"The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives": a discussion with Adolph Reed and historian Barbara Fields

Here (it really starts around the 7-minute mark).   There are also some references to this utterly scathing essay by Reed on "black public intellectuals".   An excerpt from the latter below the fold.

Reed identifies as "black public intellectuals" figures like Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Robin Kelley, Gloria Watkins (bell hooks), and Michael Eric Dyson.  After reviewing, for contrast, earlier generations of black intellectual and political debate, he writes:

Those who now describe themselves as black public intellectuals diverge significantly from the rich history of black commentary. Their differences speak to the character of our time and the changes in black intellectual life ensuing from the passage of the segregation era. The contemporary public intellectuals are unique in that they exhibit little sense of debate or controversy among themselves as a cohort. To the contrary, they seem rather to come together as a publicist’s delight, a hyperbolically log-rolling lovefest. Watkins and West gush over each other’s nonpareil brilliance; Gates proclaims West “the preeminent African-American intellectual of our generation”; and Gates, West, and Kelley lavish world-historical superlatives on Dyson, who, naturally enough, expresses comparable judgments about them. Their anthologies and conferences feature no sharp disagreements. Instead, they function as a kind of Tuskegee Machine by committee. Their political utterances exude pro forma moralism, not passion. Their critiques are only easy pronouncements against racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism or equally easy dissent from a lame Afrocentricity that has no adherents among their audience anyway.

The point is not that controversy by itself makes for purity or legitimacy, but that in this instance at least, the absence of controversy betrays a lack of critical content and purpose. The stance of these black public intellectuals is by and large just that—not a stand but a posture. Can the reader familiar with their work recall without hesitation a specific critique, a concrete formulation—an extended argument that is neither airily abstract nor cozily compatible with what passes for common sense at the moment? I’d bet not, because in this arena prominence of author counts more than weight of utterance.