BY MATTHEW CLAIR
Amid protests against racialized police violence and debates over the limits of free speech on increasingly diverse college campuses, a good many (often, white) progressives have been left scratching their heads. What explains the current upswell of black Americans’ frustration, just eight years after the election of the nation’s first black president? Black intellectuals like Coates—perceived to be authentic interpreters of the black experience—have been recruited to make sense of the disillusionment. That Coates is both black and a native son of Baltimore’s restless inner city only heightens his authenticity in the eyes of a white liberal public searching for answers. But even I—the suburban-raised son of two black physicians—carry a certain racial authenticity, one seemingly much desired in predominantly white academic spaces.
Where does this belief in, and demand for, racially authentic explanations of black life come from? Far from unique to this contemporary moment, the notion of a racially authentic interpretation of blackness has been a mainstay of American understandings of the role of black intellectuals for more than a century. Through different routes, two recent books explore the centrality of racial authenticity in black intellectual practice—or, the belief in a uniquely and authoritatively black knowledge produced by black scholars, writers, and artists. In his book On the Corner, Daniel Matlin considers how Kenneth Clark, a psychologist, Amiri Baraka, a writer, and Romare Bearden, an artist, variously navigated their designations as “indigenous interpreters” for white audiences in the 1960s. Similarly, in his bookThe Scholar Denied, Aldon Morris explores black intellectual practice, but during a time when many white audiences expressed little interest in the insights of black intellectuals, even of the preeminent W. E. B. Du Bois. Placing these books in conversation illuminates the costs and benefits of racial authenticity in the production of knowledge about black America and, ultimately, in the struggle to alter the course of American racial inequality.
The 1960s marked a turning point in the position of black intellectuals with respect to white progressives, Matlin argues. The migration of African Americans from the South to major cities in the North and Midwest in the mid-20th century resulted in a massive geographic—and symbolic—relocation of black America. The terms “ghetto” and “urban” came to signify a population that had, for successive generations, been exploited and contained in the rural South. But migrants’ lofty expectations of northern prosperity were tempered by the realities of dilapidated housing, a declining manufacturing sector, and more modern, less strident forms of racism. The cities grew restless. Various white audiences looked to black intellectuals—whom Matlin describes as racial “insiders” with “experiential knowledge”—to make sense of the emerging black ghettos and the attendant appeal of the Black Power movement’s politics of racial separatism.
On the Corner opens during the Harlem riot of 1964. During a racist altercation between a white man and several young black students on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, James Powell, a black boy, was shot dead by Thomas Gilligan, a white police officer. Protests lasted several days. As the summer progressed, similar protests against police brutality engulfed cities from Philadelphia to Rochester. To many observers, the perils of the northern black ghettos were fast eclipsing the promises of the southern civil rights movement, which had dominated media coverage in the preceding decade.
below: demonstrators carrying photographs of Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan during the Harlem Riots of 1964; Wikimedia Commons
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