The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  Gates’s most celebrated work, and a cornerstone of Black Studies, is The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988). He claims that the ideas developed in the book are based on the “critical practice” of Ralph Ellison—the towering black novelist and thinker whose 1952 novel Invisible Man is one of the great American classics, and who is in some ways too conservative for the taste of many Black Studies professors—as well as on the “revisionary techniques of parody and pastiche” pioneered by the more radical black novelist Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo). Holding up both Ellison and Reed as role models is itself something of a tightrope walk.

  The Signifying Monkey, in Gates’s words, “explores the relation of the black vernacular tradition to the Afro-American literary tradition” and “attempts to identify a theory of criticism that is inscribed within the black vernacular tradition and that in turn informs the shape of the Afro-American literary tradition.” Gates leads the reader into a rather dense forest of “theory” based on “two signal trickster figures, Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey [the former a Yoruba figure, the latter Afro-American], in whose myths are registered certain principles of both formal language use and its interpretation” that he professes to find reflected in black literature. Among Gates’s main points are that “[r]epetition and revision are fundamental to black artistic forms, from painting and sculpture to music and language use,” that “black formal repetition always repeats with a difference, a black difference that manifests itself in specific language use,” and that “[f]ree of the white person’s gaze, black people created their own unique vernacular structures and relished in the double play that these forms bore to white forms.” Gates notes—in yet another example of ingenious tightrope-walking—that the “notion of double-voiced discourse” that is central to the critical method he employs in the book is at once “related to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of narrative” and “also indigenously African.”

  This is not valuable scholarship, in that it does not unearth new facts, and it is not valuable criticism, because it does not bring a fresh, illuminating perspective to the material at hand. What it is, is a brilliantly strategic bringing together of postmodern jargon and big postmodern names (such as Bakhtin) with previously established insights about African and African American literature. The point is not to bring new insight to these literatures but to suggest that there are important continuities between postmodern theory and African and African American literature. In other words, Gates isn’t bringing anything of substance to the table here—he’s just putting things together in such a way as to allow Black Studies practitioners to feel more intellectually formidable and au courant and to give postmodern “theorists” the ivory-tower equivalent of street cred. What he’s doing in this book, in other words, is an accomplishment more of academic politics than of scholarship or criticism—and it’s ultimately more about Gates himself than about anything else. For Gates wants us to see that he, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes—that he’s intellectually and culturally capacious enough to build an edifice upon the foundations of both Ellison and Reed, both postmodernism and Black Studies. That edifice, of course, being Gates himself.

  Shelby Steele isn’t the only black intellectual who has criticized Gates—though most of the others have done it from the left. In a 2006 book titled A Companion to African-American Studies, Hazel V. Carby, a professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale, cites Adam Begley’s description of Gates, in a 1990 New York Times Magazine profile titled “Black Studies’ New Star,” as practicing an “entrepreneurial P. T. Barnumism.” Carby, who shares the view that Gates is an attention-grabbing showman, disdains him for this, complaining that all the attention Gates has directed to himself keeps other Black Studies scholars from getting the notice they deserve. (She also argues that Gates’s appearance in a New Yorker ad for the IBM ThinkPad “attests to the presence of capitalism as a universal world system.”)

  In the same book, Martin Kilson, an emeritus professor of government at Harvard and a faculty member there for four decades, recalls that when Black Studies first came to Harvard, he, like Steele, argued “that new faculty members teaching the Black Studies curricula should be selected out of established humanities and social science disciplines—literary studies, English, philosophy, history, political science, sociology, economics, etc.” But Harvard’s African and Afro-American Students Association disagreed: “They favored instead a faculty appointed solely to teach the Afro-American Studies curriculum.” They won. Kilson, because he didn’t like this setup, ended up being tagged as an opponent of Black Studies. Apparently in response to this, Kilson is eager to demonstrate his progressive credentials and to distinguish himself from Steele, dismissing as “bizarre” the objection by Steele and other “conservative Black intellectuals” to “Black-ethnic activist mobilization.” Yet he shares Steele’s view of Gates, calling him “a top-rank academic-entrepreneurial Black scholar” who “exhibits a keen grasp of the salience of what might be called the ‘self-promotion ethos.’”

  Kilson says, moreover, that Gates’s claim that “Afro-American Studies [at Harvard] was dead” when Gates came on the scene in 1990 “is not only incorrect” but also an unfair put-down of those who were there before Gates: “It just so happened—a matter of serendipity—that with the new Neil Rudenstine Harvard administration in 1990 came a fundamentally new, assertively pro-Afro-American Studies outlook at the center of Harvard University.” Kilson says that Gates’s put-down of his predecessors “tells us something fundamental about the salience and character of the ‘self-promotion ethos’ in his academic-entrepreneur persona, I suggest.” Having, in his view, been wrongly branded as an opponent of that revolutionary discipline, Black Studies, Kilson attempts here to flip things around, depicting himself as the “progressive” and Gates as a man with “establishmentarian” ties who has engaged in “tacky . . . self-promotion and pandering for conservative public favor.” (In his comments on Gates, Kilson repeats the word pander or pandering several times.) He concludes: “As a leftist Black intellectual who embraces a keen belief in Black people’s honor, I’ve always looked with dubious eyes on Gates’s obsessive combining of the self-promotion ethos and establishmentarian linkages in the hope thereby to maximize benefits as a Black academic-entrepreneur intellectual.”

  Apropos of Gates’s hustling, Steele sighs, “My whole generation has gone down that road.” Expert hustlers like Gates, he says, are what his generation of black intellectuals has instead of substantial artists and thinkers like Ellison. “We don’t have any Ralph Ellison in my generation. We don’t even have any James Baldwin, whom I disagreed with in many ways but whose talent I have enormous respect for. We don’t have that. We have bean counters.” And it all happened because “identity studies seduced this generation.”

  If Gates is the indisputable top dog in contemporary Black Studies, number two is almost surely Cornel West. The differences between the two men are reflected in their appearance: Gates cultivates a distinguished look, with a neatly trimmed, professorial beard; West sports an Afro and a shaggy beard and mustache that bring to mind a 1960s Black Panther. Though he wears suits, they tend to be snazzy and close-fitting, making him look less like a member of an Ivy League faculty than like, say, a professional magician. And while Gates conducts himself like a serious man of letters, West sports a huge, goofy, gap-toothed grin and seeks to come off as an irreverent, street-savvy cutup. Gates writes scholarly tomes in dense academic prose; West bangs out chatty, shortish books aimed at the general reader. And while Gates largely confines himself to respectable scholarly activities, West has thrown himself into a range of pop-culture endeavors, such as appearing in the second and third Matrix movies and recording rap CDs. (On May 28, 2010, Bill Maher introduced West, a frequent guest on his TV program Real Time, as “author, actor, professor at Princeton University, and rapper.”) Unlike Gates, West is not very likely to turn to either Ralph
Ellison or Ishmael Reed as a touchstone of the best of African American culture. In his view, “there are two organic intellectual traditions in African American life: the black Christian tradition of preaching and the black musical tradition of performance”; no black writer or literary intellectual, he maintains, has ever equaled, say, Louis Armstrong. (The sole, majestic exception is Toni Morrison, whom West celebrates, along with other “black diasporan women,” for having enabled “postmodern black intellectuals” to shape “a new cultural politics of difference.”)

  In 2000, while teaching at Harvard, West was famously called in by then university president Lawrence Summers, who questioned some of West’s activities—among them his rapping, his involvement in Al Sharpton’s presidential campaign, and his allegedly easy grading—and also brought up West’s failure to produce any scholarly or critical work of substance. Given the number of unemployed Ph.D.s and adjunct professors around the United States who would give their eyeteeth for such a position, and whose gifts and accomplishments certainly merit such an appointment more than West’s do, one can understand Summers’s concern. Yet West was outraged and insulted, insisting that all his nonacademic activities constituted acts of teaching, for they were all means of reaching the general public with his “ideas.” In 2002 he allowed himself to be wooed away to Princeton, where he had received his Ph.D.; he was given a joint appointment in religion and African American Studies, and the university president was reportedly very happy to have him. In 2011, it was announced that West would take up a position the next year at Union Theological Seminary.

  West’s most celebrated books are Race Matters (1993) and Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1994). In the latter, he favorably compares life in contemporary Ethiopia to America’s “hedonistic culture and market-driven society”; talks about the disappointment of “black folk” with America (yet resolves to continue to “struggle for human dignity and existential democracy”); serves up a sizable helping of scare rhetoric about the “escalating xenophobias against people of color, Jews, women, gays, lesbians and the elderly” in today’s “highly commercialized North Atlantic capitalist cultures”; attacks the “WASP” Arnoldian canon; and aligns himself with what he sees as criticisms of the “WASP establishment” mounted by a progressive coalition of “African Americans, Latino/a Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans and American women” employing theories of “the Frankfurt school (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer), French/Italian Marxisms (Sartre, Althusser, Lefebvre, Gramsci), structuralisms (Lévi-Strauss, Todorov) and poststructuralisms (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault)” while revising American history “in light of the struggles of white male workers, women, African Americans, Native Americans, Latino/a Americans, gays and lesbians.” (Reading this as a gay man, I feel as if I’m being herded into a square in Pyongyang to participate in a “spontaneous” pro-government demonstration in which I didn’t ask to take part.)

  West presents himself, then, as being at war with the Western cultural establishment and as rejecting “people of color” who embrace “the Booker T. Temptation” by involving themselves “with the mainstream and its legitimizing power.” Which is not to say that he identifies with Booker T. Washington’s antagonist, W. E. B. Du Bois, either, because he also condemns the Du Boisian “Talented Tenth Seduction, namely, a move toward arrogant group insularity.” For good measure, he also washes his hands of individualism, which he describes as the “Go It Alone Option.” The fourth option, and the one he identifies with, is that of being “a Critical Organic Catalyst. By this I mean a person who stays attuned to the best of what the mainstream has to offer . . . yet maintains a grounding in affirming and enabling subcultures of criticism.” He has another way of putting this: he has chosen to be a practitioner of “demystification” or “prophetic criticism.” In other words, he’s a prophet. This approach, he suggests, is “appropriate for the new cultural politics of difference—because while it begins with social structural analyses it also makes explicit its moral and political aims.” He cites Louis Armstrong, Martin Luther King Jr., and (rather confusingly, given West’s rejection of his “Talented Tenth Seduction”) Du Bois as forerunners of this approach, which he says is equally open to the creations of Beethoven and Stevie Wonder, Picasso and Spike Lee. Some might argue that the teaching of critical thinking involves making distinctions between, say, Beethoven and Spike Lee; but those who feel strongly about such matters would be best advised not to send their children to study under Cornel West.

  He is frequently interviewed on TV about a variety of subjects—social problems, Obama’s Nobel Prize—but whatever the question, his answers tend to be self-referential, drawing attention to his own role as a critical “prophet,” and to employ the same handful of catchphrases (America is divided into “vanilla suburbs and chocolate cities” and needs to be more “Socratic and prophetic”). The talks he gives at universities are sermons, delivered in energetic, black-church style, that begin with sweeping rhetoric, drawing on Plato and Shakespeare, about “the unexamined life” and “what it means to be human,” and that then narrow in on the proper role of educated Americans in our time: we are obliged, he urges his audiences, to “think critically,” to engage in “critical patriotism,” to “question presuppositions [and] surrender prejudice,” to “challenge conformism” and “contest dogmas” and bear “prophetic witness.” Sounds good. But for all his talk of bold contrarianism, virtually everything he spouts is received academic opinion; for all his rhetoric about the importance of being challenged, none of his student audiences are challenged by anything he says—for he’s giving them exactly what they want, reaffirming the very orthodoxies they’ve been fed from day one by their humanities professors. He calls on his listeners to “contest dogmas” but then adds that he means “dogmas like white supremacy, dogmas like male supremacy, dogmas like class privilege”—a list that is itself an affirmation of reigning academic dogma about race, gender, and class. West’s incantatory style and his frequent collegial references to biblical prophets conceal the fact that pretty much everything he has to say is a contemporary academic cliché.

  As an example of the common practice in Black Studies of celebrating blacks for actions and accomplishments that would be condemned if the people in question were white, West, in the preface to Keeping Faith, writes proudly of his mother-in-law’s membership in “one of the great families of Ethiopia”—great because she is a descendant of the “leader of the Oromo people, who wedded the sister of Menelik II, the nineteenth-century creator of modern Ethiopia,” and because she once “owned thousands of acres of land” before it was confiscated “under the communist regime.” Interesting words from a man who is otherwise not in the habit of smiling on inherited fortunes, titles, and estates; but of course it all depends, apparently, on the color of the people who possess those fortunes, titles, and estates.

  If Gates and West are among the leading figures in Black Studies, the leading textbook in the field, as noted, is Introduction to Black Studies by Karenga (born Ron Everett), the 1979 publication of which has been described by Asante as one of the “defining moments” in Black Studies. Karenga, who from 1989 to 2002 was the chairman of Afro Studies at California State University, is not shy about his book’s importance, noting at the outset of the third edition (2002) that it has occupied “a pre-eminent position among introductory texts in the discipline . . . since it was first published.” Karenga defines Black Studies as “an area of critical intellectual study and an instrument of social change in the interest of African and human good,” and though he acknowledges that it originated in the 1960s, he is quick to add that “[s]ome scholars . . . argue that Black Studies began in ancient societies like ancient Egypt, Mali and Songhay[,] which clearly established an intellectual tradition of study of themselves.”

  Indeed, while most serious Egyptologists would deny that today’s sub-Saharan Africans and black Americans are the descendants of ancient Egyptians—or would at the ver
y least advise extreme prudence in asserting such a connection—Karenga throws all caution to the winds, presenting as indisputable Cheikh Anta Diop’s notorious arguments in Nations nègres et culture (1954) and later works “for the African or Black character of Egypt” and citing Diop and others to the effect that ancient Egyptians originated in black Ethiopia. Karenga does not so much as hint at the nature of the rather strong case against these claims. Ancient Egypt’s “real history,” he insists, “reveals a debt to Africa that Eurocentric and racist thinking can neither concede nor accept”—in other words, those who dispute this dubious “history” are, quite simply, motivated by racism. Karenga is prone to making sweepingly grand statements not only about the significance of ancient Egyptian culture in the shaping of black culture right up to the present day but also about the supreme greatness of ancient Egyptian culture itself and its incomparable influence on all of human civilization (arguing, for example, for “the contribution of Egyptian to Greek philosophy”). For Karenga, in short, it is a well-nigh religiously held belief that today’s blacks are the descendants of ancient Egyptians and that the culture of ancient Egypt is the earliest and by far the most important foundation for the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa and of the black diaspora—and the true origin of many of the Western ideas and values that are more traditionally viewed as having been bequeathed to us by the ancient Greeks. To put it bluntly, Karenga has put all his eggs in one basket: if Egypt isn’t “black,” then his entire conception of black heritage collapses utterly.

  There’s no disputing, of course, that ancient Egypt had one of the world’s great civilizations. But for Karenga this isn’t sufficient: he routinely inflates the facts, proffering a long list of items that make up “the legacy of Egypt” and “Egyptian values,” many of them, at best, questionable or exaggerated. (For example, he states, untruthfully, that ancient Egyptians “were aware of blood circulation.”) Though in many ways, furthermore, the ancient Egyptians were indeed more socially and culturally advanced than many other ancient civilizations, Karenga ascribes to them a profound social consciousness—and, in order to keep from complicating his rosy picture, soft-pedals the fact that they held slaves and utterly rejects the idea that those slaves built the pyramids.