In the world of slang, smack means either heroin or dung. The academy has been overrun by intellectual smack dealers for a good while, but the biggest bust of the game has just taken place.
With intellectual honesty as his intent, Henry Louis Gates Jr. set off a bomb in the black wing of "victim studies" that has long bedeviled higher education and created a lucrative arena of complaint. That is no small hustle, for there is no better business in America than the supposed consciousness raising that goes with self-help. If one is either clever or ruthless enough, a successful career can result.
Overstatement, melodrama, militant distortion and absurd academic theories have dominated the business of racial complaint since the early '60s. Then, James Baldwin and Malcolm X were sought after speakers nationwide, on and off television. One provided eloquent weeping and moaning, the other, impotent saber-rattling. Baldwin encouraged guilt for a long tradition of injustice, the X man terrified as a conveniently impotent boogey monster in the horror movie of race. Intentionally or not, each became an entertainer.
Money and attention are a big part of the interest in such careers. Aspirants have discovered the demographic importance of sanctimonious and hostile pronouncements that resulted in a serious cottage industry specializing in fertilizer for intellectual weeds. The irony is that weeds are not always grown.
This business works in two parts. One side can provide very important observations, good insights and thoughtful aspirations to the discussion table of American life when its inherent sentimentality is unpacked and discarded. The other side is primarily a hot mess of stuff and nonsense in which "being true to the game" results in two things.
The first is wealth, attention and a reputation for what is presented as "prophetic" or "speaking truth to power." This draws innocent, gullible, badly educated or pretentious followers, whose leaders are not expected to suggest any detailed action based in successful records of engagement. (See my New York Daily News column about the revolutionary track record of Central Harlem public school students under Danielle Moss Lee's Harlem Educational Activities Fund. You will be quite surprised by what Lee and her project have brought off among those students.)
Expecting substance would be too much. It's already hard out here for a colored man or woman with a university degree, especially if ready to pimp the troubles of the colored people. True to the national impulse, their audience remains quite willing to keep the coins clinking, the cash stacking, and the credit cards sliding into place. As the third-rate gospel song goes, "Oh, happy day."
But it was a sad day for the racial gloom industry when Skip Gates took out a licking stick and brought it to the editorial page of the New York Times. His short essay left thick welts of the hard, truth-telling blues on the rumps of willfully ignorant or inaccurate academicians. Those most disturbed by the humanizing elements of the facts are usually ideologues who have made careers peddling a convenient simplification of the African slave trade that breaks down into an irresponsible cartoon about good guys and bad guys.
Such people have never been able to address the backward and evil elements of African culture that are stubbornly in place and remain fused to all of the elements that deliver universal clarity about the mournful unpredictability of human life. This is difficult information for children to absorb; they prefer cartoons that make everything seem simple. With its many cultures and peoples, Africa is anything but simple. So the slave trade was very different from a soap opera.
Ideologues have resisted this because ideology is always at war with humanity. In what Langston Hughes called "the quarter of the Negroes," the ideologue has a preference for overwhelmed African victims and overwhelming European and white American victimizers. Africans do not show any fewer human traits than any others and show no worse ones when evil is found to exhibit itself with the same level of ruthlessness or paranoid hysteria that we see everywhere else in the world.
To reduce Africans to no more than victims, whether they drove the slave trade or not, is to exclude them from the timeless themes that have no nation and no particular address. Getting beyond simple-minded notions of good and evil is one of the big tasks of our time and is, as usual, being addressed by major writers and thinkers the world over. We have seen them rise to prominence as they have spoken with the bullets of hard facts attempting to mortally wound the dragons of totalitarianism—religious, political, or neither—wherever they have appeared.
Writers and thinkers from Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin and South America have problems, but they are not contradicted by an industry of college teachers competing for highly paid franchises, academic Kentucky Fried Chickens made in the image of gold by the blame game.
Robert Penn Warren once said to Albert Murray in South to a Very Old Place that American slavery was no more than a terrible human business, and every element of it was defined by the intricate human shortcomings or virtues of those involved on either side of the issue. But those selling academic smack on our campuses never even approach what Gates makes clear in his New York Times editorial. It could have been both an allusion to a very successful academic entertainer and a statement of fact had it been titled "Truth Matters."
But inconvenient truths are contrary to the rules of the game and academic smack dealers, like all hustlers, are never less than "true to the game." That game is based in a sadomasochistic ritual where white people pay to be whipped then gleefully pass out appointments and tenure to the most vociferous and those most popular with students. Students are important trumps in this game because they are marks who love to play the alienated parts passed on to them from rock-and-roll entertainment.
As more intestinal fortitude starts rising up, the smack dealers in the universe of higher education might now begin to feel that fissures are shooting up the walls of white guilt and black gullibility which protected them for all too many years.
When this new endangered species looks for the Samson who began pushing down the building erected for philistines, they will discover that it all started with a little guy at Harvard who knew that a certain kind of blindness results from refusing to face those truths harmful only to hustlers. As Dragnet made famous during the early days of television, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has taken a simple but revolutionary position: "Just the facts." Facts can always move us closer to any new birth of freedom.
Stanley Crouch is an essayist and columnist based in New York. He has been awarded a MacArthur, a Fletcher, and was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences. The first volume of his Charlie Parker biography will appear within a year.
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