Recent essays here at the blog by Tim Lacy, Holly Genovese, and Rebecca Brenner have stirred up valuable conversation about the role of scholars—especially historians—during difficult times. Tim’s post spoke to something deep within me. I have been reluctant to say this publicly, but I have found myself questioning the role of being someone known for writing history for a public audience. Is this still valuable work? Do any readers find any value in it? Should it have any relevance at all? Tim raised questions that all scholars have to consider, especially those (like myself) who are younger and are concerned about continuing a career pursuing a “life of the mind.”
Holly and Rebecca’s posts did a great deal to crystallize questions of audience sparked by works such as Jill Lepore’s These Truths. Lepore’s newest tome, a valiant (although sometimes flawed—but aren’t they all?) work of narrative history, tries to synthesize much of the newest analyses of the American pas to tell a coherent story of American struggle to create a more perfect union. But I believe all these questions are related. Who we write for, and why we write, are often linked. I cannot help but come back to the example of African American public intellectuals, who’ve often written and spoken to public audience that were at best lukewarm about what these intellectuals had to say—and quite often incredibly hostile to even considering African Americans as human beings.
David Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, deeply spells out the costs associated with speaking “truth to power.” While Douglass was not a college professor, we should still think about the sacrifices he, and so many other African American intellectuals have had to make, just to get an audience. I suspect that when future intellectual historians write about our era, they will have to research and discuss the harassment some African American scholars have faced as a result of tackling difficult social issues through their public writing.
I won’t even attempt to answer the question of how much scholars should be engaged with the public. I think it is an option left open to everyone—with risks involved. But African American scholars (and, I suspect, scholars from underprivileged communities) have a great deal to think about. What is their role in a society that demeans and degrades so many of their fellow citizens? Indeed, a recent essay in Harper’s has further sparked this discussion, and I kindly recommend reading the piece as it will inform upcoming posts from me. I will wrestle with this question more in coming months, as much for my own interests as for sparking discussion here at S-USIH.
On reflection, this is also a question that would have intrigued the late, great scholar Leo Ribuffo. His passing this week has rocked the American historian community, and you will read more reflections about his life and incredible legacy here at S-USIH.
4 Thoughts on this Post
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Robert, thank you for this post, and for your forthrightness.
Something I garnered from reading the great sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom’s writing — her public intellectual work, in fact — is the realization that African American intellectual work is always public, because African Americans are always conspicuous in a culture that prizes whiteness. At the same time, Black intellectuals are always being discounted or dismissed as intellectuals — and Black women intellectuals, as any from Zora Neale Hurston to the Combahee Collective could tell us (and have told us) are always treated the most dismissively. This is not a reality or lived experience that I can inhabit, but keeping this in mind makes the salience of a Douglass or a Du Bois or a Baldwin or a bell hooks (or a Tressie McMillan Cottom or a Robert Jerome Greene III) qua intellectuals all the more significant and all the more fraught.
How many ideas that could make good things happen in the world go unheard or unheeded or unvalued because what is reckoned as worthy of public notice about Black thinkers is their Blackness apart from their thought?
Hard question to answer. Hard question, period.
Honestly, Lora, this is one of the best comments I’ve ever received here or anywhere else–because it’s already forcing me to think even harder about this topic.
You’re precisely correct. Because ideas are generated by African American intellectuals–and especially African American women–they risk being quickly dismissed or downplayed. I think part of the reason for the recent explosion in works on African American intellectual history is that many younger scholars probably feel the same force at work today. Going backward, and realizing how many intellectuals have been ignored for so long, is in an odd sense comforting. It means you’re not alone, that the intellectual legacy you’re a part of (as an African American scholar, or a woman, or a member of the LGBT community, for several examples) has the energy and tenacity within its DNA to continue to fight against these very issues.
Like you, I recognize this is a hard question. I need to ruminate some more on it.
Some black intellectuals have viewed whites, or at least some whites, as potential allies in the struggles for equality. Other black intellectuals (e.g., T-N Coates in Between the World and Me) seem to view most if not all whites as irredeemably stuck in permanent denial about the historical conditions of their privileged position and hence as a “lost cause” from a political standpoint. Would it be unreasonable to suggest that many whites might “dismiss” (since that seems to be the verb we’re using here) a black intellectual who dismisses them, while not dismissing, or at least not so readily, a black intellectual who treats them as potential allies?
p.s. no intent here to be snarky, and I appreciate the OP. Just didn’t have time to write a longer comment.