Prometheus 6

Erin Aubry Kaplan's review of Betrayal. I said the book was roughly three parts analysis and one part vengeance. I think Ms Kaplan focused more on the analysis part than I did.

"Laws and regulations only appear guaranteed," he says of black conservatives' reverence for the law. "And in one reading of black reality, laws and constitutional enactments have been as problematic in their American guise of archways to freedom as the trademarked arches of McDonald's are in their promises of decent employment and healthy comestibles." Whatever your political persuasion, that's a hard image to argue with.

Well, no it's not, not for Conservatives in general.

'Betrayal' by Houston A. Baker Jr.
On the failure of black public intellectuals to build on the struggles of the civil rights era and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
By Erin Aubry Kaplan
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 18, 2008

As the 1960s recede further into the American past, it's become standard practice for black people to regularly take stock of the civil rights era, usually in a debate about the legacy of its two premier forces for change: Martin Luther King Jr. and the racial paradigm shift known as black power. Conservatives and liberals alike, across the color line, generally praise King as a pacifist and unifier and condemn black power advocates as dividers and fearmongers. The debate is seen as a kind of social progress, made possible by the 1960s -- the right of people across the ideological spectrum to be heard and given equal time on the matter of race. For blacks, especially black conservatives, that equal time includes plum teaching positions, book deals, talk shows and public forums previously unavailable to blacks of any bent. On its face, what could be wrong with that?

Plenty, says Houston A. Baker Jr. In his new book, "Betrayal," the Vanderbilt University professor and civil rights veteran blasts what he sees as the tragically wrong turn that black intellectuals, both conservative and liberal, have taken since the '60s by confusing prominence with leadership and their own inclusion in the white mainstream with justice. Such luminaries as Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Stephen Carter and Henry Louis Gates Jr., through their relentless self-promotion and soft-pedaling or eliding of uncomfortable racial facts, have encouraged the confusion. More damning in Baker's eyes, these figures have collectively and sometimes consciously betrayed the ideals of black advocacy practiced most diligently by King and, to a lesser extent, the proponents of black power. Baker believes that far from being antithetical (one of many racial myths he seeks to unravel in "Betrayal"), the movements drew on the same philosophy of black-first empowerment and together formed a crucial blueprint for progress.

An unabashed adherent of black liberation, Baker claims simply to be acting as a literary scholar. He calls his criticism of Steele and others strictly textual, based on close readings of such popular but underexamined works as Steele's "The Content of Our Character," McWhorter's "Losing the Race" and Gates and Cornel West's "The Future of the Race." Using King's life and work as the standard of black public intellectualism and activism -- a high bar, to be sure -- Baker says they all fail miserably to measure up. Much of Steele's work and that of such leftist counterparts as West and Michael Eric Dyson are dismissed as "pamphlets"; the media-savvy Gates is a fine writer but too often a glib apologist for black struggles, sometimes dipping into racial caricature.