Race Matters by Cornel West Read Free Book Online Page B

gender was missed in black America and the larger society. And black leadership must share some of the blame. As long as black leaders remain caught in a framework of racial reasoning, they will not rise above the manipulative language of Bush and Thomas—just as the state of siege (the death, disease, and destruction) raging in much of black America creates more urban wastelands and combat zones. Where there is no vision, the people perish; where there is no framework of moral reasoning, the people close ranks in a war of all against all. The growing gangsterization of America results in part from a market-driven racial reasoning that links the White House to the ghetto projects. In this sense, George Bush, David Duke, and many ganster rap artists speak the same language from different social locations—only racial reasoning can save us. Yet I hear a cloud of witnesses from afar—Sojourner Truth, Wendell Phillips, Emma Goldman, A. Phillip Randolph, Ella Baker, Myles Horton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Michael Harrington, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Tom Hayden, Harvey Milk, Robert Moses, Barbara Ehrenreich, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many anonymous others who championed the struggle for freedom and justice in a prophetic framework of moral reasoning. They understood that the pitfalls of racial reasoning are too costly in mind, body, and soul—especially for a downtrodden and despised people like black Americans. The best of our leadership recognized this valuable truth—and more must do so in the future if America is to survive with any moral sense.

Chapter Three
    The Crisis of Black Leadership
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    You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress.
    No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I’m concerned, as long as it is not shown to every one of our people in this country, it doesn’t exist for me.
    MALCOLM X (1964)
    T HERE has not been a time in the history of black people in this country when the quantity of politicians and intellectuals was so great, yet the quality of both groups has been so low. Just when one would have guessed that black America was flexing its political and intellectual muscles, rigor mortis seems to have set in. How do we account for the absence of the Frederick Douglasses, Sojourner Truths, Martin Luther King, Jrs., Malcolm Xs, and Fannie Lou Hamers in our time? Why hasn’t black America produced intellectuals of the caliber of W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Cooper, E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cox, and Ralph Ellison in the past few decades?
    A serious response to these perplexing questions requires subtle inquiry into the emergence of the new black middle class—its content and character, aspirations and anxieties, orientations and opportunities. Black America has had a variety of different “middle classes.” Free negroes in the pre–Civil War period; educators, artisans, and shopkeepers during the Reconstruction period; business persons and black college professors in the years of Jim Crow laws; and prominent athletes, entertainers, and white collar personnel after World War II all serve as examples of black middle-class status prior to the passing of the Civil Rights Bill in 1964 and the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. As E. Franklin Frazier pointed out in his classic Black Bourgeoisie (1957), these various forms of black middle-class status never constituted more than 5 percent of African Americans before the Civil Rights era. In the last two decades, this percentage jumped to well over 25 percent. Yet this leap in quantity has not been accompanied by a leap in quality. The present-day black middle class is not simply different than its predecessors—it is more deficient and, to put it strongly, more decadent. For the most part, the dominant outlooks and lifestyles of today’s black middle class discourage the development of high