The Talented Tenth

The Future of the Race
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West
Knopf. 196 pp. $21.00

“The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” This observation by the black thinker W.E.B. Du Bois, made at the very outset of the 20th century and repeated throughout his long career (he died in 1963 at the age of ninety-five), continues to hold sway with historians and theorists of race.

Du Bois, indeed, was one of the great aphorists of the modern era. His famous concept of “double consciousness” remains the most widely cited description of black ambivalence about American citizenship. And still another such marquee notion is the “Talented Tenth,” a phrase Du Bois first advanced in a 1903 essay to characterize an African-American elite whose members, through their own success, would raise up the uneducated and impoverished below them. “The Negro race, like all other races,” wrote Du Bois, “is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”

Du Bois returned to the idea of the Talented Tenth in an address in 1948 to the black fraternity Sigma Pi Phi. By then, one might have expected his strong tilt toward the Left, which began in the 193 0’s, to have entirely undermined his notion of an elite black leadership. In fact, however, Du Bois easily adapted his theory to a Marxist model, according to which the rise of the “masses,” as he now called the other nine-tenths, would be accomplished through a “just distribution of wealth.” Du Bois was always adept at uniting elitism and radicalism, and it is thus no surprise that he has remained of greater interest to academics than to the masses for whom he wished to speak.

_____________

Nor is it a surprise that Du Bois’s essays on the Talented Tenth should have become the basis for these meditations on contemporary African-American leadership by two members of today’s black academic elite. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West are colleagues in the department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard and prominent figures in the black intellectual renaissance of the late 20th century; the former is best known as a literary critic, the latter as a social philosopher. Because Harvard, under Gates’s direction, has become a leading center for African-American research, and because Du Bois was the first black American to receive a Ph.D. at Harvard, it must have seemed a sharp marketing ploy to offer this updated exposition of his agenda. The volume, the authors note, was meant in part to tell the story of two “grandchildren” of the Talented Tenth, members of the “crossover generation” that has integrated white universities and white businesses and thus cleared a path for those behind and below them.

Yet The Future of the Race, purportedly inspired by conversations between Gates and West, is a perplexingly fruitless book. Through their previous writings, as well as through the story of their lives, both men have earned the right to speak for and about the Talented Tenth. But neither does so here, and the patent anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism that West shares with Du Bois is at odds with the book’s mercenary motives. Even worse, in a volume intended for a wide audience and advertised as a major “publishing event,” The Future of the Race manages to make Du Bois appear a thinker of little consequence.

_____________

One problem is that, although the idea of the Talented Tenth was a crucial part of the programs for black advancement Du Bois outlined in landmark books like The Souls of Black Folk and Dusk of Dawn, his two essays on the subject, both reprinted here, are among his least cogent. Except for some dozen paragraphs, the 1903 essay is a rambling, repetitive piece of work, crowded with moot statistical charts. The 1948 essay reveals much about the evolution of Du Bois’s politics by mid-century, but remains a hazy amalgam of utopian socialism, rueful thoughts on the advanced age of the audience he is addressing, idiosyncrasies (he hates American “noise, waste, and display,” and warns against profit-driven careers in gambling, insurance, and drugstores), and intellectual confusion (at one point he asserts that one-hundredth is greater than one-tenth).

Nor, unfortunately, do the companion pieces by Gates and West have much to say about black leadership, past or present, or touch significantly on the subject set forth in the grandiose title. Gates’s “Parable of the Talents,” an anecdotal essay built in part on recollections of his undergraduate years at Yale in the late 1960’s, reads rather like an out-take from his recent engaging autobiography, Colored People. In it he surveys the rise and retrenchment of the civil-rights agenda, intelligently embroidering a tautology: “The real crisis in black leadership, then, is that the very idea of black leadership is in crisis.”

As for West’s contribution, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” its main drift is fairly well indicated by its title. According to West, even Du Bois, the “great titan of black emancipation,” fell short in his radicalism: he failed to provide “the necessary intellectual and existential resources” to confront the “indescribable agony and unnameable anguish” ready to be unleashed by “uncontested, fast-paced global capitalism.”

On the stage of such grand opera, the mere question of leadership is dwarfed by the specter of modern-day “evil,” which, for West, has reached its apogee in the

profoundly decadent American civilization at the end of the 20th century—a ghastly century whose levels of barbarity, bestiality, and brutality are unparalleled in human history.

This sort of flaccid writing marks much of West’s essay, a catalogue of excoriation, hackneyed literary criticism, and visionary pronouncements. Thus, West compares the present world-historical crisis to that of Russia on the eve of Bolshevism and Central Europe on the eve of the Holocaust. Where the one case produced Tolstoy and the other Kafka, says West, America has produced analogous “soul-making” prophecy in the persons of. . . Sarah Vaughan and John Coltrane.

West’s contribution to The Future of the Race confirms one lesson of his 1993 best-seller, Race Matters—that he cannot conceive of black leadership outside a model of radical “resistance.” In the earlier book, he did indeed assert that the black leader must be a “race-transcending” prophet; but in illustration he held out the example of James Baldwin, a once-brilliant writer whose own preoccupation with race lapsed finally into paranoid fantasies of genocide. Similarly, in The Future of the Race, West’s abiding presumption that African-Americans form a monolithic Left, defined principally by expressions of rage, pain, and invisibility, leaves him unable to transcend either the category of race or the genre of the jeremiad.

_____________

By contrast, Henry Louis Gates recognizes that the malaise or anger of today’s black middle class, now a third of the black population, is not always distinct from that of Americans at large, despite the lingering persistence of white racism. Noting that blacks in many respects are more conservative than whites on social issues (even if some are still open to the canards of racial-conspiracy theory), he contends that African-Americans need “a politics whose first mission isn’t the reinforcement of the idea of a black America.” Because he does not wrap himself in the revolutionary’s mantle, Gates’s lament for the burnout of the Great Society—“liberalism’s supernova”—has a bittersweet authority.

There is also a welcome candor in Gates’s cool reappraisal of the 60’s counterculture—at Yale, he remarks, he and his peers occupied themselves with “minute examination of the metaphysical nature of the ‘Pig’ ”—and his admission that he stood very much on the periphery of the Black Power movement renders him free to dissent from the strange mix of cynicism and nostalgia left in its wake. The faltering civil-rights dream, argues Gates, has left many among the Talented Tenth afflicted with “survivor’s guilt,” leading them to mask class differences in a romantic black nationalism which today is the “veritable socialism of the black bourgeoisie.” But in Gates’s view, the civil-rights era fulfilled Du Bois’s agenda, and it is now time for “cultural glasnost” on the race question.

It would be more accurate, however, to say that the 1960’s fulfilled the agenda of the NAACP, which Du Bois had helped to found in 1909, than that of Du Bois himself. By the time of his indictment and trial in 1951 for work on behalf of the pro-Communist Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace and the Stockholm Appeal (the case was dismissed), Du Bois had lost all patience with democratic liberalism. For the Supreme Court decision in Brown v.Board of Education, ending legal segregation in schools, he gave credit to the Soviet Union; and he embarked on an adulation of totalitarian regimes that led, at last, to self-exile in Ghana. In his 1948 address to Sigma Pi Phi, Du Bois ventured that “the United States is probably the most thoroughly hated and despised nation on earth, especially among the really cultured and civilized,” whom he located vaguely in Europe and Asia. He would soon rank Truman with Hitler as “one of the greatest killers of our day,” and place the “great man” Stalin above both. Though he still believed in the Talented Tenth, the real work of raising up the masses, he said in 1948, would best be done by state planning and carried out by state force.

Such a change of heart in an accomplished and influential writer is worthy of attention, but one finds virtually no comment on it in The Future of the Race. Likewise, although Gates has elsewhere written fine profiles of Colin Powell, Albert Murray, and Louis Farrakhan, among others, his portraits of some of today’s Talented Tenth are perfunctory, while West, for his part, confines himself to portentous comments on a handful of musicians and novelists. (Readers interested in the lasting influence of Du Bois on contemporary black leaders should consult Gerald Early’s Lure and Loathing, a collection of twenty responses to his thought by writers as diverse as Glenn Loury, Stanley Crouch, and Nikki Giovanni.) Finally, at a time when, as Gates notes, the incarceration rate for black men is 100 times their college-graduation rate, one might have expected some deeper reflection by these two admitted beneficiaries of affirmative action on the best means of augmenting the Talented Tenth today. Even if there is plenty to choose here between West’s doomsaying and Gates’s pragmatism, neither tells us much about the future of the race.