Life
The role of black intellectuals – too much talk, not enough action?
By: Marsha Coleman-Adebayo
Cornel West wrote in 1985 that the black intellectual was “caught between an insolent American society and an insouciant black community.”
Twenty-seven years later, with a black president in office his words have the insistence of a drum roll. We see President Barack Obama battered by the harsh racism of a Republican right in Congress that is prepared to paralyze government and harm the nation if it means defying his attempts at reform. Insolence has never been more insulting.
And while the black community certainly does not have the blithe unconcern that completes the meaning of insouciant, they certainly are not doing much to interrogate their own conditions. We hear pastors of African American church congregations across the south still tell parishioners that Barack “is the chosen one.’ The parishioners repeat it to each other, any criticism of such a deified man would surely be treason?
And yet the prisons bulge with African American men, the Washington Post told us as the year ended that in the Washington area, African American students were suspended and expelled two to five times as often as whites.
