It was easy, at the outset, to support Nikole Hannah-Jones on general principle. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media had bungled the hiring of a star journalist, an accomplished and esteemed Black woman, and one of their own to boot. The optics, as they say, were ugly.
It was easy to infer that the process had been tainted by politics, given that UNC’s board was Republican-appointed, and that Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work has become an especially polarizing topic in our increasingly crude culture wars. The lack of transparency and communication from university leadership didn’t help. Hannah-Jones was set to be the first Knight chair to hold the position without tenure: peculiar at best, humiliating at worst. As public pressure increased, the board delayed any decision on tenure … until it finally relented, at which point it was too late.
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It was easy, at the outset, to support Nikole Hannah-Jones on general principle. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media had bungled the hiring of a star journalist, an accomplished and esteemed Black woman, and one of their own to boot. The optics, as they say, were ugly.
It was easy to infer that the process had been tainted by politics, given that UNC’s board was Republican-appointed, and that Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work has become an especially polarizing topic in our increasingly crude culture wars. The lack of transparency and communication from university leadership didn’t help. Hannah-Jones was set to be the first Knight chair to hold the position without tenure: peculiar at best, humiliating at worst. As public pressure increased, the board delayed any decision on tenure … until it finally relented, at which point it was too late.
In the aftermath of Hannah-Jones’s decision to decline UNC’s offer of tenure and take her talents to Howard University, the principles involved began to seem less cut and dried, and the question of winners and losers murkier. I saw a personal ax being ground — masterfully, even. I also saw a lot of money earmarked for a new program at Howard. There was widespread jubilation and schadenfreude online, but the celebration seemed out of step with the gains. A lot of people — particularly students, faculty members, and citizens who had invested their energy in advocating for Hannah-Jones’s cause — had lost something. Those who’d opposed her tenure at UNC, on the other hand, got, in the end, exactly what they wanted.
The prevailing fantasy was that Hannah-Jones’s personal revenge was every academic’s dream come true, and a victory for Black academics in particular. But the Black academics I know harbor dreams of simply finding a job — ideally a stable one, without an overwhelming courseload, in a department with the least possible dysfunction. Forget about tenure — the statistics for Black faculty members’ achieving that coveted status are damning and depressing. Millions of dollars in funding from anonymous donors; the support of prominent figures, formidable philanthropic institutions, and media outlets; a litany of job opportunities on which to fall back — that’s a step beyond a pipe dream, so far from the realm of possibilities for most Black academics that it’s difficult to see any germane lesson to glean, and certainly no collective victory.
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There was some pushback. An open letter, written under an alias but claiming to be from a Howard faculty member, spoke directly to and undercut Hannah-Jones’s edict to “go where you are valued, not where you are tolerated.” The letter made clear that the inequity and dysfunction one finds at a place like UNC can also be found at an HBCU. Faculty members at Howard have also been undervalued and jerked around in negotiations. Greg Carr, an associate professor of Africana studies and chair of the department of Afro-American studies at Howard, remarked on Twitter: “I won’t be surprised if we enter a moment when much more detailed and layered testimonies of HBCU faculty life will emerge in the wake of recent ‘renaissance’ narratives. It was probably inevitable. And, in many ways, long overdue.”
The story, for me, isn’t about Nikole Hannah-Jones, a talented journalist who produced a historical analysis that even her critics have to admit moved the needle of public discourse. It’s about how the media framed her tenure struggle, and how so many of us are so eager to substitute the latest cause célèbre for real, collective progress. It’s about how social-media protagonists confuse their own stories for social-justice narratives. It’s about how we understand Black uplift, progress, and renaissance at a time when those terms have been made as hollow and ubiquitous as a Twitter hashtag.
Harold Cruse, in his uneven but at turns insightful 1967 polemic, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, wrote that “no literary or cultural movement today can be truly and effectively radical unless it presents a definitive critique of the entire cultural apparatus of America.” This line comes to mind whenever I read any of the recent wave of declarations of a new Black Renaissance, which tend to be rooted in the visibility (fame), white institutional acknowledgment (award nominations), and compensation (book sales, TV and film deals) of a select few rather than in any collective progress or societal shift. This supposed renaissance seems manufactured, bought and paid for, distinctly establishment. It has co-opted the language of radicalism and revolution without any of the moral underpinnings.
Cruse’s observations reverberated during the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. Thirty years ago, both Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr. reshaped notions of the Black public intellectual and the scholar as celebrity. They joined forces at Harvard University in the hope of reinvigorating the public significance of Black intellectual culture just as some of the more gnostic ideas of race, identity, and culture (signifying, anti-essentialism, intersectionality) gained pop-cultural significance. The “Black Renaissance” of the ’80s and ’90s went by a variety of names, but was best captured by Trey Ellis’s “new black aesthetic,” an attempt to capture the rise of Black writers, artists, and musicians emerging in the wake of left-leaning, nationalistic Black cultural politics.
Gates and West were as much a part of this movement as more recognizable figures like Spike Lee and and musical acts like Public Enemy. Indeed, the professors parlayed their unprecedented visibility into conventional academic metrics of success, like programs and centers. But they also appeared frequently on talk shows, signed commercial book deals, made rap albums and movie appearances, and eventually produced television shows. Was their use of the celebrity spotlight an abandonment of Cruse’s “radical critique,” or was it an important front in an ongoing culture war? Or something in between?
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Looked at from the vantage of 2021, academic celebrity — hypervisibility and mainstream popularity — has shifted the metric by which we measure intellectual success. Over the years, our Black celebrity intellectuals have tended to measure success by what white people value.
White people can afford the titillating delusion of Black radicalism and renaissance — they traffic in Black celebrity intellectuals and mascots, whom they promote to validate their own moral innocence as well as their bona fides as allies. It’s almost literally the least they can do. They can also use these mascots to antagonize and browbeat their “bad” white counterparts. It’s a tired act, but it makes for profitable theater.
But Black mascots excite Black people only so much, which explains the vastly different reactions I get from friends and colleagues by race. Many of the white ones are eager and beaming when they discuss the Amanda Gormans (and non-Black minorities like Lin-Manuel Mirandas) of the world. My Black friends and colleagues are far more cynical and frustrated. Their prevailing sentiment is that we have too much to lose to continue to indulge silliness and empty symbolism. They want collective improvement for Black Americans, not an invitation to root for a metaphorical hero in the latest media-generated movie. They want tangible change, not abstract renaissance.
The new Black Renaissance specializes in shallow personal investigations of identity, television shows and movies marked by clunky dialogue and heavy-handed storylines that seem lifted straight from social media. The Black public intellectuals and establishment radicals specialize in nebulous catchphrases: T-shirt fodder like “Black Excellence” and “Black Girl Magic” (which is also a bottle of wine now), and mumbo jumbo like “Black Abundance.” These slogans and hashtags, which can’t withstand the slightest scrutiny, seem tailored for use in dull online culture wars.
Add to that stockpile “go where you are valued, not where you are tolerated.” It’s a damned good quip. Never mind that it’s tone-deaf advice when most Black people lack the option of mobility — and rarely find any evidence of being valued. The quip and the clapback are what’s most prized online. Nuance isn’t just an inconvenience — it’s unwelcome.
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It’s no mystery that the discourse, around race, Blackness, progress, politics, policy, is stultified. In step with the right, the left has leaned hard into the politics of identitarian grievance and resentment. Sloganeering plays better than serious intellectual interrogation, as do controversies that give the audience the vicarious thrill of victory over perceived enemies. Traditionally reputable media outlets increasingly default to puff pieces and Access Hollywood-style profiles of individual Black “creatives.” This neoliberal take on conservative exceptionalism highlights the accomplishments of a handful, sans context. Declarations of a renaissance are preferable to investigating the plight of the collective. In this way, the sensibilities of the white gatekeepers and white audience mold and constrict the field of Black thought. When they’re handing out Pulitzers for Black meditations on mustaches, you get down or lay down.
This has created a bottleneck effect among Black public intellectuals, who are competing to make the same obvious points about the most accessible issues, and to argue passionately against the most extreme foils. It incentivizes shamelessness, self-promotion, and shallow discourse. Self-critique has fallen by the wayside. For example, when Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, offered her dubious rationalizations about buying up millions of dollars of personal real estate despite being a Marxist, the Black-public-intellectual class was nowhere to be found. I saw a couple of softball interviews, including one in which an apologist dismissed the very legitimate criticism and questions about integrity and misallocation of resources as right-wing attacks that surfaced because “we’re winning.” Never mind that some of the criticism came from the families of victims of police murder. If this is what winning looks like, how do I quit the team?
If this is what winning looks like, how do I quit the team?
As traditional institutions and political processes fail us, we turn with greater frequency to reality-show-styled celebrity figures to seek vicarious victories in place of the policy changes that result in legitimate collective uplift. The slogans and hashtags entrench us in the politics of resentment. They offer little more than schadenfreude. Those who use intersectionality as a cudgel conveniently forget that many things can be true at once. Instead, they lean into a selective, opportunistic, Manichean morality: If you are against ___, you must agree with the bad person on the other side. And so the foil sets the agenda.
The new crop of Black public intellectuals demonstrates a keen understanding that those who profit from wars are the ones who manufacture the ammunition. You can catch them at the next antiracist book festival, or on the DEI speaking circuit that’s cutting checks for canned talks about Black bodies and white privilege. The discourse has become bloated with recognizable characters and oversaturated with codified language. It might get a select group paid, but the script will not save us.
To be clear, I don’t think Nikole Hannah-Jones is a bad-faith actor or a grifter. But the media’s framing of her story illuminates how ideas become secondary to symbols, and how that formula is replicated by people who are bad-faith actors and grifters. It’s reminiscent of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s success in manufacturing idols to hold your attention and manipulate your passions, regardless of the product’s quality. I still have no idea if Conor McGregor has any real worth as a fighter, but hundreds of millions of dollars say that’s irrelevant. The fight isn’t the sport; the sport is crafting figures onto whom the audience enjoys projecting its resentments, aspirations, and need for identity and value validation.
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It also makes me think of the ill-fated Jay-Z and R. Kelly project Best of Both Worlds. On the title track, Jay-Z compares himself and R. Kelly to “Martin and Malcolm — this is bigger than the album.” It’s one of the more delightfully ridiculous examples of an old trend in rap music: the association of capitalist pursuits with larger, unrelated social and political movements and icons. The goal is to make you think listening to their music is tantamount to an act of political/social rebellion. Want to affirm your politics? Buy my album. It’s not dissimilar from the opportunistic Black Twitter users who, in the aftermath of an episode that highlights Black oppression, post their CashApp and Venmo information, inviting white people to pay them directly as a form of penance. It’s capitalism as religion.
None of this — the manufacturing of minor intellectual celebrities, the selective highlighting of Black success narratives, the feting of Black creatives who market to your own insecurities about identity and value, the never-ending stream of slogans and hashtags — is germane to any legitimate social movement or intellectual renaissance. They are mirrors of our collective delusion. And we increasingly latch onto people who share and validate our delusions rather than challenge and critique them. We indulge in anger and performance rather than analysis.
The fantasy of a new Black Renaissance keeps the rest of us — the secondary actors in the movie — fighting imaginary battles on social media, while shielding from scrutiny the grifters who employ the slogans and spectacles for their personal enrichment. Their salaries are not our salaries; their victories are not our victories. You’d be naïve to expect them to interrogate the potential misallocation of funds from those who profit off Black pain because that sort of analysis might hit too close to home. How many of them are, like their right-wing foils, trading on grievance and resentment as they collect speaking fees and book deals, all the while employing their social-media followings as bully pulpits to blunt criticism and seize more influence? They seduce you with the rhetoric of collective empowerment, but you’ll never see a dime of their rewards or a sliver of their platforms.
A few weeks ago, a friend in academe passed along a rambling, narcissistic social-media post from one of these very public voices, who bemoaned the lack of “real niggas” in the academy. It struck both of us as especially warped, because the academy, for all its issues, is home to many of the “realest” Black people I’ve ever encountered: deeply principled, underpaid, overextended, and dedicated to the nuts and bolts of scholarship for which they’ll rarely, if ever, be rewarded. People who understand there are no winners and there are no prizes: The work is the work. The post highlighted the unspoken tension between the Black pseudo-celebrities who orbit the academy, and the rest of us. The disdain and delusion were both astonishing and palpable. They were also out of step with reality. The Black academics of whom I’m most wary are those on social media performing these personas, which vacillate between radical, defiant, cartoonishly authentic, and megalomaniacal. Their posturing is excellently, magically, and ebonically Black.
The thing is, my friend lived a hardscrabble life, and his journey to academe is a minor miracle; I spent my youth between one of the most notorious welfare hotels for the homeless in crack-era Times Square and a Harlem housing project. All the posturing and slanguistics have begun to confuse us. In street parlance: real recognize real … and the bulk of these people are decidedly unfamiliar. When I articulated this much to my friend, he laughed and posed this question: “What if you threw a Renaissance, and the same 10 Negroes kept showing up?”