THE FUTURE OF OUR RACE
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West


Has there always been such a great debate about what is so often called “the crisis in African-American leadership?” It would seem so. Substitute “black” or “Negro” or “colored” or even “freedmen” for “African-American,” and the argument may well stretch back to the days of Frederick Douglass and beyond.

Of course, an awful lot of this passing-of-judgment on the nature of African-American leadership is being done by folks who aren't actually African-Americans. This seems to be accepted as the natural order of things, but doesn’t it appear a little odd? After all, how does the Chinese community choose its leaders? Or the Jewish community? Does anybody other than Chinese or Jews know? And while we've been inundated with discussion about the role of New Hampshire in picking the President, I haven’t the faintest idea as to how the white folk up in Nashua pick their own community leaders. The details of other communities’ leadership seem not to worry or fascinate us a'tall. But somehow, the choosing of African American leaders has come to be something of a national community property, the subject of talk-show debate, newspaper editorials, and “Time” and “Newsweek” covers.

I wonder why that is?

Whatever the case, it's always nice when African-Americans themselves jump into the discussion. Especially when those African Americans are two of the nation’s more prominent scholars: Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Dr. Cornel West, both of Harvard University. More especially when these distinguished doctor-thinkers take as their point of reference one of the theories of the pre-eminent African-American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the original leaders of the oldest civil rights organization in America: the NAACP. One opens “The Future Of The Race” with the hope that this honorable cast of characters might help African-Americans gain some better insight and direction in the task of choosing their leadership, and thus give the rest of the nation one less thing to worry about.

A shame, then, that Drs. Gates and West couldn't manage to keep to the point.

“The Future Of Our Race” is like being at one of those campus-area coffe-house conversations that go on until all hours of the night. You leave mighty impressed with all the references to the learned theories and texts and with the many wonderful new words you learned, but walking home afterward in the cool dawn you realize nothing of substance was settled at all or, actually, even dealt with.

The springboard of “Future” is Dr. Du Bois' controversial theory of looking to the black "Talented Tenth" for African-American leadership.

When Yankee soldiers broke the back of the main Confederate Army at Appomatox and the institution of American slavery formally came to an end, millions of former African captives were set adrift in uneasy, unwelcome, and unforgiving American sea. This was two generations before the establishment of the New Deal’s social “safety nets,” three generations before the civil rights movement ended overt, anti-black racism as an acceptable national practice. During the second half of the nineteenth century, most African-American freedmen could still neither read, or write, or count money. They were at the mercy of unscrupulous businessmen, landowners, and demagogues...both of their own race and of the white race.

It was during this period that Du Bois called for African-American leadership to be developed solely and exclusively within the top echelon of the race...that portion of the race which had the most money, were the best educated, and possessed the greatest access to white culture. He called this black elite the “Talented Tenth.” “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men,” he wrote in 1903. “The problem of education, then, among the Negroes...is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”

Such a theory bears serious discussion and analysis in the mid-1990’s, what with a black race drifting toward economic and social disaster, and with a huge segment of its youth just wannabein’ like Mike...Jordan or Jackson, you take your pick.

But despite the fact that their book purports to “analyze, and reinterpret for our generations, the great writings of the black past, showing how they continue to speak to us today,” professors Gates and West present two individually-written essays that are simply an exercise in academic babbling.
Gates’ effort is by far the worst. He calls his essay “an autobiographical account of the triumph and tragedies of the generation of young blacks who attended historically white institutions...in the late sixties and early seventies.” In fact, it is merely some musings on his undergraduate days at Yale, particularly his intellectual infactuation with two brilliant black student leaders who turn out to be busts in the real world. This is not even interesting stuff, unless you’re a fan of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

West, at least, talks less about his own experiences and more about Du Bois:

“My fundamental problem with Du Bois is his inadequate grasp of the tragicomic sense of life--a refusal candidly to confront the sheer absurdity of the human condition. ... Du Bois’ inability to immerse himself in black everyday life precluded his access to the distinctive black tragicomic sense and black encounter with the absurd. He certainly saw, analyzed, and empathized with black sadness, sorrow, and suffering. But he didn’t feel it in his bones deeply enough, nor was he intellectually open enough to position himself alongside the sorrowful, suffering, yet striving ordinary black folk. ... [H]e was reluctant to learn fundamental lessons about life--and about himself--from [ordinary black folk]. Such lessons would have required that he--at least momentarily--believe that they were or might be as wise, insightful, and “advanced” as he; and this he could not do.”

What West is either unable or unwilling to do is to address in his essay what DuBois addressed: the issue of where African-American leadership should come from. West rejects Du Bois’ “Talented Tenth,” charging that “by and large [they will] procure a stronger foothold in the well-paid professional managerial sectors of the global economy and more and more will become intoxicated with the felicities of a parvenu bourgeois existence.” My! But, then, should African-American leadership come from hustlers and street people, the “lumpenproletariat,” as once advoctated by Malcolm X and later by the Black Panther Party? Or from the black working class, as both black trade unionists and black Marxist-Leninists believe? Or from the thinning ranks of the black church? Or from other black religious institutions, such as the Nation of Islam? Or from black elected officials? And what are the leadership implications of last October’s Million Man March? West doesn’t say.

Perhaps we can infer from these two essays that African-American leadership will not soon come from academia. Or maybe that’s too harsh a judgment from so slim an investigation. Whatever.

Anyways, unencumbered by any offering on the issue from Dr. Gates and Dr. West...at least not in this book...the national debate goes on.