The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  Karenga claims for modern blacks not only the legacy of ancient Egypt but also that of Muhammad’s Muslim empire. He embraces wholeheartedly the myth of Andalus—the fanciful notion that Spain, and all of Europe, reached a cultural and ethical zenith during the centuries when portions of Iberia were governed by Muslims. “The Moorish empire in Spain represents not only a golden age in Islamic civilization,” Karenga writes, “but also a golden age of civilization for Africa, Europe and ultimately the world.” There follow several pages of propaganda rehearsing the familiar line about the glories of Moorish Spain and its supposed “religious tolerance and multiculturalism”—a bit of nonsense that is not leavened by even the most fleeting mention of dhimmitude, the Moors’ systematic and often brutal subordination of Christians and Jews. Karenga even respectfully cites Ivan Van Sertima’s crackpot 1976 work They Came before Columbus, which argues that Africans traveled to America in ancient times and founded the Olmec civilization. Though Karenga at least acknowledges that there are historians who disagree with Van Sertima on legitimate (in other words, nonracist) grounds and begins his account of Van Sertima’s theory by saying, with relative caution, that it “invites serious consideration,” four pages later he states without qualification that Van Sertima “has clearly shown the African presence and legacy in ancient America.” Hence, when Columbus went to America, “he found Blacks had already preceded him.”

  Karenga depicts the historical cultures of sub-Saharan Africa almost as glowingly as he does those of ancient Egypt and Moorish Spain. For example, he describes African societies of centuries ago as having pursued knowledge not just for its own sake but “for human sake” [sic]. As in the case of ancient Egypt, he is quick to dismiss any pesky factual details that might spoil his perfect picture: he deals with the central role of black Africans in the capture and sale of slaves to white Europeans and Americans—a well-established historical fact—by dismissing it out of hand. (Everything, in Karenga’s world, has to be the fault of Europeans and capitalism.) To be sure, he admits that “Africans enslaved others before the coming and demands of the European.” But this man who repeatedly hammers home the idea that black slavery in America was nothing less than a “Holocaust” essentially defends (indeed, all but praises) slavery in Africa, arguing that it was “in no way like European enslavement,” that most slaves in Africa were taken in war or were being punished for crimes, and that their slavery was less like American-style slavery than like medieval serfdom. While Karenga represents the holding of black slaves by whites as the greatest crime in human history, then, he makes ample excuses for slaveholders who happened to be black.

  Given Karenga’s presentation of African civilizations of the past as highly developed, he feels obliged to account for the continent’s current backward state. “Invariably,” he admits, “students of Black Studies raise the question of why did Africa with all its glory and achievement fall to the European advance.” His answer: Western guns, Western ships, and Western capitalism. Africans were by nature peaceful, “communalistic,” friendly to foreigners, “deeply spiritual and deferential to nature and concerned with living in harmony with it rather than conquering it”; Europeans, by contrast, were aggressive, bloodthirsty xenophobes bent on conquest. Repeatedly in this book, Karenga celebrates black “collectivity” as opposed to European individualism. Anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of the real history of Africa will recognize just how factually challenged Karenga’s image of that continent’s historic civilizations is.

  Not surprisingly, Karenga supports the reparations movement, the call for white Americans to give money to black Americans in partial compensation for the crime of slavery. Karenga’s logical inconsistency is especially manifest here: though he argues, apropos of black African participation in the slave trade, that “it is factually inaccurate and morally wrong and repulsive to indict a whole people for a Holocaust which was imposed on them and was aided by collaborators,” he would in fact “indict” all American whites today for the actions of a small minority of American whites more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Never mind that slaveholders always made up a small percentage of the white population; never mind that many white Americans today descend from soldiers who fought and died to free slaves; never mind that most white Americans today descend from immigrants who came to America after the Civil War; and never mind that some whites are themselves the descendants of slaves while some blacks aren’t. Karenga plainly doesn’t wish to face the fact that the black African “collaborators” in slavery weren’t just collaborationists, like the Dutch bureaucrats and French gendarmes who helped the Nazis—they were crucial figures in the slave trade without whom the whole business would’ve been impossible. As even Gates acknowledged in a New York Times op-ed in 2010, “90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.” Slavery was already a fact in Africa; it took commerce between black Africans and European and American whites to extend it to the West.

  Karenga’s umbrella term for the rise of Black Power and related developments is “the Reaffirmation of the 1960s”—a label he purports to find appropriate because blacks, during that decade, “reaffirmed . . . themselves as Africans” and at the same time reaffirmed a “social justice tradition” that reached “back to the ethical teachings of ancient Egypt.” He can hardly avoid writing about Martin Luther King Jr. (though he does manage to entirely omit Bayard Rustin, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Great Society), but his real enthusiasm is for people like Malcolm X and “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” head of the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad, in Karenga’s view, “broke the monopoly whites had on good and God by revealing an alternative truth and reconstructing reality in Black images and interests.” Karenga also praises the black Christian leader Albert Cleage, who “portrayed Jesus as a Black revolutionary,” “argued God is Black,” and considered blacks “God’s Chosen People.” He likewise celebrates the activist Imari Obadele, who demanded an independent black republic consisting of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. (Karenga says that this “question is still a burning one and is not solved by non-believers dismissing it as utopian.”)

  But Karenga’s biggest hero is plainly himself. While Martin Luther King Jr. gets five lines in Karenga’s index, Karenga himself (who, by the way, invented Kwanzaa and wrote the mission statement for Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March) gets nine, his Us (short for United Slaves) Organization (established in 1965 with the goal of waging “a cultural revolution”) gets three, and his “Kawaida philosophy” (on which Us was founded) gets seven. What is “Kawaida philosophy”? It’s basically a set of truisms about the need for Africans—and when Karenga uses the word, he is including African Americans—to “recover the best of their culture and use it to envision a new world and to support the struggle to bring that world into being.” (Karenga’s book contains pages and pages of such rhetoric.) For Karenga, power is all-important; he quotes himself as saying, “We must move on every level to get power. We must have an organization that thinks, acts, breathes and sleeps on the question of power.” Perhaps the most important thing to know about the Us Organization is that, to quote J. Lawrence Scholer, it “was more radical than the Panthers, setting off quarrels between the two.” Take, for example, the 1969 dispute over “the leadership of the new Afro-American Studies department at UCLA.” The Panthers and US supported different candidates; at a meeting held to discuss the standoff, “Panthers John Jerome Huggins and Alprentice Carter . . . verbally attack[ed] Karenga,” and afterward, “[t]wo US members, George and Larry Stiner, confronted Huggins and Carter in a hallway . . . and shot and killed them.” Scholer provides further biographical background:

  On September 17, 1971, Karenga was sentence
d to one to ten years in prison. . . . The charges stemmed from a May 9, 1970, incident in which Karenga and two others tortured two women who Karenga believed had tried to kill him by placing “crystals” in his food and water.

  A year later the Los Angeles Times described the events: “Deborah Jones . . . said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga . . . also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.”

  . . . Eight years later California State University at Long Beach made Karenga the head of its Black Studies Department.

  According to Karenga, an important element of Kawaida is striving after “excellence”; he repeatedly asserts that Black Studies is “rigorous,” “intellectual,” “serious,” and so on. Yet Karenga’s book is notable for its frequent sloppiness and its often spectacularly terrible prose. It is awash in elementary agreement problems, misplaced commas, and mistakes such as “Queen, New York” for Queens. (And this is, note well, the third edition of a widely used textbook.) Sample sentences:

  In addition to the stress on social justice as a core concern of politics, the emphasis on power as an indispensable element and focus is also made.

  However, the question of for what purpose do we seek power remains.

  Us has maintained since the Sixties concerning European cultural hegemony, one of the greatest powers in the world is to be able to define reality and make others accept it even when it’s to their disadvantage.

  It [slavery] also involves lifting Africans out of their own history making them a footnote and forgotten casualty in European history and thus limiting and denying their ability to speak their own special cultural truth to the world and make their own unique contribution to the forward flow of human history.

  Throughout his book, Karenga waxes poetic (or tries to) about the glories of ancient Egypt and the “Holocaust” of slavery. Black history, he writes, “is a history of ancient wonder and achievement in the Nile Valley, awesome tragedy and destruction in the Holocaust of enslavement,” and so on. “We must always be conscious,” he counsels, “of our identity as the fathers and mothers of humanity and human civilization in the Nile Valley, the sons and daughters of the Holocaust of enslavement and the authors and heirs of the Reaffirmation of our Africanness and social justice tradition in the Sixties.” And he informs his young black readers that “our culture has the most ancient of ethical traditions, the oldest ethical, spiritual and social justice texts,” and that “[w]e introduced the concept of human dignity and divine image of the human person.” Rarely has any book been so packed with vapid, repetitious platform rhetoric about “enhancing the human future,” “meaningful interaction and mutually beneficial exchanges,” and the like; continually, one finds oneself reflecting that it would be far more of a service to black American students, and to black American culture, to give them the kind of solid education that would enable at least some of them to help create a great culture than to soothe them ad nauseam with the lie that they are already great, by virtue of the supposedly monumental cultural legacy of their African forefathers and the demonstrably magnificent cultural legacy of their alleged ancestors who lived along the Nile many millennia ago. Yes, ancient Egypt, along with ancient Greece, Rome, and other civilizations of millennia ago have indeed bequeathed us a great heritage, but the things they have given us are, as Du Bois so stirringly argued, the common inheritance of all humankind, and are no reason for any of us to congratulate ourselves or relax on our laurels; on the contrary, they should be—for all of us—an object of devoted study and a source of inspiration.

  Perhaps surprisingly, Karenga actually includes a few lines in his book about “black conservatives,” though his take on them is hardly a surprise: for him, Shelby Steele and company are the despicable progeny of Booker T. Washington—blacks who seek rewards from white society for betraying their people.

  Today, there are more than eight hundred tenured Black Studies professors in the United States, and nearly one in every ten universities grants degrees in the subject. Rojas sums up the Gates era—to coin a phrase—as “characterized by a focus on legitimacy.” He feels that the field has oriented itself during these years toward more “traditional social sciences and humanities” and has thus acquired respect and stability. He also contends that “the dominant style of black studies is not overly associated with nationalism” like Karenga’s—most programs, he says, do not encourage separatist or nationalist sentiments but rather appeal to students of all colors. In Rojas’s view, Black Studies has transcended its revolutionary origins and achieved moderation, intellectual seriousness, and academic legitimacy. Yet what he seems to regard (and admire) as moderation is, by nonacademic American standards, anything but. Black Studies’ leading lights, after all, are people like Gates and West; within its walls, the ideas of people like Shelby Steele are considered anathema, and are cited only for the purpose of mockery. There is, in short, a considerable distance between Black Studies—whether it’s the Black Studies of Karenga or that of Rojas—and the black man and woman in the street. And nothing illuminates this state of affairs more vividly than the case of Bill Cosby.

  While professors like Karenga are busy indoctrinating students in strident anticapitalism and racial supremacism, and other inhabitants of the Ebony Tower are preaching only somewhat less extreme versions of the same ideology, a very different message about race has been resonating with ordinary, hardworking black Americans. In recent years, the comedian and actor Bill Cosby has been speaking to audiences in black churches and other community centers, lamenting the prevalence among black Americans of unwed teenage mothers and absentee fathers, violent and misogynistic gangsta rap, and black-on-black crime. He has been calling on young black people to reject these self-destructive social pathologies and to embrace traditional American values of self-respect and personal responsibility.

  In an Atlantic article about Cosby’s crusade, Ta-Nehisi Coates maintains that Cosby’s call for “hard work and moral reform” rather than “protests and government intervention” resonates with “conservative black Americans who are convinced that integration, and to some extent the entire liberal dream, robbed them of their natural defenses.” Coates points out that in 2004, the New York Times found that black parents in Louisville, Kentucky, the site of a historic battle over school desegregation in 1975–76, were now “more interested in educational progress than in racial parity.” Coates also cites a survey showing that 71 percent of American blacks consider rap “a bad influence.” Coates quotes lines from one of Cosby’s speeches in which the comedian assails some black Americans’ uninformed image of themselves as Africans: “We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans. They don’t know a damn thing about Africa—with names like Shaniqua, Shaliqua, Mohammed, and all that crap, and all of them are in jail.”

  Whatever one may make of Cosby’s diagnoses and prescriptions, one thing is clear: he’s no hustler. On the contrary, he’s a very rich and respected cultural figure who, by wading into these waters, only risks alienating millions of people whose affection and admiration for his work have made his fortune. Yet he’s taken this step because he recognizes that the black “leaders” of our era (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton) and the academic Black Studies establishment (Gates, West, Karenga) not only have failed to say things that need to be said, but have in many cases encouraged the kinds of pathologies Cosby is alarmed about.

  Not surprisingly, a leading black academic, Michael Eric Dyson, has taken on Cosby in a very big way. Dyson, who has taught at DePaul, the University of North Carolina, Columbia, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania, is now a professor of sociology at Georgetown University and can frequently be heard serving up commentary on NPR, CNN, and Real Time with Bill M
aher. In addition, he is an ordained minister who, in 2010, at the upscale New York restaurant Cipriani, officiated at the wedding of a deejay named La La and a pro basketball player named Carmelo Anthony, who at the time were starring in a VH1 reality series. (“The 320 guests,” according to Dyson’s Wikipedia entry, “included Justin Timberlake, Kim Kardashian, Khloe Kardashian, Lamar Odom, Ciara, Spike Lee, Ludacris, Kelly Rowland, and LeBron James.”) Dyson, it should be noted, is considered an academic star and is paid a salary in the high six figures. This means that he’s several times more handsomely compensated than many of America’s most distinguished scholars in the humanities and social sciences—or, to look at it in another way, he takes home a bigger paycheck than any dozen or so adjunct professors put together, people who are far more gifted and accomplished than he is and carry much heavier course loads.

  Over lunch in Philadelphia in 2010, Alan Charles Kors brings up the subject of Dyson, his former (and much younger) colleague at the University of Pennsylvania. “For years,” says Kors, “Dyson was the highest-paid member of the Arts and Sciences faculty at Penn.” This is an astonishing distinction for anyone as young as Dyson, no matter what his professional record. Dyson’s oeuvre, which includes books with titles like Reflecting Black, Making Malcolm, Race Rules, Between God and Gangsta Rap, Debating Race, and Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip-Hop, hardly explains his disproportionate level of compensation. “He’s a huckster,” says Kors bluntly. Kors explains that Dyson was hired by Penn’s Department of Religious Studies “to teach a course on ‘Great Religious Thinkers of the West.’ Each time around it focuses on a different figure, and over the years they’ve done Augustine, Luther, Tillich, and so forth. Dyson taught it more than once.” And whom did Dyson focus on when he taught it? Tupac Shakur. “As a great religious thinker,” Kors adds drily. After he spent a few years of teaching this sort of thing, “Georgetown offered him a higher salary which Penn couldn’t match, so he left.” Noting the tiresome predictability with which Dyson flouts what Karenga calls “traditional white studies” and shamelessly follows the latest academic fashion, Kors wonders: “What would he say if you put him on truth serum? People tend to convince themselves of the positions that are most profitable to hold.”