Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Jr. shocked the world in the late 1960s, when Vidal began shooting holes in the intellectual blimp that kept Buckley’s ego afloat. What’s more, the hype and blows that attended their political debates rivaled those that attended heavyweight bouts between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
Well, not since then has there been a bout of wits between two public intellectuals as the one now brewing between Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West. Both men earned their academic credentials as peripatetic professors at some of America’s most prestigious universities: Dyson at Brown, Georgetown, and Penn — to name a few; West at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. But, arguably, both are known today far more for their social commentary (primarily on Race Matters) than for their academic scholarship.
West is the more famous (or infamous) of the two, having spent much of the past decade doing little more than regaling TV audiences (as opposed to university students) with stream-of-consciousness riffs on one facet or another of the Black experience. But in recent years, he has been lacing his riffs with condescending, self-righteous and often hypocritical insults – aimed not only at other Black intellectuals, but also at the first Black president of the United States. These insults finally provoked Dyson to begin shooting holes in the intellectual blimp that has kept West’s ego afloat.
I see no point in commenting on who landed what blows during the earlier rounds of this bout. Not least because they smack of the contrived blows one sees on reality TV shows like The Real Housewives of Atlanta. But then came the punch Dyson threw this week, which left Howard Cosell’s famous exclamation – “Down goes Frazier, down goes Frazier!” – ringing in my ear.
It took the form of an April 19 “scholarly” hit piece in The New Republic, which Dyson telegraphed with this damning, exhaustive headline, “The Ghost of Cornel West: President Obama betrayed him. He’s stopped publishing new work. He’s alienated his closest friends and allies. What happened to America’s most exciting black scholar?”
No doubt Dyson stunned him with his many jabs about West betraying his professorial duty to “publish or perish.” But the knockdown blow had to have been his assertion that the aggrieved nature of West’s social commentary these days makes him more like “a woman scorned” than a public intellectual.
Foremost, Dyson notes that even the wrath of an angry God cannot compete with that of an angry West, whose love for President Obama has clearly turned to hate. This excerpt highlights how Dyson set him up, and then knocked him down.
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He has accused Obama of political minstrelsy, calling him a ‘Rockefeller Republican in blackface’; taunted him as a ‘brown-faced Clinton’; and derided him as a ‘neoliberal opportunist’…
West remained allied with Obama until he took the White House and, in football parlance, faked left and ran right. ‘[Obama] posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit,’ West complained…
It is a sad truth that most politicians are serial rhetorical lovers and promiscuous ideological mates, leaving behind scores of briefly valued surrogates and supporters [but] West felt spurned and was embittered.
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Mind you, what imbues this round with such compelling pathos is the obvious personal pain Dyson infuses with each punch. One got a sense, for example, that there was no love lost between Vidal and Buckley. By contrast, Dyson readily admits feeling hurt and dismayed when West began ridiculing him as a Black sellout with no more intellectual integrity than the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
This is why (and please forgive my mixing analogies) reading Dyson vs. West evoked the same emotions I experienced watching Larry Holmes vs. Muhammad Ali. Specifically, there was a palpable sense that neither Dyson nor Holmes took any pleasure in having to publicly humiliate the man he idolized. More to the point, I felt almost as pained reading Dyson’s piece as I suspect he felt writing it….
All the same, Dyson had to have known that critiquing “the most exciting Black American scholar ever” in this comprehensive fashion would trigger considerable backlash. And, sure enough, he’s feeling it. In fact, he wore the strain of it all on his face during an otherwise collegial interview – with fellow professor Marc Lamont Hill (of Columbia University) – on Tuesday’s edition of HuffPost Live.
Incidentally, I recommend watching this defensive interview as highly as I recommend reading his hit piece. But what struck me most about the former is the way Hill practically pleaded with Dyson to explain why he struck out (or back) at West so publicly. For this betrayed the prevailing, irrational notion – even among Black intellectuals – that what goes down in Black America should stay in Black America.
Remarkably, ignoring the very public potshots West has taken at so many notable Blacks, Hill posited that such a public spat between Dyson and West might undermine the ability of Blacks to work together for their collective advancement. But, having already punctured West’s ego, Dyson probably thought better of lecturing Hill on the precedents W.E.B Du Bois vs. Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X vs. Martin Luther King Jr. set.
Instead, here is how Dyson addressed the backlash from Blacks who, like Hill, seem to think that, no matter how warranted his critique might be, he should not have made it so publicly:
[T]he public character of what we’re doing here is vital and necessary because the lessons that can be learned, either from my mistakes, either from my flaws, either from my failures and professor West’s are instructive to other people, who will then learn…
Black America has had a certain kind of complicity … in West’s vitriol that needs to be called into question as well.
I could not agree more.
In fact, the only issue I have with anything Dyson has said in this context is his assertion that nobody in Black America has shown his intellectual courage to publicly criticize West. He duly acknowledged that two White public intellectuals, namely Larry Summers and Leon Wieseltier, beat him to the punch. But Dyson went so far as to challenge Hill to “show me your critique of Cornel West.”
Embarrassingly, Hill did/could not meet this challenge: either because he took it as just a rhetorical point, or because he had nothing to show. But I do.
Here is an excerpt from “Professor Cornel West’s Racist Psychobabble about President Obama,” June 1, 2011, which shows that I beat Dyson to the punch too. And bear in mind that Dyson admits he only decided to counter West’s ad hominem attacks on Obama and others after West began directing similar attacks at him.
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I have never bought into the delusional conceit about there being Black issues that should never be aired in ‘public’… I should also hasten to disclose that I share the professor’s progressive political leanings, which puts us both far to the left of Obama on the ideological spectrum.
That said, I disagree with the professor’s criticism of Obama’s political agenda. And I take profound exception to the way he’s infusing this criticism with psychobabble about the president’s race consciousness.
His criticism stems from what he considers to be the president’s failure to address the concerns of poor and working people… This, of course, is easy for the professor to proffer from the ivory tower he inhabits at Princeton University; not least because, unlike the president, he has no constitutional responsibility to ensure that his words and policies promote the general welfare of all Americans. Not to mention that the surest way for Obama to have doomed his presidency from day one would have been for him to focus on the concerns of poor and working people, instead of doing all he could to rescue the U.S. economy from the brink of a second great depression…
Whatever legitimacy his criticism about the president’s political agenda might have is completely undermined by this:
[Obama is] a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats… I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free Black men… It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a White man with black skin…
He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want….
(truthdig.com, May 16, 2011)
I wish I could begin by expressing shock and dismay that a Black person of the professor’s stature and influence would speak – on the record no less – so irresponsibly, disrespectfully, and ignorantly about any other Black person, let alone one who is the president of the United States…
But, truth be told, this psychobabble reflects nothing more than the Black-on-Black racism that has beset Black consciousness in America since the days of slavery…
[T]he professor’s personal feelings were hurt because the president showed that he was not impressed by his criticism, not intimidated by his intellect, and not flattered by his support.
But this seems too petty a slight to cause even this peacock of a professor to turn on Obama; especially since he could soothe his bruised ego with the mollifying fact that he’s just one of many self-important critics who Obama has left seething with indignation after their encounters with him…
More to the point, the professor must realize that holding a grudge against the president for [perceived slights] is not only unfair, but inherently self-immolating…
Because I can think of no political, cultural or racial explanation, I have to conclude that the professor’s criticism of Obama’s political agenda, as well as his psychobabble about the president’s race consciousness, stems from a confluence of personal slights. What is certain, however, is that the way he’s dealing with this is doing more to betray the professor’s presumed intelligence than it’s doing to undermine Obama’s presidency.
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Welcome to the team, Prof. Dyson.
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