Crisis of the Black Intellectual (review)

It has been forty-two years since Harold Cruse's scintillating critique of the Black intellectual: the 1967 treatise The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Imitatively named, Crisis of the Black Intellectual by W. D. Wright examines the continued absence of the Black intellectual's intelligibility on matters of racism and race. Wright asserts that these are indeed different things, and should be treated as semantic matters. Further, Wright argues, it is the mission of the Black intellectual to translate the Black experience and offer practical solutions and ideas to the Black community. Failure to do so has created a space for Wright's shouting as both a Black man and a Black intellectual.

Crisis is 369 pages deep with an "Author's Note," seven chapters, two appendices: "Ancient Kemet and Judaism and Christianity" and "Prolegomenon," references, a selected bibliography, and an index. The anatomy of the text will be dissected accordingly, with meaty and selected offerings acting as representations of Wright's polemic.

In the half page, unnumbered section "Author's Note," Wright explores the use of the terms "black," "white," and "racism: white supremacy and ebonicism" as a cheat sheet and perhaps a disclaimer as to how his terms are to be used. These terms are then expounded throughout the book in seven chapters beginning with "Introduction: Revisitation and Beyond." The chapters in Crisis build on each other (such as chapters four or five), or can stand alone as essays tethered by the common premise: the crisis of the Black intellectuals is their failure to articulate and translate the Black experience to the Black (and surrounding) communities at large.

Wright opens with why Harold Cruse wrote his 1967 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and it takes only three to four pages before the reader notes the invocation of James Baldwin, E. Franklin Frazier, Nathan Hare, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., etc. Still, it is not until the book's sub-section "Black Public Intellectuals" that we get the acerbic and rather mordant rhetoric of Wright. "If anything," he states, "today's Black public intellectuals should be associated with that historically racist tradition of white people thinking and feeling that they have the right to own Black people, including Black intellectuals, or to own the consequences of that ownership" (18). Crisis attempts to "blacklist" the Black intellectuals, citing their current irrelevance and failure to translate the Black experience.

In chapter 2, "Racism and Race: Lolling and Lumbering in an Intellectual Wasteland," Wright opens with the failure of the Black intellectuals' rhetorical ability to communicate, to explain in lucid means the idea of racism and race. Further, he calls their attempts a failure, but not a "failure due to incompetence" (27). In other words, the education is there, but the ability to decipher each phenomenon has proven a more difficult pill to swallow as the present intellectuals arm themselves with rather obfuscated rhetoric. In short, they confuse and quibble over racism and race, but get the meaning behind each phenomenon incorrect.

Wright focuses on Cornel West, one of his Black intellectual targets throughout the book, also discussing what he claims are the shortcomings of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. According to Wright in his critique of West: "when it comes to the subjects of racism and race, his thinking and writing . . . shows the same confusion other Black intellectuals have about racism and race and exhibits the same kind of inadequate racist analysis" (29). Wright argues that "In The Future of the Race, and in other writings, Gates's thinking on these matters is just as blurred" (30). Again, Wright argues that racism and race are treated as dialectic, not as having distinction. Of course, this is incorrect. Wright then offers an example from the past in this present ambiguity of racism and race nomenclature. He looks to Frederick Douglass, and asserts: "He [Douglass] made the argument that Black people did not suffer in America because of their race, but because of the racism of white people, which I refer to as white supremacy/ebonicism...