The End(s) of African-American Studies

I have been asked a million times what [I'm] doing for the black community. . . . My whole life is a commitment to the black community. That's the truth--and that's what I respond. My work is in African American studies. Who else is that for if not primarily the black community?

Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Head Negro in Charge"

Whether or not one is inclined to credit Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s apologia pro vita sua, the familiarity of the question and the plausibility of his response point up what has become a common way of understanding at least one facet of black-white racial inequality in the US. In this view, many of those social ills commonly tracked by racial classification (e.g., numbers of families living below the poverty line, numbers of births among unwed teenage mothers, rates of incarceration, rates of infant mortality, etc.) persist largely because of the failure of black leaders and intellectuals to fulfill their moral, political, and cultural responsibilities to the racial group as a whole. The black middle classes--and the intelligentsia that they have produced--stand accused of pursuing their own selfish ends and thereby shirking their world historical mission. As Harold Cruse acerbically put the case in 1967, "The middle classes of Harlem that furnish community leadership are neither sovereign nor solvent; neither independent nor autonomous. They thrive on the crumbs granted them by the power structure for keeping the unruly masses mollified" (90). And having settled for crumbs, these purported leaders presumably have nothing to disburse to the impoverished black classes below them.

Critiques of this sort generally remark on growing class divisions within the nation's black population, often blaming the black middle class for its own estrangement from those traditions or cultural heritages credited with having sustained a more cohesive and vital black community under slavery and through legal segregation. Although I began with Cruse, one could easily cite numerous other and even earlier examples of this line of critique. Among them one can count Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926) and E. Franklin Frazier's touchstone study The Black Bourgeoisie (1957). To begin with the latter, Frazier held that what was most important about "the emergence of the black bourgeoisie" was:"the uprooting of this stratum of the Negro population from its 'racial' traditions or, more specifically, from its folk background. As the result of the break with its cultural past, the black bourgeoisie is without cultural roots in either the Negro world with which it refuses to identify, or the white world which refuses to permit the black bourgeoisie to share its life" (24). Painting a bleak picture of middle-class deracination, Frazier was devastating in his estimation of that class's leadership aspirations. Likewise, Hughes's essay, which preceded Frazier's study by three decades, lamented the lack of cultural leadership from a middle class that had succumbed to the "urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible" (692).

And while recent manifestations of this line of critique are similarly scathing in their assessments of the black middle class, they are unlike the arguments put forth by Hughes and Frazier in being even bleaker in their appraisals of black Americans living at or below the poverty level. For example, in seeking to rally black intellectuals from their political dereliction, the Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III astonishingly declared in 1994 that "[s]ome 40 years after the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, younger Black Americans are now growing up unqualified even for slavery" ("Beyond the Nationalism") Rivers then buttressed his social libel with an array of statistics including the frequency of drug use, the prevalence of sexually transmitted disease, and rates of imprisonment. While Rivers's characterizations may at first appear extreme, they...