What if you brought together over 100 of the world’s most innovative thinkers at one roundtable…and then asked them (simultaneously) to answer 100 questions culled from thousands submitted from all over the world?
What if the responses were videotaped and available over the net?
I finally got a chance to read Juan Williams’ new book Enough. I was telling my man Cobb that I didn’t expect much. I was suprised. If you’re interested in seeing the NAACP, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the reparations folk slapped around, then you’ll find something there. But the reason I bring this up here is because there is ONE short paragraph that talks about solutions. Literally ONE.
Check out Dropping Knowledge if you get the chance. It’s clear that somebody had enough and decided to do something about it…and someone else had enough and decided to run his mouth.
So, I don’t want to “ASSUME”. Are you saying that this group in Europe is doing something while Mr. Williams is just mouthing off?
I haven’t read the book, but I think, based on Mr. Williams stances on issues, it might be a good read. I’m still in the midst of reading the covenant with black america, which is a book that supposely gives blacks solutions to some of the ills in America.
Granted, I don’t think that Mr. Williams may have the solution to all the problems, but it is good to at least offer some solutions. I guess it’s just a measure of whether people, other than the so-called informed, will actually read the book and actually work through some solutions.
I plan to work out a way to start a school in Chicago. I don’t know how, but I will get this done. You know the saying the … it’s “gonna take little while longer”. I want to get involved with education more. My experience with helping the community (the Hood) shows me that more and more positive black men are needed to be visible. Not for photo opts, but for the strength of the “HOOD”.
While Williams did not succeed in writing a book that meets the intellectual standards I expect from a highly-trained social scientist, a charitable reading of Enough’s final chapter, What Next?, should certainly find several proposed solutions that relate to his focus on what he believes are predominantly cultural ills related to economic resource management, education, marriage, and parenting. I just quickly scanned the final chapter again and found the following (I paraphrase his thoughts):
– Spend money more discerningly (212) and cautiously (213)
– Save more (213)
– Buy more “books, tutors, and learning experiences” (213)
– Finish high school (215)
– Have children after 21 and after getting married (215)
– Stay married; two parents are better than one (216)
– Discourage women who plan to become single mothers based on their bad reasoning (218)
– Stand against Blacks who promote negative images of Blacks in the media (219)
…and there are more examples like these.
I don’t like the way our public intellectuals are polarizing people who favor simplistic cultural panaceas vs. those who favor simplistic structural panaceas. THERE ARE NO SIMPLE PANACEAS. And, the best programs for change will undoubtedly require us to draw from good ideas offered by those who are staunch supporters of Cosby as well as those who are staunch supporters of Dyson. I know neither is completely right. I think each is partially right.
The most useful theories and solutions will undoubtedly be syntheses of some of the best ideas from the two most prominent opponents in this debate; other, less prominent but more scholarly, participants who have developed good ideas within the Academy that were not designed for mass public consumption; and real community leaders like Spedy wrote about who heroically go to work for their communities everyday while famous scholars and dilettantes theorize. And, the best solutions will need to be tailored to the specific needs (cultural, structural, economic, political, educational, public health-related) and scale (community, municipal, state, national) of the social system the solution would attempt to improve.
It would be foolish for any of us to think that the issues faced by real Black people (not statistical representations), living real lives, in the many different deprived U.S. communities are so similar that we could use the same national vision and abstract solution/game-plan for each of them. We will need solutions that focus on community problems, municipal problems, state problems, and national problems. And, the more I observe public intellectuals spew their underdeveloped opinions, in an attempt to polarize instead of synthesize, the more frustrated I become with their banality. Too many smart folks are competing against one another instead of competing with one another and meanwhile, too many Black communities remain deprived.
I now believe that Enough is a good purchase–don’t think I’d make that purchase but still–just because of the throat slitting it does. There is value in critique, even hard nosed smash mouth critique.
But again his solutions? Ed, the solutions I saw were the same ones you saw. Contained in a paragraph. For someone like me–an expert who doesn’t believe our problems are cultural? There’s no meat there. None.
Which is why I made the juxtaposition. Check out the value added of the Dropping Knowledge project after they’ve put content up and tell me what you think about Enough in comparison.
Mr. Hopkins
While I agree with your point that there are no simple cures or panaceas for the problems facing the black community or the world at large for that matter, I don’t think it’s a case of the community waiting around for some hodge-podge of intellectuals and their theories to pick and choose from.
In times when real and lasting change has occurred it was the masses who leapt ahead of the intellectuals and their theories. In fact, it was only those intellectuals who understood the creative potentialities of the great masses of people who were most able to lead or theorize about change and the direction it will take.
In the end, if we forget this fact then all we can do is offer some stop-gap programs that will sound like Cosby-type conservatism even if it comes from a good place.
Slaves in the South did not sit around and wait for solutions to their problems that came from some leader who had studied the situation closely, they sat and waited until conditions were ripe, i.e. when they knew the North had the upper hand, and then they crippled the Southern economy with a general labor stoppage like this country had never seen. This was not part of a political program put forward by any leader or intellectual it was spontaneous, organic action brought forth by the creative energies of a great mass of people yearning to be free. I think a study of the civil rights movement will yield similar conclusions to those who are willing to put the movement in front of King rather than the other way around.
Anyway, sorry for the long-windedness, but just thought i’d weigh in.
peace
C.L.R. Odell:
You needn’t ever apologize to me for circumlocution. I prefer it to terse posts that leave the reader to fill in gaps about important premises on his or her own. I don’t expect every blogger to be an aphorist. Additionally, I read incredibly fast. 🙂
Your points are good ones. Thank you for posting them. They are also fine bait for further dialogue.
I agree that some economic and political movements needn’t and shouldn’t wait on intellectuals. I think good men and women who do the real work in their communities or join with others to work collectively in their communities are our real heroes and ideological champions. I agree that our intellectuals should be attuned with the challenges real Black people face or else they would probably fail to offer useful solutions that could be implemented in the real world. In fact, I agree with all of your points, except the point you made that the “great masses leapt ahead of intellectuals and their theories†“in times when real and lasting change has occurred.†I’m not convinced that intellectuals haven’t led the way for the most part.
I think scholars and public intellectuals of our past played indispensable roles in most major movements since the 17th Century. They wrote, published, and distributed pamphlets, manifestos, newspapers, and books that inspired African Americans (the literate would often pass the ideas to those who could not read) to organize, and encouraged Whites in our country and members of the world community to be empathetic with respect to immoral and inhumane treatment of African Americans. White empathy was, of course, essential to every movement.
Scholars probably instigated the ideological tipping points that turned local movements into national and international ideological epidemics. And, these epidemics encouraged our federal government to get southern states in line morally, and encouraged the world community to get the U.S. in line morally.
I think our scholars and authors of the past, even though many of them did not have formal degrees, were probably essential catalysts and strategians of the most significant movements, especially since a higher proportion of our best Black scholars of the past were also our best Black leaders. I also think a strong case could be made that African American slaves and members of the Jim Crow South did wait on scholars who had studied the institutions of slavery or race segregation closely and encouraged African Americans to fight back in specific ways in their publications
Yet, the era we are living in is different from past eras in at least one respect: the racism and structural oppression practiced today is more difficult to grasp and combat. Racism and structural oppression was carried out so baldly during the late forties and early fifties that its practitioners’ unapologetic dismissals of African Americans’ dignity was a major factor in the critical mass of discontent that preceded the Civil Rights Movement. One’s level of education or social science literacy might need to be somewhat higher these days in order to grasp how the more furtive structural racism and economic oppression of minority races in the U.S. is occurring.
All over the nation, we could find community leaders working on local problems; however, many of their operations suffer from disadvantages with respect to human capital, social capital, political capital, and economic capital. So, I think we need intellectually gifted, loyal, productive, attuned, and humble Black scholars more than ever these days. We need them to educate us about the inner-workings of the furtive systems that create structural hurdles. And, we need them to support our national, state, municipal, and community leaders in politics, government, and business with their intellectual firepower. This would help the leaders who face real problems on a daily basis to develop smarter plans that would better use their limited capital, in all its forms, to efficiently remove or work around the very real structural hurdles that are, unfortunately, not as easy to see as “No Coloreds Allowed†signs and not as easy to grasp as Jim Crow South public bus system seating rules.
I think what Mr. Odell is trying to say isn’t that intellectuals haven’t played a role in historical movements, but rather, with his response posed the question, what role did they play?
It would seem to me that their role throughout time has been one of clarification of the historical tasks and problems facing people. They have served as sources of inspiration and in certain aspects they have played leading roles, but the question, again, is do intellectuals create the movements or do movements create the intellectuals? Was King in front of the Civil Rights movement, or did we send up King as an intellectual who was best able to our articulate the struggle ahead? Did he organize, literally overnight, a system of transportation in response to the bus boycotts or rather did people en masse show their potential to remake society organically and democratically without any intellectuals to tell them how to do it?
I think Mr. Odell is right in the sense that our most revolutionary moments in human history were the result of a spontaneous energy which in times of crisis (not always economic crisis) explodes into a new, creative form of economic organization, such as the Greek City-States, the worker revolts in Florence in the middle ages, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Soviets in Russia in 1905 and 1917, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, and just three months ago, the revolution in Nepal which dethroned the King.
Nepal is of special importance because it is our most recent example of a movement which revolutionized society which the Maoists and the leading trade unions and parties did NOT explain and COULD NOT explain, let alone lead. The responsibility for intellectuals is to elaborate on the creative energies and revolutionary spirit of working people which resulted in the reorganization of society at large in Nepal.
Regardless of how complex institutional racism is, or if people are aware of Section 235 of the Federal Housing Act, or if they know what the Prison Industrial Complex is, they know the system is broken and has never respresented their interests as wage-workers who create value.
The grievances and problems of the French of the 18th century threw up Rousseau who saw that representative democracy is inherently flawed because it so easily devolves into personal interests. This was understood to be an organic result of a separation existing between those who are representing and those who are represented.
In fact, the problems in society, nowadays, could never be clearer. While chattel slavery is a much more rigid and clear-cut class/caste system, today folks more clearly see the disparity in intellectual life and manual life where you have a division of labor between those who use their hands and those who use their heads. Right there is the economic basis for the idea that intellectuals must solve the problems of those who use their hands and it is been the historical task of workers for the past three hundred years to eliminate this distinction and to show the creative capacities of society as a whole.
This conference merely highlights this disparity and compounds the antagonism. To be straight-up, no one gives a shit about what either Cosby or Dyson thinks. I love Dyson. Cosby can kiss my ass, but that is neither here nor there. If we want a new society, it won’t be found in the head of either of these intellectuals, but within the activity and resistance of workers, black, brown, white, man, woman, straight, gay, immigrant, and native who through their actions on-the-job foreshadow the possibility for something better and that they are the best ones to organize society.
Krisna:
Thank you for your post.
“I think what Mr. Odell is trying to say isn’t that intellectuals haven’t played a role in historical movements, but rather, with his response posed the question, what role did they play?â€
I did not intend to communicate that I thought C.L.R. Odell had communicated that intellectuals haven’t played a role in historical movements. After re-reading my posts, I don’t think I communicated that. And, I realize that you did not necessarily intend to assert that I had attempted to communicate that in the above quote. I explained that “I’m not convinced that intellectuals haven’t led the way for the most part.†And, I agree that his response could be interpreted as encouraging us to examine “what role did they play.†Indeed, my reply to his post attempted to advance a dialogue about their roles.
I’m literate with respect to World History, before and after 1550; I possess advanced literacy with respect to social and political philosophy; and I enjoy conversations about these fields. However, I’m more interested in analyses of ideological and political movements related to Blacks in the “new world†since 1619. And, when I restrict my historical and sociological resources to this context, I’m neither convinced that intellectuals catalyzed ideological movements (for the most part) nor convinced that movements created ideological platforms for intellectuals (for the most part). I could easily take the simple position that a little of both occurred, but there is nothing illuminating or novel to be found there. I’m interested in learning more about which was probably most responsible (the published works and speeches of intellectuals or the spontaneous organic action of the people they served) for the major movements that led to our major political, economic, and legal revolutions.
Yet, I am convinced that the 40 million or so who make up the U.S. Black Community need talented and loyal Black thinkers for the reasons I described more than ever. I do not think that the inner-workings of the unmeritocratic and unjust systems that operate against the interests of minority groups, especially U.S. Blacks, are clear-cut. At least, I don’t think the average U.S. high-school graduate or average U.S. college graduate is aware of or could understand these systems easily. And, I would like to learn more about the premises you used to develop your conclusions in paragraph seven from your most recent post in this thread, because I disagree with all but one of the conclusions you expressed in it. If you have some sound premises and valid arguments to support your positions, I request that you post them. You will find that I am open-minded and persuadable. And, I would thank you for investing the time and energy that it would take to put forth a good effort to persuade me.
I count Cosby among our talented and loyal thinkers. I count Dyson among our talented and loyal thinkers. I think Professor Lester K. Spence and other up-and-coming scholars have and will continue to make some valuable contributions. However, I think someone who would be culturally attuned and in possession of great intellectual talent and scholarly literacy, perhaps Du Boisian talent and literacy, might be needed in order to synthesize the best ideas that have been produced by all our most talented and informed thinkers with the real world wisdom of those who are working on real problems with real Black people every day. Perhaps Spence is up to this intellectually Herculean task. 🙂
Whoever does it (assuming it is doable), I’d like for this talented thinker or these talented thinkers to help develop better methods to determine which social systems require which combinations of structurally-focused, culturally-focused, economic, educational, public health, law enforcement, or political strategic visions and tactical plans. I think these plans need to be tailor-made according to the needs and scales of the social systems they would be designed to help. And, I think many variables would need to be accounted for while these tailor-made solutions were developed for each of the many social systems that need improvement. Smarter, tailor-made, solutions that would invest these systems’ limited Black-controlled capital, in all its forms, would enable us to better test the strength of our best ideas and best leaders against the challenges U.S. Blacks face at all levels—community, municipal, state, and national.
Mr. Hopkins
C.L.R. James (I shoud state that I’ve stolen my online moniker from him) once noted that in Russia in 1905 nobody, not one person, saw the soviets coming. (A little back history on what the soviets were might be helpful in understanding where I’m coming from on this one, but you’ve proven your skills for erudition so i won’t bore you.) When everybody thought that the workers needed to do this thing they went and did that thing, causing most of the working-class leaders for social-democracy to reject them as immature and not understanding of the situation.
But not Lenin, no, he knew what they were, he could look at them with clear unobscured lenses and say, “that right there, that is the new form of socialism, whatever those groups want we should do our best to give it to them, because they are paving the way for us and the rest of the world.”
Was Lenin a great leader? (opinions may vary greatly here but I’m writing so I’m the only one who counts) I say yes of course. Did he create the soviets? Absolutely without a doubt, NO. Lenin’s greatness was not found in his iron will or even his great ability as a propagandist and writer, it was his unflinching ability to look to the masses for their creative input, his insight that these were the people that would lead the way through their activity.
Did Lenin contribute greatly to the Russian Revolution? Of course. Did Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines contribute greatly to Haitian Independence? Absolutely. And was King a great mobilizer and figurehead of the civil rights movement? Without a doubt. But the question is would these things have gone about a similar course without them, I think the answer is 100% yes. And why? Because what they had at their bottom were great masses of people striving to institute a more peaceful, egalitarian and harmonious society than the ones they knew. They would have found other great leaders to throw up from among them to carry the burden of “leadership.”
The genius of the “leaders” that I mentioned is found in their incredible insight into what these masses were ready to do, their ability to articulate it in a popular voice, and their tireless activity to spur forward whenever they could the action that was just waiting to happen.
Anyway, I got more long-winded this time than the last,b but as you said you can handle it. Mr. Hopkins, can I say what a joy it has been to participate in such a dialogue. When it comes down to it I don’t think there is a chasm of divergence between your thoughts and ours (I say ours ’cause Krisna and I are homies, sorry to tag team you, but I think with your literacy on what seems to be an ever-increasing multitude of subjects, it is we who are at the disadvantage) we are just trying to figure these things out in a world with a lot of insoluble problems and I welcome the exchange.
peace,
Clear Lenses Robert Odell
I appreciate the dialogue here and as an aside Ed would urge you to take a look at Kris and Odell’s site by the way. Very interesting stuff.
It’s a bit late, and not only have I been up since 5am, I’ve got to hit the road tomorrow for a very long weekend. So I hope I make a bit of sense.
The disagreements you all have are minor as you both realize I think. What I’d like to do is point this back to Enough, and to Cosby’s comments (since Williams uses Enough to defend Cosby).
One of the things that separates people like James and Grace Boggs, and CLR James, from Juan Williams and Bill Cosby is that even when their work reflected class biases they were deeply engaged in the everyday struggles of people in the communities they wanted to move.
Even Dubois, who had SERIOUS class issues, was embedded in the communities he studied. To do work on the Philadelphia Negro, Dubois interviewed and surveyed at least one thousand folks by himself with very crude survey tools.
So check out the rhetoric of both Williams and Cosby. Look at how they separate themselves from working class black people. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt–something I’m not willing to do–strategically and tactically you’ve got to say that their choice of rhetoric was at best, ill planned.
But further Ed, I’d suggest that neither Cosby nor Williams are actually intellectuals, but rather reactionary pundits. Williams’ critiques of Jackson, Sharpton et al is on point–I’ve already acknowledged that. However neither has any sense of where we’re going, of how we can get there, and of the unique capacities of working class people to work for themselves. Though James Boggs is no longer with us, Grace has been working in Detroit for more than forty years IN the community, helping Detroiters carve a consensual vision of what a city should do. I haven’t seen nor have I read anything from either Williams or Cosby that gives me the sense that they’re thinking like this. They are writing from a position of exasperation and aggravation, not a desire to rethink the central questions of the day.
Mr. Hopkins,
Yes, I understand the context of your statements and I have kept them within those bounds. I consider this dialogue nothing, but a little comradely exchange. 🙂
I in no way will attempt to challenge your breadth of understanding of world history. In fact, in terms of mere quantity you probably know considerably more than me. I’m a forklift operator/telecomm installer/professional chicken fryer who never made it past the 7th grade, so I’m definitely no academic.
I think the question is, as I think we would all agree, is one’s interpretation of history and therefore not what to think, but how to think about phenomena and the motion of society and things.
With respect to the intellectuals, I think you were closer to a correct characterization when you said, “a little of both.” It is the production of capital that has brought such a rigid division of labor between intellectuals and manual workers such as myself. Of course, it would be disingenuous if I didn’t consider myself an intellectual, but I refer to intellectuals in the traditional and professional sense and not the organic sense.
I also realize that a large part of the discussion and the general context of Spence’s site is around independent black politics and their struggle for freedom, but while it has an independent validity all its own, the black struggle is not separate and apart from the general struggle of workers and their ability to change the world. Again, I would be disingenuous if I evaded that question since the working-class struggle is my point of departure and general method of analysis.
Admittedly, my either/or question posed earlier was quite binary and offered no third option about the relation of intellectuals to society. I definitely think there is an organic unity between the two, but I still tend more toward the onus for change being place squarely upon regular people.
I think, in general, that society poses only those questions of which we are able to solve, Aristotle in no way could completely grasp the nature of commodities not because he was untalented–he was probably one of the most talented thinkers of all the world’s history–but because the extent of his understanding of a commodity was limited to the level of development of the society from which he evolved. So any intellectual development should be considered in its relation the problems society poses.
Sorry for another long-winded post. I promise I wasn’t trying to have last word! 🙂 Looking forward to future discourse.
C.L.R. Odell:
While I believe Vladimir Ulayanov would have told us that Bolshevik intellectuals had to spearhead the Russian Revolution else change would have occurred far too slowly, I find your example and analysis is very persuasive. In fact, you have encouraged me to spend a few hours this week to perform a few similar analyses with respect to major U.S. movements after the Lincoln Presidency. Thank you for your posts. I shall make your site the third blog that I’ll read regularly from this point forward.
Krisna:
Your posts have also encouraged me to look at the matter more closely from a different context. However, I think that race and class in the U.S. (especially between Blacks and Whites) have interacted with one another in unique ways that make comparative analyses with other nations less fruitful than comparative analyses that focus on different eras or geographic locations within the U.S. And, I certainly count you as an intellectual. I too am a passionate autodidact and philomath, and I can easily spot another when I hear or read his or her words.
Lester:
I agree Cosby and Williams use rhetoric that demonstrates they are not optimally attuned, culturally or linguistically, with Blacks of more modest socieconomic realms. Although, for the most part, I don’t think Blacks in these realms have been the core audiences for their speeches and writings. They don’t seem to speak directly to the people they want their ideas to influence; they seem speak to people they think will take their ideas to the people they want to influence. Nonetheless, I believe they have made themselves weaker champions for their good ideas as a result of their somewhat condescending rhetoric—this makes it more difficult for many people to evaluate their ideas calmly and rationally. And, you are right (I was wrong), Cosby should not be counted among our professional intellectuals. I respect the man greatly for his life’s work. However, I do agree, despite his graduate education in education, he is not a scholar, but rather an entertainer, a pundit, and a pseudo-activist. Williams is certainly a pundit.
I’m neither a professional intellectual nor a pundit. I’m a businessman who understands his moral obligation to improve his community—for his family, those who shall interact with members of his family, and himself. I have been able to devote most of my time and intellectual energy to autodidaticism since Fall 2003. And, I used that leisure time in order to better prepare myself to communicate well with major social scientists present and past who deal or dealt with ideas for a living.
From this point forward, I would like to help operationalize the best ideas of the best social scientists by converting their ideas into real strategies and real action for the communities I want to improve. The folks working through the Jamestown Project at Yale, and their efforts to operationalize the ideas in The Covenant have been helpful, and I think they are on the right track. Yet, even they would benefit from more inputs from talented strategians, business people, and hard-working Black folks who are, perhaps, more familiar with the smell of economic and political “rubber meeting the road†at the municipal/community level than the smell of scholarly journals. Too few are very familiar with both scents.
Lester, Krisna, and C.L.R. Odell, I thank you for this exchange.
need the 100 culled questions
go to the website.
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