Reconsidering my reconsideration of "the racial protocol"

You might remember my prior meditations on the "racial protocol" here and more recently here. Today I'm writing a stream-of-consciousness meditation on both the "racial protocol" and black internationalism.

My inspiration for reconsidering the "racial protocol" came from Anastasia Curwood's book Stormy Weather:

The literary theorist Claudia Tate developed the term 'racial protocol' for the assumption that African Americans' experiences can be reduced to racial politics and that individual subjectivity carries little importance. As a result of the racial protocol, much writing about African Americans focuses entirely on racial struggle and not on the human experiences that would move the analysis beyond a two-dimensional representation of African Americans' lives.

I was discussing this idea over dinner with a friend and colleague. He suggested that I border, if not tip over into, the offensive by attacking the "racial protocol," because it sounds like I am neglecting (if not negating) the oppression, in which, as a white person, I am implicated.

I removed the above quote from my talk and instead focused on this quote from Claudia Tate herself (in her book l, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race, 1998):

The black text mediates two broad categories of experience: one is historically racialized and regulated by African American cultural performance; the other is the individual and subjective experience of personal desire signified in language.

This makes my analysis both/and rather than either/or. Both oppression/struggle and three dimensional subjective individuals are important. Both race and other identities are involved in the identity formation of my research subjects. I believe that this both/and emphasis is more reflective of what I do in my work, in which race/oppression/struggle matters as one primary category of analysis, but in which they are not the only categories.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, this is in contradistinction to Michael West's and William Martin's argument that the black international “has a single defining characteristic: struggle." This struggle is born of consciousness and the dream of a “circle of universal emancipation, unbroken in space and time” (From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution, 2009). 

By analyzing the three-dimension subjectivity of individuals, I can understand how Eslanda Robeson's and Emma Goldman's relationship was primarily social, but through the click of their personalities, the aging Goldman persuaded the young Robeson toward a more radical stance on economic issues. West and Martin's formulation makes it seem predetermined that a black person would choose struggle, when in fact that choice was born of dark nights of the soul and wrenching decisions to put oneself and one's loved ones at risk.

At the same time, I've been pondering what makes black internationalism distinct when compared to Pan-Asian or Wilsonian inspired anti-colonial movements (I'm relying upon Erez Manela's Wilsonian Moment there). West and Martin offer a very succinct explanation of difference.

Reading some Social Darwinists for my USIH class, though, makes struggle as a defining characteristic unattractive. William Graham Sumner argues that "life on earth must be maintained by a struggle against nature, and also by a competition with other forms of life." (American Intellectual Tradition, p28).

Perhaps, then, it is not the fact of struggle that is defining so much as what is being struggled towards--the dream of "a circle of universal emancipation, unbroken in space and time." The meaning of that emancipation for a Christian missionary returning to Africa to civilize it, or Marcus Garvey's desire to also return to Africa to impose his own kind of civilization, is not so uni-dimensional or clear-cut.

One of the essays in West and Martin's collection offers a more nuanced alternative. Lara Putnam, in "Nothing Matters but Color: Transnational Circuits, the Interwar Caribbean, and the Black International" argues

First, that migration and migrants' activities created a West Indian-centered black internationalist world in the first decades of the twentieth century; second, that this world came under attack as a result of the rise of narrow, racially defined nationalism and imperial closures in the interwar years; and third, that the attacks reinforced 'race consciousness' among migrants, spurring increasingly explicit black internationalist critiques of imperial and neocolonial power.

She follows this with the conclusion that "In the interwar years, West Indian community leaders of diverse class positions and ideologies came to a common conclusion: only by putting race first could people of African descent attain collective uplift in a modern, racist world." [I wonder about the contrast between this quote and her title, in which she foregrounds color. It does not seem to me that color and race were the same thing in the Caribbean; indeed intraracial discrimination often occurred along color lines]

I'm so compelled by that statement, because some of the people that I study reached the opposite conclusion. Juliette Derricotte decided that fellowship could only be achieved, not by ignoring race, but by concentrating on similar religious convictions (she was among a diverse body of Christians, all trying to find a way to overcome racial and national animosities in 1928). Ralph Bunche, on the other hand, decided that the only way to overcome racism was by finding and attacking its economic root.

One of the things that most intrigues me about West and Martin's edited collection is the way that internationalism actually solidifies nationalism (is this the same as the thesis that Italian nationalism was created in America by Italian migrants? It is by being in a place where you are different that you search for someone who is similar). I think Erez Manela makes a similar argument in The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. Manela argues that the emergence of the circumstances for decolonization was due "to the establishment, for the first time, of international institutions and norms that allowed, indeed invited anticolonial nationalists to challenge colonial powers in an external arena, circumventing and thereby weakening the imperial relationship." Manela is looking particularly at internationalist organizations like the League of Nations, while Putnam is considering more the experiences of individual British West Indian migrants, but both express the vibrancy of the international dialogue during the interwar era.

Putnam writes, "The black internationalism articulated by British West Indian migrants in the interwar years was not a revival of tradition, but a particular vision of the future, developed in dialogue and in step with the other nationalisms that defined North Atlantic modernity."

She and Manela certainly aid my argument that the interwar era represents a distinct moment in black American and black international history, rather than the culmination of the nadir or the beginnings of the Long Civil Rights Movement.

Another interesting consideration around the question of the black international is when does someone become a nationalist, when does someone become a Pan-Africanist (with or without becoming a nationalist) and when does someone become what Nico Slate terms a "colored cosmopolitan" (someone who felt common cause with other people of color in an anticolonial struggle)? I think that question of motivations and decisions will become a central one for my book.

News In Black Intellectual History

A few days ago The New York Times reported on problems between Malcolm X's daughters in relation to holdings by Betty Shabbaz. Shabbaz died in 1997, and the daughters have been arguing over the estate since. One of the casualties of that argument has been intellectual history. How? I'll let the article explain:

The daughters have traded accusations of irresponsibility, mental incapacity and fiscal mismanagement of the estate, which is worth about $1.4 million. But the greater value may reside in a trove of unpublished works from Malcolm X and Dr. Shabazz.

As the dispute drags on in Westchester County Surrogate’s Court, efforts to publish the works have been thwarted by the daughters’ bickering; all must sign off on any plan to sell and release the material, which includes four journals that Malcolm X kept during trips to Africa and the Middle East in 1964, a year before his assassination.

For the uninitiated, this is precisely one of the most fertile times in Malcolm X's intellectual life. While his autodidact period of intense prison reading gave him a heavy dose of Western cultural literacy, the African and Middle East travel period represent a growth in wisdom. Black intellectual history will benefit greatly when the daughters work out their competing interests. If it's just about money, this might be a good time for the proverbial "silent donor" to speed the process along. - TL

News In Black Intellectual History

A few days ago The New York Times reported on problems between Malcolm X's daughters in relation to holdings by Betty Shabbaz. Shabbaz died in 1997, and the daughters have been arguing over the estate since. One of the casualties of that argument has been intellectual history. How? I'll let the article explain:

The daughters have traded accusations of irresponsibility, mental incapacity and fiscal mismanagement of the estate, which is worth about $1.4 million. But the greater value may reside in a trove of unpublished works from Malcolm X and Dr. Shabazz.

As the dispute drags on in Westchester County Surrogate’s Court, efforts to publish the works have been thwarted by the daughters’ bickering; all must sign off on any plan to sell and release the material, which includes four journals that Malcolm X kept during trips to Africa and the Middle East in 1964, a year before his assassination.

For the uninitiated, this is precisely one of the most fertile times in Malcolm X's intellectual life. While his autodidact period of intense prison reading gave him a heavy dose of Western cultural literacy, the African and Middle East travel period represent a growth in wisdom. Black intellectual history will benefit greatly when the daughters work out their competing interests. If it's just about money, this might be a good time for the proverbial "silent donor" to speed the process along. - TL

Info for Historians of Conservative Thought and those interested in Anti-Intellectualism in the US

I just noticed that Thomas Sowell has a new book out called "Intellectuals and Society." In a column in the Jewish World Review explaining the book, he argues that

Those whose careers are built on the creation and dissemination of ideas — the intellectuals — have played a role in many societies out of all proportion to their numbers. ...

But certainly, for the 20th century, it is hard to escape the conclusion that intellectuals have on net balance made the world a worse and more dangerous place. Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the 20th century was without his supporters, admirers or apologists among the leading intellectuals — not only within his own country, but in foreign democracies, where intellectuals were free to say whatever they wanted to.

Given the enormous progress made during the 20th century, it may seem hard to believe that intellectuals did so little good as to have that good outweighed by particular wrong-headed notions. But most of those who promoted the scientific, economic and social advances of the 20th century were not really intellectuals in the sense in which that term is most often used. [People who created tangible things that flew or did not fly (in the example he gives of the Wright Brothers) rather than the intangible products of "intellectuals"]

He continues in a second article:

If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences. But intellectuals who generate ideas do not have to pay the consequences.

Academic intellectuals are shielded by the principles of academic freedom and journalists in democratic societies are shielded by the principle of freedom of the press. Seldom do those who produce or peddle dangerous, or even fatal, ideas have to pay a price, even in a loss of credibility.

He gives Rachel Carson as his first example, arguing that her crusade against DDT led to the resurgence of malaria. For his second example, he argues that Woodrow Wilson advocated changes for the sake of change in the aftermath of WWI, leading to the disastrous totalitarian regimes of WWII.

Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override.

What do you all think of his argument? It seems to me like Sowell is at once giving intellectuals more power than they actually had (Wilson did not create self-determination in a vacuum, absent the desires of those elasticities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the Ottoman Empire was not carved up just because he said so) and then criticizing them for the outcomes. He also seems to think that Wilson is generally praised for his efforts; that isn't the case in the history I study.

Some of his arguments remind me of those who criticized American and Western European communists in the 1950s and later. The ideas they played with were much too dangerous.

Do you have a sense of how influential Sowell is these days? I have the impression that a few years ago, he was a major presence. Is he still?

Info for Historians of Conservative Thought and those interested in Anti-Intellectualism in the US

I just noticed that Thomas Sowell has a new book out called "Intellectuals and Society." In a column in the Jewish World Review explaining the book, he argues that

Those whose careers are built on the creation and dissemination of ideas — the intellectuals — have played a role in many societies out of all proportion to their numbers. ...

But certainly, for the 20th century, it is hard to escape the conclusion that intellectuals have on net balance made the world a worse and more dangerous place. Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the 20th century was without his supporters, admirers or apologists among the leading intellectuals — not only within his own country, but in foreign democracies, where intellectuals were free to say whatever they wanted to.

Given the enormous progress made during the 20th century, it may seem hard to believe that intellectuals did so little good as to have that good outweighed by particular wrong-headed notions. But most of those who promoted the scientific, economic and social advances of the 20th century were not really intellectuals in the sense in which that term is most often used. [People who created tangible things that flew or did not fly (in the example he gives of the Wright Brothers) rather than the intangible products of "intellectuals"]

He continues in a second article:

If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences. But intellectuals who generate ideas do not have to pay the consequences.

Academic intellectuals are shielded by the principles of academic freedom and journalists in democratic societies are shielded by the principle of freedom of the press. Seldom do those who produce or peddle dangerous, or even fatal, ideas have to pay a price, even in a loss of credibility.

He gives Rachel Carson as his first example, arguing that her crusade against DDT led to the resurgence of malaria. For his second example, he argues that Woodrow Wilson advocated changes for the sake of change in the aftermath of WWI, leading to the disastrous totalitarian regimes of WWII.

Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override.

What do you all think of his argument? It seems to me like Sowell is at once giving intellectuals more power than they actually had (Wilson did not create self-determination in a vacuum, absent the desires of those elasticities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the Ottoman Empire was not carved up just because he said so) and then criticizing them for the outcomes. He also seems to think that Wilson is generally praised for his efforts; that isn't the case in the history I study.

Some of his arguments remind me of those who criticized American and Western European communists in the 1950s and later. The ideas they played with were much too dangerous.

Do you have a sense of how influential Sowell is these days? I have the impression that a few years ago, he was a major presence. Is he still?

Tim's Light Reading (02/3/2010)

1. Studying Reading Reception: The Reception Study Society and its associated annual, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, should be of interest to practicing U.S. Intellectual historians. Why? It seems to me that every single community of discourse that ever existed in U.S. history worked, in some way, around the production and reception of some kind of text. Practitioners of reception history studying recent times have recourse to oral histories. This is an exciting development. In the past, however, reception was studied only through personal or institutional papers, and published accounts. On the last, I believe that book reviews are an understudied and under-explored resource for intellectual historians. While I fully understand the weaknesses of this source (e.g. word limitations, written for money, notoriety, for spite, etc.), the problems in assessing authorial motivations in reviews are no different than for any other publication. In other words, we can correct for those limitations, or publicly acknowledge them, and still pick out relevant nuggets of thought from reviews. Of course there are limits: How do we assess the audiences of reviews? That seems to throw us back into the archives to examine personal papers, diaries, etc.

2. The Weight Of Tradition In Publishing: A Berkeley study, summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education, unsurprisingly reports that tradition weighs heavily on authors in considering publication options. This paragraph sums up the situation:

Although the seven fields surveyed have very different cultures, which are explored at length in the 733-page report, the executive summary points to the persistence of doing scholarly business as usual. "Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core," the report states. It found that young scholars "can be particularly conservative" in their behavior, perhaps because they have more to lose than senior scholars, who "can afford to be the most innovative with regard to dissemination practices."

[The report's authors] identified five key needs of faculty members in regard to scholarly communication. Those include developing "more nuanced tenure and promotion practices that do not rely exclusively on the imprimatur of the publication or easily gamed citation metrics," and reassessing "the locus, mechanisms, timing, and meaning of peer review."

Here are the report's findings on its "History Case Study" (p. 388-503).

3. The Effects Of Catholic Higher Education On Catholics: Positive, Negative, Or In-Between?: Some relatively conservative American Catholic organizations criticize Catholic colleges and universities on the historical grounds that Catholics who attend Catholic institutions come out less Catholic (intellectually, socially, theologically) than when they entered. I have not seen a precise starting date put on this trend by critics. In his comprehensive history of American Catholic higher education, titled Contending With Modernity, Philip Gleason identified a turning point as the 1967 Land O' Lakes Conference held in the Wisconsin town of the same name. Here is the famous statement produced at the conference. Conservative critics pointed back to Land O' Lakes during last year's debates about Obama's Notre Dame address. But a new study, underscored by this InsideHigherEd article, forwards that while Catholics do indeed lose ground on specific Catholic teachings, they gain ground on others at Catholic colleges. In sum, the broad claim by some that Catholic colleges are really not functioning as such is questionable at best. It is more the case that Catholic colleges are not doing exactly what the conservative critics want.

4. Book of Interest: Williams, Zachery R., In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. xiv, 250 pp. $39.95, isbn 978-0-8262-1862-9.)

5. Workshop of Interest: This Harvard University gathering will be of interest to some of our readers:

International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825 (Bernard Bailyn, Director)

Workshop---Intellectual History: New Findings, New Approaches, in the Study of Religion, Science, and Cultural Identity

April 10, 2010

This Workshop will concentrate on current innovations in the study of the intellectual history of the Atlantic world, the flow of ideas between Europe and the Americas, from José de Acosta to Jonathan Edwards – new findings on Biblicism, alchemy, science, architecture, critiques of idolatry, and approaches to the Enlightenment. The intention is not to present descriptive summaries of these subjects but for leading authorities to identify, from work in progress, innovative points of inquiry and to indicate profitable lines for future study. ... To register, and for additional information, please see our Web site or contact the Atlantic History Seminar [Emerson Hall 4th Floor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Phone: 617-496-3066; Fax: 617-496-8869; e-mail elebaron-at-fas.harvard.edu].

Tim's Light Reading (02/3/2010)

1. Studying Reading Reception: The Reception Study Society and its associated annual, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, should be of interest to practicing U.S. Intellectual historians. Why? It seems to me that every single community of discourse that ever existed in U.S. history worked, in some way, around the production and reception of some kind of text. Practitioners of reception history studying recent times have recourse to oral histories. This is an exciting development. In the past, however, reception was studied only through personal or institutional papers, and published accounts. On the last, I believe that book reviews are an understudied and under-explored resource for intellectual historians. While I fully understand the weaknesses of this source (e.g. word limitations, written for money, notoriety, for spite, etc.), the problems in assessing authorial motivations in reviews are no different than for any other publication. In other words, we can correct for those limitations, or publicly acknowledge them, and still pick out relevant nuggets of thought from reviews. Of course there are limits: How do we assess the audiences of reviews? That seems to throw us back into the archives to examine personal papers, diaries, etc.

2. The Weight Of Tradition In Publishing: A Berkeley study, summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education, unsurprisingly reports that tradition weighs heavily on authors in considering publication options. This paragraph sums up the situation:

Although the seven fields surveyed have very different cultures, which are explored at length in the 733-page report, the executive summary points to the persistence of doing scholarly business as usual. "Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core," the report states. It found that young scholars "can be particularly conservative" in their behavior, perhaps because they have more to lose than senior scholars, who "can afford to be the most innovative with regard to dissemination practices."

[The report's authors] identified five key needs of faculty members in regard to scholarly communication. Those include developing "more nuanced tenure and promotion practices that do not rely exclusively on the imprimatur of the publication or easily gamed citation metrics," and reassessing "the locus, mechanisms, timing, and meaning of peer review."

Here are the report's findings on its "History Case Study" (p. 388-503).

3. The Effects Of Catholic Higher Education On Catholics: Positive, Negative, Or In-Between?: Some relatively conservative American Catholic organizations criticize Catholic colleges and universities on the historical grounds that Catholics who attend Catholic institutions come out less Catholic (intellectually, socially, theologically) than when they entered. I have not seen a precise starting date put on this trend by critics. In his comprehensive history of American Catholic higher education, titled Contending With Modernity, Philip Gleason identified a turning point as the 1967 Land O' Lakes Conference held in the Wisconsin town of the same name. Here is the famous statement produced at the conference. Conservative critics pointed back to Land O' Lakes during last year's debates about Obama's Notre Dame address. But a new study, underscored by this InsideHigherEd article, forwards that while Catholics do indeed lose ground on specific Catholic teachings, they gain ground on others at Catholic colleges. In sum, the broad claim by some that Catholic colleges are really not functioning as such is questionable at best. It is more the case that Catholic colleges are not doing exactly what the conservative critics want.

4. Book of Interest: Williams, Zachery R., In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. xiv, 250 pp. $39.95, isbn 978-0-8262-1862-9.)

5. Workshop of Interest: This Harvard University gathering will be of interest to some of our readers:

International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825 (Bernard Bailyn, Director)

Workshop---Intellectual History: New Findings, New Approaches, in the Study of Religion, Science, and Cultural Identity

April 10, 2010

This Workshop will concentrate on current innovations in the study of the intellectual history of the Atlantic world, the flow of ideas between Europe and the Americas, from José de Acosta to Jonathan Edwards – new findings on Biblicism, alchemy, science, architecture, critiques of idolatry, and approaches to the Enlightenment. The intention is not to present descriptive summaries of these subjects but for leading authorities to identify, from work in progress, innovative points of inquiry and to indicate profitable lines for future study. ... To register, and for additional information, please see our Web site or contact the Atlantic History Seminar [Emerson Hall 4th Floor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Phone: 617-496-3066; Fax: 617-496-8869; e-mail elebaron-at-fas.harvard.edu].

Grouchy Crouch: Black Intellectuals

I was just reading Stanley Crouch's introduction to a 2005 edition of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and it is a very strange document. It professes the importance of Cruses' work while tearing apart all the ideas presented in it as either wrong or rather silly. For example:

The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual seemed to assume that there was a substantial intellectual tradition among American Negroes. That was neither true forty years ago nor is it true now. Very little arrived that would challenge the depth of thought found in the works of men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edmund Wilson, T.S. Eliot, Gilbert Seldes, Lincoln Kirstein, Malcolm Cowley, Alfred Kazin, and so on. There has never been a substantial body of thought on any Afro-American subject that was formed of deep studies, original theories, probing cultural examination, complex religious assessment, and schools of philosophical concern that raised questions about essences as opposed to superstitions, hearsay, and propaganda. There have been attempts here and there, usually caught up in Negro politics or Negro art movements based more in exotica than the kinds of challenges to convention that jazz brought to the table of Western music. No serious gathering of ideas, as full of yea as of nay, has appeared that was so well conceived and so eloquently expressed that it would add something of value to either American thinking or the larger and more formidable fact of life we call Western thought.

In the Salon, Amy Alexander explains that this is typical Crouch.

Armed with an elephant's memory and a passionate knowledge of and engagement with art (blues and jazz especially, though not exclusively) and history (American, though not exclusively), Crouch delights in slaying the dragons of convention -- particularly those that guard the sometimes-insular world of black intellectuals.

But also argues that there is more to him than his contrariness:

Underneath the mask of Crouch the Grouch is a down-to-earth individual who would rather engage you in debate than cut you dead with pretensions of writerly superiority. He is one of the rare top-echelon literary figures who not only welcomes conversation with unknown young writers (he gives out his home office phone number and usually picks up when it rings), but is also wont to commandeer them for marathon swirls through his downtown universe of smoldering jazz clubs, big-portion restaurants and Runyonesque watering holes.
...
Although routinely and incorrectly described as a black conservative, Crouch calls himself a "radical pragmatist." To the uninitiated, his philosophy might best be described as rigidly humanist. It centers on an unsentimental vision wherein we must fight the siren temptation to obsess about our (mostly superficial) differences, lest we miss the chance to embrace our (very real and very numerous) commonalities.

Of all the things that could be said of Crouch, one cannot deny that he is a very intelligent man and an excellent jazz critic. Why, then, would he claim that there was no black intellectual tradition? Why would a publisher, New York Reviews Books Classic, put him at the beginning of the reprint of Cruse, generally acknowledged as a major contribution to black intellectual history? What can we take seriously in Crouch's critique and what can we dismiss as his famous "grouchiness?"

I think this might be more interesting as a discussion than simply me offering an opinion, though I will point out that Du Bois' interpretation of the Reconstruction, published in the 1930s, is now the staple interpretation (minus some of Du Bois' Marxism).

Grouchy Crouch: Black Intellectuals

I was just reading Stanley Crouch's introduction to a 2005 edition of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and it is a very strange document. It professes the importance of Cruses' work while tearing apart all the ideas presented in it as either wrong or rather silly. For example:

The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual seemed to assume that there was a substantial intellectual tradition among American Negroes. That was neither true forty years ago nor is it true now. Very little arrived that would challenge the depth of thought found in the works of men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edmund Wilson, T.S. Eliot, Gilbert Seldes, Lincoln Kirstein, Malcolm Cowley, Alfred Kazin, and so on. There has never been a substantial body of thought on any Afro-American subject that was formed of deep studies, original theories, probing cultural examination, complex religious assessment, and schools of philosophical concern that raised questions about essences as opposed to superstitions, hearsay, and propaganda. There have been attempts here and there, usually caught up in Negro politics or Negro art movements based more in exotica than the kinds of challenges to convention that jazz brought to the table of Western music. No serious gathering of ideas, as full of yea as of nay, has appeared that was so well conceived and so eloquently expressed that it would add something of value to either American thinking or the larger and more formidable fact of life we call Western thought.

In the Salon, Amy Alexander explains that this is typical Crouch.

Armed with an elephant's memory and a passionate knowledge of and engagement with art (blues and jazz especially, though not exclusively) and history (American, though not exclusively), Crouch delights in slaying the dragons of convention -- particularly those that guard the sometimes-insular world of black intellectuals.

But also argues that there is more to him than his contrariness:

Underneath the mask of Crouch the Grouch is a down-to-earth individual who would rather engage you in debate than cut you dead with pretensions of writerly superiority. He is one of the rare top-echelon literary figures who not only welcomes conversation with unknown young writers (he gives out his home office phone number and usually picks up when it rings), but is also wont to commandeer them for marathon swirls through his downtown universe of smoldering jazz clubs, big-portion restaurants and Runyonesque watering holes.
...
Although routinely and incorrectly described as a black conservative, Crouch calls himself a "radical pragmatist." To the uninitiated, his philosophy might best be described as rigidly humanist. It centers on an unsentimental vision wherein we must fight the siren temptation to obsess about our (mostly superficial) differences, lest we miss the chance to embrace our (very real and very numerous) commonalities.

Of all the things that could be said of Crouch, one cannot deny that he is a very intelligent man and an excellent jazz critic. Why, then, would he claim that there was no black intellectual tradition? Why would a publisher, New York Reviews Books Classic, put him at the beginning of the reprint of Cruse, generally acknowledged as a major contribution to black intellectual history? What can we take seriously in Crouch's critique and what can we dismiss as his famous "grouchiness?"

I think this might be more interesting as a discussion than simply me offering an opinion, though I will point out that Du Bois' interpretation of the Reconstruction, published in the 1930s, is now the staple interpretation (minus some of Du Bois' Marxism).