Columbia University Press

Friday’s Los Angeles Times had a review of Houston Baker’s Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era.

The review offers a very good summary of Baker’s argument and his critiques of prominent Black intellectuals:

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.

The blog Prometheus 6 has posted an interesting review of Houston Baker’s Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era.

There is also a video available of Houston Baker participating on a special panel with Richard King, Bob Moses and Ruth Turner Perot to examine Robert Penn Warren’s 1965 book Who Speaks for the Negro? as part of Vanderbilt University’s commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

Houston Baker appeared on NPR’s News and Notes yesterday to discuss his book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era. In the interview Baker discusses his upbringing in Louisville’s Little Africa, how Shelby Steele has misread the message and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., continuing racism in the United States, and his own role as a Black intellectual.

This past weekend on the occasion of the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, many commentators explored the legacy on Martin Luther King. In his new book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era, Houston Baker Jr. argues that black intellectuals on both the left and the right, some of whom were asked to comment on King’s legacy, have turned away from the political aims and intellectual style of Dr. King.

To learn more about Betrayal, catch Houston Baker at the Hue-Man Bookstore in Harlem tomorrow and throughout the month in other cities.

Here is an excerpt from Betrayal regarding the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.:

Compassion, empathy, fearlessness, self-sacrifice, and a genius at living within modest means, King stood witness for the freedom of the black American majority and was a compatriot to all the wretched of the earth. When he referenced the great American myth in all in his scintillating homiletics for freedom, it was usually to reveal how exclusionary that myth is from its founding instance till the time of his assassination . . . and beyond. He was a big-issues public intellectual who refused to avert his eyes from the harsh and enduring ill treatment meted out to the black majority by our national polity.

Black post-Civil Rights era public intellectuals have, in form, substance, ideology, and spirit betrayed virtually every contour of the legacy of public intellectual leadership bequeathed by Dr. King. Their lively performances and earnest recommendations have, time and again, amounted to little more than a black-majority-vilifying, neoconservative, ideological pottage sold and fed to paying white audiences.

According to a new report from the Pew Center on the States, for the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults are now in prison. For minority groups the rate is even higher: one in 36 Hispanic adults is in prison and one in 15 blacks is, too, as is an astonishingly one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

In his new book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era, Houston Baker takes a look at the some of the historical and economic contexts behind this phenomenon. He argues that the rise in incarceration rates for black men is the result of the lack of economic opportunity for blacks and Hispanics, and of a cruel and wrongheaded drug policy that disproportionately affects men of color.

However, the rising prison population has been a boon to some, namely what has become known as the “prison-industrial complex.” Private corporations, often with the aid of government subsidies, have made substantial profits building new prisons to house the ever-growing prison population. What are the possible implications of the rising prison rates? Baker writes:

Those who have been labeled out and thus cast viciously and brutally into our country’s prison-industrial complex are emblems of the American majority future. Do we really want to be complicit in constructing the death row fashioned by mythical patriarchs, oligarchic businessmen, corrupt congressional representatives, and prison suppliers who constitute a billion-dollar elite? I hope not. But if we do not begin to imagine and then construct safe spaces of black American majority life now, death row—the civic, social, economic, and psychological incarceration of our culture—will be our American future.

In looking for answers to this problem, Baker turns to the work and ideas of Angela Davis and Manning Marable. These two thinkers have “condemned utterly our era’s neoconservative and brutal economies of lockdown.” For Baker, Davis and Marable’s efforts exemplify the proper role of black intellectuals in the United States in addressing the issues and concerns confronting black America.

Continuing our series of postings on Black History Month, we turn to Michael West’s The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations. In the book, West explores the power and influence of Washington’s ideas during his own lifetime and their often negative influence in the continuing struggle for equality in the United States. West provocatively argues that Washington’s formulation of the idea of “race relations” ultimately preserved some measure of racial peace but obscured the injustices of segregation. West writes:

Many [of Booker T. Washington's supporters] called him a visionary who offered a means of solving ‘the Negro problem.’ My argument is that Washington’s solution was an idea, a theory . . . called ‘race relations,’ that opened the way for the ideological reconciliation of two opposites: racist proscription and democracy. Judged by the esteem of his contemporaries, Washington’s idea was a great success. Judged by the sorry fate of millions of African Americans, Washington’s leadership was a failure. . . . The power of Washington’s idea—the race relations idea—is the key to understanding the successful progress of Jim Crow America and the shape of the civil rights movement that sought to dismantle Jim Crow.

In The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Literature, winner of the Before Columbus Foundations 2006 American Book Awards, Darryl Dickson-Carr has written a definitive guide to contemporary African American literature from Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison to Colson Whitehead and Terry McMillan. Dr. Andrew Radford, Journal of American Studies, writes of the volume “An eloquent and perceptive overview of this rapidly expanding world.” Bernard W. Bell, African-American Review, says of the book, “A valuable reference book that promotes the knowledge of and respect for African American post-1970s literatures and cultures.”

The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Literature is part of the Columbia Guides to Literature Since 1945 series.

In Burnin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature, Valerie Sweeney Prince reexamines the meaning of home in the work of five classic novels: Native Son by Richard Wright, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, and Corregidora by Gayl Jones. The book also explores how the blues have shaped these novels and African American literature.