6 Scholars Who Are ‘Reimagining Black Politics’“Last week, Michael Eric Dyson&

6 Scholars Who Are ‘Reimagining Black Politics’“Last week, Michael Eric Dyson’s New Republic essay taking Cornel West to task for various perceived missteps, including West’s harsh critique of Obama, raised questions, for me and many others, about the role of the black public intellectual. Just days after that article’s publication, as spirited responses continued whizzing around the Internet, news broke that another esteemed black academic was embroiled in a controversy involving actor Ben Affleck. Henry Louis Gates was accused of scrubbing evidence of Affleck’s slave-owning ancestry from an episode of his celebrity genealogy show on PBS. Affleck had requested the storyline be left out.All of this left me wondering, do these highly publicized but narrowly focused events tell us anything about the state of black public discourse? At a moment when the killing of black people by police officers and vigilantes is finally at the center of mainstream conversation, who are the black academics demanding that we dig beneath pat explanations? And do you have to be a man and over the age of 50 to be among their ranks?So I reached out to some black scholars who have sizable followings outside the academy. I asked what conversations are vital to black American communities right now. This is a purely subjective sampling; there are a great many more thinkers to note, but these are some of my own favorites. Some responded in conversation, others via e-mail. Their answers have been edited for length and clarity.”Read the full piece here -- source link
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