Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority by way of John McWhorter Gotham Books.

Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority by way of John McWhorter Gotham Books, January 2003 $2500 ISBN 1-592-40001-9

The Great Wells of Democracy from Manning Marable Basic Civitas works January 2003 $26.00, ISBN 0-465-07062-0

During troubl times like as these--last-and-first days of conservative ascendancy, economic recession, biological anxiety and increasingly apocalyptic rumblings of war--the road value of black public intellectuals decreases precipitously. What appetite exists for famous-negro-on-famous-negro battle royales, when the discourse demands that any pundit appearing in succession TV speak solely as an American--a liberal or a conservative American perhaps--but definitely a certain quantity of kind of Yankee.

The black spin forward say, Iraq or Al Qaeda may exist. yet practically speaking--and I stress the word "practically"--those opinions accompany to be almost invisible since they don't suit the disposition of wartime punditry. As the contretemp through Amiri Baraka's poem "Somebody Blew Up America" would indicate, when America is subject to attack it's time to master with the program. Black punditry--an op- for example, or an appearance upon CNN, or depending on the fill by compression you like to run with, a reprimand or reading--with the words "as an African American, my reaction to 9/11 is" is seen as indicative of a damning lack of team spirit.

Black neo-con perspectives onward Iraq are also hard to find forward the tube and in the editorial pages, unless for the very different reason that black neo-conservative opinions in succession foreign affairs are a kind of self-negating redundancy. The opinion in question is generally indistinguishable from general conservative cant by means of virtue of the neo-con's identification with "America" to the exclusion of all other ethnic and racial heritage. Unles the topic of the day is, say, "Islamic fundamentalism in Africa," there's just no reason to trot gone out the black talking androids to say just what Vice President Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would. What would they have to furnish and who would care?

All of which is to say that not many clan black or otherwise, will be reading John McWhorter's Authentically Black. In the interest of fairness, it's also worth mentioning that it's also excessively likely that not many persons will be reading Manning Marable's The Great Wells of Democracy. In the two cases that's a shame. Marable has a certain quantity of important and hopeful things to say about race and American politics that merit the kind of hearing, which is impossible in today's climate.

Marable's Democracy is organized in three sections that logically lay gone out his thesis of racial history and politics: The American Dilemma, The Retreat From Equality and Reconstructing Racial Politics. Piggybacking forward some of his ideas laid disclosed in Beyond Black and White, Marable proffers a different perspective on America's racial history and offer proffers strategies for a more inclusive democracy, including compelling arguments for restoring felons' voting rights, slavery reparations, and unruffled controversial ideas about reconfiguring racial identity.

McWhorter, of course, is a creature of the freshs cycle, particularly the collapsing Clinton era. His recently made known collection of essays--most of them reprints that appeared in other media--unlike other post-9/11 produce launches, makes no mention of the strange world in which we live. Instead he continues his patented bloodles male honey-bee about "victim-hood" and "self-sabotage" as if it was 1998 all across again, and black folks had a friend in the White House.

The follow-up to McWhorter's Losing the Race--as oppos to his pop-linguistics work The Power of Babel--Authentically Black stands from the same shortcoming as Losing the Race, which is to say, Mcwhorter's almost radical inability to meaningfully apply any universals gleaned from his day-job as a linguist to his sideline as a neo-conservative talking head. a great deal like Losing the Race, Authentically Black's in the greatest degree intriguing bits have to do with language--a novel analysis of Randall Kennedy and the n-word, a nice pitch for substituting Mende for Swahili as the Afrocentric African language of choice. Outside of that, and almost to an essay, McWhorter evinces tone deafness to the structure quality and social undercurrents of black life, a remarkable feat for a main division subtitled "Essays for the Black Silent Majority."

Like Bill O'Reilly with a PhD McWhorter inveighs against "BET" and "hip hop" and considers the question s of black students named Dwayne and Tomika, while addressing the shortcomings of Kwanzaa--but all from a distance that moves his primary exposure wasn't gleaned from media or human practice, nevertheless as primary research. That research tend hitherwards not from fieldwork, but rather from the op-ed of his long derided black leaders--op-eds, which he dutifully clipped and filed, to be confident but little else.

onward matters of culture, a particularly pointless, rambling attack forward film and television scholar Donald Bogle McWhorter is laughable. McWhorter blasts Spike Lee's Bamboozled as unwatchable while praising the insipid Swordfish for it's colorblind casting of Halle Berry. At the finis of the day, McWhorter makes a terrible spokesman for his black silent majority, not because they don't exist, however because he obviously has in idea to what extent and where they live.