The life of Afro-American intellectuals is governed by a web of contradictions. Simply put, there is this central contradiction: while black intellectuals work within the aesthetic limits of a pariah-like ethnicity, this ethnicity’s cultural forms are used and exploited—both intellectually …
When President Carter appointed Andrew Young ambassador to the United Nations, a new era began. For the first time in this century, a key figure in the foreign-policy establishment was Afro-American, with his writ extending especially to African affairs. Young’s …
Since the publication of E. Franklin Frazier’s brilliant book Black Bourgeoisie in 1957, this class of blacks has acquired a new prominence in both American and Afro-American life. The size of the black bourgeoisie surpasses anything Frazier could have imagined; …
Intellectuals, whatever their national or ethnic origins, often have had to make hard choices between creative and political activity. This problem is particularly acute for black American intellectuals. In no generation have they escaped the simultaneous pulls of creative and …
Political Sociology of Racism For the first half-century after slavery was abolished in the United States, the Negro lived mainly in the rural South and, save for a brief 10-15 years of Reconstruction, he had no rights of political participation. During …
The negro intelligentsia in the United States has recently faced several critical points in its evolution. These crises have been both sociological— including a new social composition, shifting intellectual activities, a changing relationship to whites—and indirectly political, as the Negro lower …
When the Mau Mau rebellion broke out in Kenya in the fall of 1952, the American press was quick to interpret it as a “terroristic” uprising by a people barely a few generations away from “savagery.” It was said that …
