Rethinking Racial Uplift: Rhetorics of Black Unity and Disunity in the Obama Era

RETHINKING RACIAL UPLIFT

RETHINKING RACIAL UPLIFT

RHETORICS OF BLACK UNITY AND DISUNITY IN THE OBAMA ERA

NIGEL I. MALCOLM

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

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Chapter 2 is reprinted by permission from Nigel I. Malcolm, Slaves to the Community: Blacks and the Rhetoric of ‘Selling Out,’ Journal of African American Studies 19, no. 2 (2015): 120–34.

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Malcolm, Nigel I., author.

Title: Rethinking racial uplift : rhetorics of Black unity and disunity in the Obama era / Nigel I. Malcolm.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022033436 (print) | LCCN 2022033437 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496842640 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496842657 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496842664 (epub) | ISBN 9781496842671 (epub) | ISBN 9781496842688 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496842695 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Race identity. | Black people—Race identity.

Classification: LCC E185.625 .M327 2023 (print) | LCC E185.625 (ebook) |

DDC 305.896/073—dc23/eng/20220824

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033436

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033437

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Minnie P. Reed,

my grandmother,

who was always there for me.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Race, Class, and Fear in Twenty-First-Century America

CHAPTER 2

Slaves to the Community: Blacks and the Rhetoric of Selling Out

CHAPTER 3

Black Man’s Burden: The Rhetoric of Racial Uplift

CHAPTER 4

Identification, Division, and the Rhetoric of Black Disunity

CHAPTER 5

Divided Loyalty: Race, Class, and Place in the Affirmative Action Debate

CHAPTER 6

Blacks and the Rhetoric of Individualism

Conclusion

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Vijay Shah for your interest in my work. I wish you all the best in your new endeavors. Thank you to Emily Snyder Bandy at the University Press of Mississippi for picking up where Vijay left off. I appreciate your carrying the baton and helping me to run this race until the end. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for your feedback on my work. Thank you to Lisa McMurtray and all the many people at the University Press of Mississippi who make books possible.

Thank you to the Florida Education Fund, and Dr. Lawrence Morehouse, for your support these many years. Thank you to the African American Communication and Culture Division at NCA for providing a space for me to try out new ideas. Thank you to Keene State College for providing a sabbatical so that I could finish this work. Thank you to my colleagues who have also become friends.

Last, thank you to all my family, especially my wife, Sarah, for the trade-offs we make to support each other. Ian, Nya, and Nora, thank you for bringing unimagined joy to my life.

INTRODUCTION

We live in a different world from our predecessors. Both Blacks and whites in the post–civil rights era can attend the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods, and intermingle as they see fit. These things may not happen as much as they should or as much as we’d like them to, but the fact that they can happen is evidence of change in America. The distance between some Blacks and some whites has closed dramatically. We live in a world in which we must regularly assess whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. For some of us, the glass is perhaps three-quarters full, and for others it is overflowing.

This is a world in which Blacks can be both icons and pariahs. Some Blacks number among the wealthiest individuals and most successful individuals in the country. Others are middle-class, though, as Conley (1999) observed, lacking the wealth that makes their white counterparts solidly so. For at least another quarter of Blacks, life remains hard as they struggle to hold on to the short end of the stick in American society. They deal with what it means to be both Black and poor in a society in which many whites think that racism is a problem of the past, and some Blacks think that poor Blacks have only themselves to blame.

What, one may ask, are Black people to make of all of this? In the span of eight years, America went from electing in Obama its first Black president to electing Trump, whom Coates (2017) saw as America’s first white president (344), one for whom whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power (343). One step forward and two steps backward may be the norm throughout American history, yet the road leading up to Obama’s election appeared to signal for some the possibility that we had reached a new state of affairs in the relationship between Blacks and whites: a world in which George W. Bush provided us with two Black secretaries of state, and a Black secretary of education, despite Kanye West’s assertion in 2005 that the president doesn’t care about black people. In 2018, Kanye later declared his love for Donald Trump and referred to him as his brother. While no one has yet figured out just where Kanye’s head is at, it might be worth trying to see just where the heads of Black public intellectuals are at, given the head-spinning changes of the twenty-first century and even the last decade. For much of the twentieth century, Black intellectuals took their cues from Du Bois, but in the twenty-first century, that appears to be changing.

If for the iconic intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois (1969), "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line (54), then part of his solution to that problem lay in the creation of a group of people among Blacks that he deemed the Talented Tenth. For Du Bois (1986), The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men" (842), and while women have always played, and continue to play, a role in racial uplift, the gendered nature of Du Bois’s proclamation should be noted even if it is inaccurate. What matters most for my purposes is that Du Bois was an elitist and that he saw leadership among Blacks and racial uplift as derived from above. It was college-educated Blacks who he believed were capable of providing the race with the guidance it needed to surmount a history of slavery, segregation, and oppression in America.

Over time, Du Bois came to see that Blacks, like other humans, are capable of being selfish and self-interested. He reassessed his idea of the Talented Tenth and instead put his faith in a Guiding Hundredth (Gates and West 1996) before eventually turning away from such ideas altogether and leaving America for good to live in exile. Yet as I have argued in an earlier work (Malcolm 2008), the fact that Du Bois gave up on the Talented Tenth did not mean that the Talented Tenth gave up on themselves. Du Bois created the Talented Tenth through his own rhetoric, yet once the rhetoric and the group it created came into existence, both took on a life of their own. As Gates and West (1996) noted, ‘The Talented Tenth’ was held up as a model for the social, political, and ethical role of the members of what we might call a ‘crossover’ generation, those of us who, as a result of the great civil rights movement, were able to integrate historically white educational and professional institutions (xi).

Nearly a hundred years later, Gates and West revisited Du Bois’s idea because it still had power and held sway among Blacks in America. Even Randall Robinson (2000), when he wasn’t talking about reparations and what America owed to Blacks, followed up with a discussion of what he thought Blacks owed each other (R. Robinson 2003). The idea of a debt that Blacks owe to the race, the idea of racial uplift with a Talented Tenth at the forefront, continues to hold sway for many Blacks.

Yet while some Blacks continue to believe that Blacks constitute a unified group and that members of the Talented Tenth owe a debt to the less fortunate masses, not everyone agrees. As hooks (2000) stated, Collectively, black folks in the United States have never wanted to highlight the issue of class and class exploitation, even though there have always been diverse caste and class groups among African-Americans (89). Hooks reminded us that class matters. Race and gender can be used as screens to deflect attention away from the harsh realities class politics exposes (7). Moreover, That sense of solidarity was altered by a class-based civil rights struggle whose ultimate goal was to acquire more freedom for those black folks who already had a degree of class privilege however relative. By the late 1960s class-based racial integration disrupted the racial solidarity that often held blacks together despite class difference (91).

Instead of seeing racial uplift as a debt the Talented Tenth owe the masses to ensure the success of all, racial uplift is now redefined as the Talented Tenth finding ways to elevate themselves and their children. My work suggests that success now has to do with one’s own rise as the ties that bind the Talented Tenth to the lower classes are cut. As I will show, evidence for this change exists in the works of some contemporary Black writers whose books I have selected for analysis and critique. In this work, I argue that rhetorics of Black unity and Black disunity coexist today, and the appearance of both types of rhetoric in Black public intellectual discourse ultimately points to the divided state of Blacks in the post–civil rights era. I should note that while division has always existed among Blacks, both the need for and the appearance of Black unity have generally been advocated with a high degree of consensus even if such unity did not exist in reality. From Martin R. Delaney in the nineteenth century, to twentieth-century figures such as Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, race women such as Cooper, and the numerous women of the civil rights movement who put race before gender in the interest of group unity, debates between various individuals ensued, yet the belief in the necessity of Black unity remained strong. Even in the twenty-first century, we see efforts such as Shelby’s (2005) to provide a philosophical bedrock for Black unity. A rhetoric of Black unity was a means to achieve the ends of racial justice. I define rhetorics of Black unity as those that envision Blacks as a unified group and stress the need for Blacks to work together as a collective, even at the expense of individual goals or self-interest. I define rhetorics of Black disunity as those that do not envision Blacks as a unified group and stress the need for Blacks to pursue individual rather than collective aims, even emphasizing commonalities across racial lines above loyalty to a perceived racial group. As I will show, examples of this exist in the work of Eugene Robinson (2010), who suggested that Blacks are broken up into four distinct subgroups; Touré (2011), who argued in favor of a post-Black identity that places individual needs before those of the group; and Cashin (2014), who suggested that place should take precedence over race and that the wealthy Blacks can work against the interests of poor Blacks when higher education and social mobility are at stake. Yet what makes the subject of Black unity and Black disunity necessary to discuss today?

The success of the civil rights movement, as hooks (2000) noted, opens doors for some Blacks and allows others to be left behind. The totality of segregation and discrimination in the past was such a dominant scene that, to use Burke’s ([1945] 1969) terms, it determined the actions Blacks could take. Yet when that scene changed, Blacks could act differently than they had in the past, and some chose to do so. Moreover, a change in the scene led to a change in how Blacks saw themselves as agents, both in the collective and in the individualistic sense. A change in the situation eventually produced a change in how Blacks identify with each other. The intermediating force for this change is rhetoric. As Bitzer (1968) wrote, We need to understand that a particular discourse comes into existence because of some specific condition or situation which invites utterance (4). I see the success of the civil rights movement as the condition that calls forth a change in the rhetoric of Black Americans. If the situation changes, then our rhetoric changes in response. Simply put, some Blacks no longer feel the need to appear unified, even in a rhetorical sense. My work combines insights from Bitzer (1968) about the rhetorical situation, Charland (1987) on the ways in which rhetoric helps constitute a people, Meyrowitz (1986) on the ways in which new media alter social environments in ways that change social behavior, and hooks’s (2000) discussion of the changes in class relations among Blacks after the civil rights movement. In this work, I reveal how changes to the situation bring forth a change in rhetoric, which affects identity (both collective and individual among Blacks), leading to potential changes in behavior, which will themselves potentially affect the situation in which Blacks and other Americans find themselves going forward.

The post–civil rights era, and changes within this era, brings about a change in the rhetoric among Blacks related to unity and disunity. If unity among Blacks was based on historical necessity and circumstance, then changes in the situation in which Blacks exist historically open the door to changes in their rhetorical response to that situation. As Bitzer (1968) asserted, changes in the situation call forth a corresponding change in discourse. I suggest that shifts in rhetoric create, often intentionally, an opportunity for a new sense of identity among Blacks, both at the collective and the individual level. Eugene Robinson (2010) argued that four distinct groups now exist among Blacks, whereas Touré (2011) sought to move toward a post-Black identity at the individual level in ways that diminish group identity altogether. While my work, in discussing Touré’s rhetoric, only partly reveals changes in behavior that would stem from changes to identity, I do assert that this is something that authors such as Cashin (2014) hope will happen when she argued in favor of ardent integrators who will help build multicultural alliances—a shift that I note takes Blacks away from Du Bois’s notion of the Talented Tenth and their role among Blacks. Last, changes in the behavior of Blacks will have some effect on the environment or situation in which they exist. While whites are still the majority group and exert a great deal of power over our social world, Blacks throughout history have shown the ability to force alterations in social relations and the shared social world as well. Whites have always found it necessary to try to control the thoughts and actions of Blacks because those in power have always known that a change in one part of the system can alter the system as a whole.

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency is one such reaction to a shift in the system as a whole brought on by the election of Barack Obama. As Coates (2017) noted, Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness (344). Obama’s election to the presidency was something that not even Blacks really thought was possible until it happened. Who could have imagined that a biracial man who did not shirk from blackness but instead married into and celebrated it could defeat the Clinton regime, win the Democratic Party nomination, and ultimately the general election? Not many imagined it, and fewer still thought it possible. Yet Obama spoke of hope and change and enlisted Americans of all colors into a broader vision of what the country could and should be. He became the change he sought in the world, and America woke up one morning to see a Black family in the White House. Not everyone was comfortable with this new day in America, and some wanted to see it end as quickly as possible.

Yet for eight years that vision endured, and despite the racism Obama encountered both from other politicians and from many members of the public, he worked to save the world’s financial system and to provide all Americans with some form of health care, even if half of them didn’t appreciate the effort. The response to his good works was animosity, because good Negro government could not be tolerated. It was too much of a shock to the system. As Olson (2004) wrote, White citizenship is the enjoyment of racial standing in a democratic polity. It is a position of equality and privilege simultaneously: equal to other white citizens yet privileged over those who are not white (xix). Obama’s election undermined white privilege, and after eight years of progress, a majority of white America decided to make America great again by attempting to turn back the clock to a time when minorities knew their place and the White House was for white people.

I mention the shift from Obama to Trump and the resurgence of white supremacy because all the books I critique were published from 2007 to 2015; five of the six books overlap with Obama’s term in office, and one was published while he campaigned for office in 2007. That said, these books constitute a response to one of the most unprecedented events in American history, a Black presidency. If ever there was a time when Black people could begin to question the meaning of blackness and Black unity in the twenty-first century, this was surely the time. Some of the works I critique display greater calls for individuality than others. Some of the works attempt to double down on Black unity at a time when Obama could attain the White House using race-neutral politics, the endorsement of Oprah, and the legion of adoring white women who constituted a faithful share of her television audience and continued magazine readership.

What the authors whose works I critique would have written in 2016 upon observing the election of Donald Trump and the racist campaign he embarked on is not present in these texts. Perhaps some of them would have changed their minds about just how far they thought Americans had really come as a nation and the need, or lack thereof, for racial unity among Blacks. Yet what interests me is what they did write and what it says about the shift in rhetoric among Blacks in the post–civil rights era. This change did not take place all at once, and no doubt other works also contain similar ideas. Yet all the works I chose were popular and reached a national audience. Randall Kennedy’s Sellout was reviewed in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint’s Come On, People reached number five on the Publishers Weekly nonfiction best-seller list and was a New York Times best seller. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me was a number one New York Times best seller and won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Eugene Robinson’s Disintegration was reviewed in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Sheryll Cashin’s Place, Not Race was reviewed in the New York Times and the Washington Post and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Nonfiction. Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? was a New York Times and Washington Post notable book. These authors are well-known, and one is now infamous, yet all for a time constituted part of a modern-day Talented Tenth. What they have to say on the subject of race and Black unity or disunity is important to consider.

Still, I find that extended analysis of the books such individuals produce is mostly absent in the field of communication studies. Rhetoricians focus on works of the past going back to abolition and advancing toward the civil rights movement. While they study the speeches of social movement leaders and Black politicians, less attention is given to the books of Black thinkers, and fewer still discuss those books in concert with each other. Moreover, when attention is paid, it usually concerns what the author has to say about the relationship between Blacks and whites rather than the relationship that Blacks have with each other.

My fascination, however, is not with what one could call interracial communication but rather intraracial. What do Black people or members of any racial group say to each other? What thoughts cross their minds? What mutual interests are shared? What disagreements had? What resolutions to those disagreements found? Although my work cannot explore each of those questions to their full extent, these are the types of questions that motivate it. We often hear calls for interracial dialogue and greater communication between racial groups. Yet my contention is that before groups talk with each other, a conversation must first be had within those groups themselves. This intragroup conversation is primary, and just as important as the conversation that takes place between groups. Interracial conversations often proceed based on the notion that a single individual or a few persons can speak for an entire group of people. Yet who says that these are the right people, and for how long are they authorized to speak? Who says that a single person could even speak for an entire group unless some conversations within that group had already taken place and authority granted to a given leader or spokesperson? Disagreement among Blacks is in fact the norm. Why, then, should such productive disagreements not be explored and studied?

We value the rhetoric of whites talking primarily to other whites. Should not the rhetoric of Blacks talking primarily to other Blacks be equaled valued? Unlike whites, Blacks cannot pretend that whites do not matter or that they do not factor into the conversations that Blacks have with each other. Yet every conversation is not about white people, and every conversation is not addressed to them. Though whites may constitute a potential audience for Black rhetors, there are times at which white people are in fact secondary.

I believe that the conversations that Blacks have with each other about what it means to be Black in America and how Blacks should relate to one another are equally important to the conversations Blacks have with whites about race relations in America. My continued project is to explore this intraracial communication even while acknowledging that race is a sociological construct rather than a biological fact. Blacks have a shared history in America, and it is this shared history, along with the rhetoric and legal fictions of whites, that shapes our sense of blackness. Black thinkers spend a great deal of time writing their thoughts in books for other people to read. While Blacks have excelled in oral discourse, books take longer to produce and may reveal much more about the state of our thinking than a speech could. As Postman (1985) noted, the medium in which a thought is expressed can limit what is expressed. Just as Postman valued the type of culture the printed word could produce, I too value the printed word and the use that Black authors make of it. Moreover, I believe that the works of contemporary Black authors are worthy of exploration. As Rambsy (2016) observed, "Despite his popular acclaim, contemporary writers like Coates seldom become central