Minds That Mattered
By Ann Douglas
Sunday, November 17, 1996
William M. Banks, a professor of African-American studies at the University of California at Berkeley, has written what the historian John Hope Franklin claims in his foreword is the first "comprehensive, overall history of African-American intellectuals," a topic attracting heated debate in recent years. But it surely will not be the last such history.
In approaching Bank's book, one should remember that the terms "black intellectual" and even "intellectual" are both of fairly recent origin as mainstream categories. The former dates from the 1960s, most visibly from Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual; the latter from the 1930s and 1940s, when it was used for the largely Jewish intellectuals who worked as critics at the New Masses, Partisan Review and other New York periodicals. This is hardly to say there were no intellectuals before 1930.
To my mind, the most crippling aspect of the current discussion of the intellectual's role is the refusal of those engaged in it to look at the writers and artists who preceded the 1930s group. James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Constance Rourke, and Gilbert Seldes, all brilliant cultural commentators who started out as writers in the 1920s or earlier, felt no need to advertise their diagnostic or descriptive skills under the label of "intellectual," but they presented a witty, eloquent, searching and many-sided analysis of American culture still unequaled in our annals.
Once such pre-1930s figures are taken into account, the conventional description of the "intellectual" -- as (at least until recently) usually male, usually white, and often an impassioned, heavily blinkered defender of the elite arts against the crass temptations of mass culture -- is exposed as a myth, a myth serving, as all myths do, the political purposes of those most directly involved in its creation. As it was conceived in the 1930s, the term "intellectual" signified, among other things, a will to power masquerading as critical insight. The "intellectual" was not born but made, and there is no reason we should content ourselves today with such restrictive notions and definitions about those who most strikingly illuminate our cultural situation.
Thankfully, Banks does not, and he is to be congratulated for giving consideration to African Americans from the 1920s and before like Hurston, Langston Hughes, Frances E.W. Harper and Charles Chestnutt, often remembered today simply as artists rather than as the formidable intellectual authorities they also were. Despite his sometimes painfully limited skills in addressing music and literature, Banks at least knows that the American intellectual was not only often black but often a woman, an artist and a dedicated fan of popular culture -- a realm, after all, that African Americans have dominated for most of this century. Indeed, following writer Albert Murray, Banks suggests in passing that black musicians like Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Dinah Washington not only preceded black intellectuals in visibility and recognized authority but may also offer them strategies for political and cultural leadership.
Unfortunately, Banks does not always rise to the challenge of his subject. He defines the intellectual broadly and vaguely as someone who is "reflective and critical, who act[s] self-consciously to transmit, modify, create ideas and culture," and he gives us a 200-year overview that is sometimes deficient in dramatic power, telling detail and rigorous analysis, an account that surprises as often by its omissions as by its insights. There is no consideration, for instance, of the later careers of W.E.B. DuBois and Richard Wright, still perhaps black America's most astonishing theorists of race and culture, both of whom developed an increasing commitment to thinking internationally and diasporically about people of color. Wright's earlier, striking commentary on the task and role of the intellectual, one I take to be an originating moment for Banks's subject, is likewise ignored.
In a radio interview of December 1941, Wright explained why black writers, unlike white ones, are of necessity, even "in spite of" themselves, "intellectuals," people who, in his definition, "handle" and critique "the basic assumptions of men." Unlike the white author, the black writer, in Wright's words, "can take nothing for granted." Theodore Dreiser could get his sociology from Spencer and his realism from Zola, but the black novelist must be "his own research-worker, his own psychologist." He can't trust "the so-called experts" because in the West the experts are always white and all their thinking is tainted by their inevitable attempt, largely invisible to themselves and to their white readers, to "justify" the West's treatment of the Negro and other people of color.
The black artist, simply in order to create, has to rethink and test all conventional knowledge, for he knows, as his white peer does not, that all knowledge to some degree reflects the biases of those who produce it. To Wright, this was a way of saying that black writers and thinkers -- whether, like Wright and DuBois, from the United States or, like Wright's friends C.L.R. James and Kwame Nkrumah, from the Caribbean and Africa -- now constituted the intellectual avant-garde of the West and quite possibly of the world. Despite a widespread belief that, in Toni Morrison's words, "critics generally don't associate black people with ideas," in Wright's view intellectual authority had shifted hands as early as the World War II era, though most of the West refused to see, much less acknowledge, the fact.
Banks has no comparable grasp or synthesis of his subject, but his book is still at moments a compelling one. Black Intellectuals comes alive in its last third, when Banks presents his sometimes revelatory interviews with a wide range of contemporary black intellectuals, most notably playwright Adrienne Kennedy, historian Nell Painter, and critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. Through these interviews, Banks skillfully and fair-mindedly explores the tensions between black and Jewish intellectuals, a topic key to his enterprise, since the two most powerful and sometimes irreconcilable formulations of the American intellectual's role have been largely Jewish and black.
Hostilities between the two groups have been exacerbated, in Banks's telling, by the suspect eagerness with which the white public has accepted Jews as authorities on blacks while refusing to consider blacks as authorities on Jews, or even on themselves. Commenting on a tendency among some of today's black intellectuals to prefer creative autonomy to the time-honored task of serving as "race advocates," Banks reveals his own commitment to an intelligently modified version of race responsibility, a "groundedness" in race, which he sees as part of the inspiration for the greatest acts of black self-expression past and present.
He quotes Harold Cruse's remark that if blacks don't study and theorize the conditions of their race, (largely Jewish) white writers will. Banks also notes shrewdly that the public preference today for minority memoirs, such as Shelby Steele's The Content Of Our Character (1991), over black-authored broad critiques of race by Lani Guinier and Derrick Bell is evidence of a society backtracking from earlier and better commitments, refusing its political obligations by turning to "something simpler -- one person's story," a remark that could be extended to cover the present rage for memoirs from all of America's ethnic groups, including its WASP elite.
Banks reminds us that what he takes to be the defection of some black writers to a less color-conscious ethos of individual self-expression laden with broadly humanist, inclusivist connotations is all too welcome to their white peers, many of whom "embrace the universalistic idea" of culture in order to "deny the lasting significance of race in American society." At such moments, Banks looks at his subject with admirable sobriety and penetration. Whether one agrees with his point of view or not, he should be accorded our full attention.
Ann Douglas teaches Ethnic Studies at Columbia University and is the author of "Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s."
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
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