The Vastness of the Black Intellectual Tradition: A Check to White Historians’ Knowingness

The introduction to this innovative and brilliant volume betrays a bit of frustration with the subfield of intellectual history for continuing to display a gross indifference toward Black scholarship and Black topics. That frustration is amply merited; white intellectual historians are by and large failing to engage this dynamic body of work.

And because we are failing—I am certainly including myself here—I think it’s worth asking what success might look like.

“Engaging this dynamic body of work”—what would that mean? Well, first it would mean acknowledging that we don’t already know it, and that there is a lot to know. It is always wounding to one’s vanity to admit not only that one is ignorant, but that one’s ignorance is so great that it will require a lot of work to rectify. New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition is first and foremost a formidable showcase of exceptionally talented scholars applying themselves to a rich and varied body of texts and traditions, but it is also a quietly forceful demonstration of how vast its subject is. I did not just learn a lot from it: I learned to reappraise how much I did not know.

So that might be the first step of a more successful engagement of white intellectual historians with Black intellectual history: an admission of ignorance and an appreciation of the size of the task in remediating it.

And the second step, therefore, would be actually reading it.

And that in itself presents a problem. Most academics do not have much time to do reading in fields or subfields unrelated to what they are actively teaching or writing, and most white intellectual historians aren’t teaching or writing about a subject that requires deep reading in Black intellectual history. We may be cognizant enough of the need to include race as one dimension of our analysis to make the addition of a representative Black figure or two logical, but that is a condition which can be dispatched by a rather targeted reading of the scholarship on those particular figures. A more sustained, wide-ranging reading in Black intellectual history is unlikely to occur if that is the standard we are using.

Such a standard generates a self-perpetuating cycle that is hard to break: because white intellectual historians (again, I’m both speaking generally and including myself) haven’t done enough of the reading, we formulate our courses and our research projects in such a way that we don’t have to do more.

There is a real problem—in graduate instruction and in the pressures that fall on scholars of all ranks but especially on contingent faculty—in the lack of time available for historians to read widely. Many people who have left academia have testified to how liberating it feels to be able to read non-instrumentally, to read without some larger strategy or without some precise notion of how a book or article will fit into one’s current research project. I certainly do not have a good answer for how to improve that situation. But not being able to solve it doesn’t mean excusing ourselves from making an effort to read as much as we can.

One thing I can think of that might make the problem a little less daunting, however, is this: because historians are trained to read so instrumentally, to read for how we are going to use someone else’s scholarship—even if it’s just sticking it in a footnote—we are always thinking about what we want to say about it. We are always thinking about what it’s missing, where we can “intervene,” or what we can borrow (with attribution) to advance our research. That is, I think, a fairly labor-intensive method of reading, and I’m not sure it’s always necessary. “Engagement” doesn’t have to be so calculating or so controlling.

Much of graduate training and academic habits can instill a kind of knowingness, particularly among people of traditionally privileged groups (white cishet men most of all). That knowingness impedes the kind of humility required not only for admitting ignorance but also for just shutting up and listening—or, in this case, reading. It may be the case that the time is really not there, but for some white scholars, I would imagine that the greater roadblock to a more substantial and sustained engagement with Black intellectual history is precisely this knowingness, this need to make immediate use of what one reads to show that one has already mastered it. And it is precisely what we (people like me) need to check.

So let me begin that checking by saying that New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition is an excellent place to begin shutting up and reading.