S selection of a half dozen Black intellectuals and cultural achievers was Henry Louis Gates Jr., head of Harvard's Black Studies Department. According to the CHRONICLE, Gates has "taken black culture to the masses through PBS documentaries, a best seller, A BOND WOMAN’S NARRATIVE, the NEW YORKER profiles, and a vibrant web site, Africans.com." However, the article didn't explore Gates' opinion about the inseparability of the African-American culture from the general culture of American civilization. In other words the article avoided the dialectical process by which these two cultures became the culture of America. BLACK ELITE'S BIG HOPES Gates is the W. E. B. DuBois Professor of Humanities at Harvard University. He once considered himself a representative of the "talented tenth" and a "member of the crossover generation" of African Americans that would go into big time politics or become presidents of big corporations. Gates didn't go directly into the political economy of capitalism. Instead he proposed that the "remnants of DuBois's 'talented tenth' should assume a renewed leadership role...within the black community" to solve the many problems of poverty and social dislocation of African Americans. Gates' resurrection of DuBois' late 19th century concept of a "talented tenth" leading Blacks to freedom, seems to indicate that he has purged his memory of the history of the Civil Rights Movement, which arose without (and sometimes in direct opposition to) the leadership of the "talented tenth." COMPARISON TO DUBOIS FALLS SHORT In fact, more than 50 years ago DuBois himself severely criticized the limits of a talented tenth leadership in an address he gave at Wilberforce University to an African-American audience of doctors, lawyers, college presidents and businessmen. In August 1948 he told that audience that "Karl Marx stressed the fact that not merely the upper class but the mass of men were the real people of the world." Therefore, DuBois said, "my Talented Tenth must be more than talented, and work not simply as individuals [but] to sacrifice and plan for such economic revolution in industry and just distribution of wealth, as would make the rise of our group possible" (quote in David Levering Lewis' biography of W. E. B. DuBois, p. 538). Such declarations don't prove that DuBois understood the revolutionary philosophy of Marx, but they do show that he knew that the unchained activity of the African-American masses is crucial in any struggle against racism and the social and physical brutality needed to maintain it. The middle-class African-American audience did not appreciate this and "left him sitting alone on a campus bench" after the talk. Although DuBois, who was educated at Harvard and the University of Berlin, did grasp the internal conservatism lurking in a majority of African-American intellectuals back then, his criticism hasn't brought about any great change in the thoughts or in the activities of most of the African Americans connected with the stellar universities of this country today. CULTURE OF FREEDOM, OR GAIN? For example Henry Louis Gates Jr., in THE FUTURE OF THE RACE, a book he co-wrote with Cornel West, claims: "The nature and size of this new black middle class is significant here because of what it says about patronage and the economics of black art: whereas the Harlem Renaissance writers were almost totally dependent upon the whim of white patrons who marketed their work to the predominantly white readership, the sales of some of the most phenomenally successful black authors (such as Terry McMillan, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker) are being sustained to an unprecedented degree by black readers." Here Gates becomes irrational. On one hand, he transforms a social condition of poverty into an economic agent that creates monetary profits for white publishing companies and some royalties for Black writers. And then he, consciously or unconsciously, demeans the historic Harlem Renaissance as if it was a hidden white agenda and not really the birth of a new Black self-consciousness, itself aware of the great role that African Americans played in creating the universal culture of this American civilization. Gates, at Harvard, is a manifestation of the culture. Intellectuals at Harvard can entertain ideas of a self-sustaining independent Black culture. However culture comes out of the life and struggles of people fighting for freedom, who in the process create culture that speaks to all and sustains everyone's aspiration for freedom. African-American culture can and has become universal by this process. But an attempt to separate culture from its source in the struggle for freedom is doomed to make it no more than an intellectual exercise that fits into the bourgeois world without solving any of the problems of poverty and social dislocation. |
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