The Talented Tenth in an Age of Blue-Checks
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I suspect that most black people know a little something about “The Talented Tenth.” The term might be considered synonymous with the occasional pejorative “bougie.” (Personally, I have been acquainted with the term since I was a child.) Many people associate the term with something that Dr. W.E.B. DuBois wrote a long time ago (true enough, Dr. DuBois popularized the term but it’s origins go back a little further). I think that very few people know precisely what Dr. DuBois meant by the term and how Dr. DuBois own understanding of “the Talented Tenth” changed over time.
As Dr. DuBois originally conceived it, “The Talented Tenth” was to be an “aristocracy” of “college-bred” men who were to be:
...the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of the community where he lives, directs thoughts, and heads social movements.
At the time, Dr. DuBois noted that the preachers, however “ignorant and immoral,” were the group leaders by the way of the foremost institution in black life: the black church. DuBois’ aim was that these “college-bred men” would, in large part, supplant the role of the preacher in black life and provide guidance and teaching to others.
Importantly, DuBois did not seek to deprecate other professions or other forms of education; not even technical and industrial education of the type advocated by Booker T. Washington. But he did think that college-bred men that entered teaching and other professional jobs (Dubois provides a chart showing the various professions that college educated black people were entering) were to be the leaders and teachers of black people.
In August 1948, Dr. DuBois gave a speech to the Sigma Pi Phi fraternity at Wilberforce University. He critiqued his earlier formulation of the Talented Tenth. DuBois’ critiques of his earlier notion of The Talented Tenth were heavily influenced by his study of Karl Marx, an acknowledgement of the need for continuing education even by college-bred men and women, and encouraging the members of Sigma Pi Phi, themselves, to step up and to become those community leaders; a “community” that was to be inclusive of providing leadership to people of color everywhere in the world. The role of teaching is paramount in both of Dr. DuBois visions of “The Talented Tenth.”
By any definition, I would think, public intellectuals would be members of that Talented Tenth. Even in his earlier formulation of the Talented Tenth, DuBois was aware of some of the pitfalls and traps that awaited; he was much more explicit about those pitfalls and traps in terms of money, arrogance, and prestige in his 1948 formulation. A decade later, in Black Bourgeoise, E. Franklin Frazier only devoted a few pages of his scathing critique of the Black middle-class specifically to black intelligentsia but much of Frazier’s critique would apply to that class. The best known critique of the black intellectual class, Harold Cruse’s The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual appeared in 1966. Since then, it seems as if some semi-popular book-length critique of black intellectuals as a class appears every five or ten years. Mostly, though, even those critiques of the black intellectual class come from within that class. Now, in the age of cable television and social media, a different and significant and important critique of black public intellectuals is emerging into the public square: the instantaneous and very public response of what I would call the 90% caucus.
Given the constraints upon black upward social mobility and the pressures for status and affluence among middle-class peers, many black intellectuals principally seek material gain and cultural prestige. Since these intellectuals are members of an anxiety ridden and status-hungry black middle class, their proclivities are understandable and, to some extent, justifiable. For most intellectuals are in search of recognition, status, power, and often wealth. Yet for black intellectuals
this search requires immersing oneself in and addressing oneself to the very culture and society which degrade and devalue the black community from whence one comes…
(I will leave this quote unsigned. If you know who wrote this, do indicate the person in the comments.)
Eddie Glaude, Jr. is currently the chair of the Department of African American studies at Princeton University. I have to acknowledge that I have not read any of his work, which seems to be mostly centered around religious studies. My sole awareness of Professor Glaude is through his appearances on a number of MSNBC news and opinion shows like Morning Joe and Deadline White House.. Professor Glaude also maintains a presence on Twitter complete with a blue check verification status. And about a week ago, it jumped off.
The primary contention of most of the 90% caucus on the Twitter thread is this 2016 essay in Time magazine where Dr. Glaude stated that he would not vote for Hillary Clinton and why.
Dr. Glaude is not the only so-called “black blue-check” that has been on the receiving end of Twitter criticism from the 90% caucus in the past couple of weeks.
The reasons for these critiques of “black-blue checks” are varied; some critiques I agree with, others I disagree with.
The fact that these very public critiques of the Talented Tenth by the 90% caucus exist in the public square is, itself, notable. Additionally, a central and unsaid issue of these critiques is that of representation.
Of course, Dr. Glaude (or any other “black blue-check”) can vote for whomever he or she wants for any reason or they can hold any political/cultural opinion on anything for any reason.
But...the chairperson of an academic department at one of the nation’s top universities is a member of The Talented Tenth, by definition, as well as a representative for the black 90% caucus, whether he or she likes it or not; after all, that is the probable reason Dr. Glaude and others are (rightfully) being given airtime by the network in the first place: to give a black perspective on any number of issues.
In this day and age, with a plethora of social media (as opposed to angry private letters and e-mails that can be trashed or filed and kept out of public view) and an autocratic-minded Orange Damn Fool running the country into the ground, the 90% caucus has a right to be heard.
And, perhaps, a member of The Talented Tenth has a duty to listen without judgment.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old black boy, was stoned to death by white people in 1919 after he swam into what they deemed the wrong part of Lake Michigan.
In response, black people in Chicago rose up in protest, and white people attacked them. More than 500 people were injured and 38 were killed. Afterward, the city convened a commission to study the causes of the violence.
The commission found “systemic participation in mob violence by the police,” Khalil Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and author of the book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, told Vox. “When police officers had the choice to protect black people from white mob violence, they chose to either aid and abet white mobs or to disarm black people or to arrest them.”
In the process of compiling the report, white experts also testified that “the police are systematically engaging in racial bias when they’re targeting black suspects,” Muhammad said. The report “should have been the death of systemic police racism and discrimination in America.”
That was in 1922.
It’s almost 100 years later, and thousands of Americans are in the streets daily, protesting the same violence and racism that the Chicago commission documented. It may seem like nothing can change, but Muhammad said the last several weeks could be a wake-up call for some Americans to what policing in this country really means.
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Black men receive federal prison sentences nearly 20 percent longer on average than White men for the same crime, according to a report from the United States Sentencing Commission in 2017.
The Deep South probably isn’t the first place you think of as a poster child for equal treatment and equitable prison populations across racial lines. Yet …
These include Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Mississippi, according to a recent study released by The Sentencing Project. Each of those states saw close to a 3:1 ratio between Black and White prisoners. Which, obviously, isn’t great … until you see what’s happening in other states. In Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, there are at least 11 Black people jailed for every one White person. New Jersey has the worst ratio in America, with 12 times the number of Black prisoners as White prisoners.
Even in Hawaii, which had the lowest disparity, African Americans were more than twice as likely to be arrested as White offenders. The study also found that Latinos were imprisoned at a rate 1.4 times than that of Whites, with particularly high disparities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New York — all in the Northeast.
Differences in drug arrests and laws are a major factor. “It’s more the effect of there being a more lenient approach, or just more of a ‘second chance look’ at Whites and less of that leniency given toward African Americans, for whatever reason. It’s not explained by differences in crime rates,” says Ashley Nellis, a senior analyst and author of the study, The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons.
Sarah Catherine Walker, founder of the Minnesota Second Chance Coalition, notes that the Midwest’s racial history is tied to the Great Migration (of African Americans from the South to the North) and the pursuit of industrial jobs. “A lot of those manufacturing jobs are all drying up — so what you see is a compounding of multiple racial disparities in Northern areas. That starts with employment, but then it goes into housing.” And criminal justice.
So what accounts for the relative equity found in Southern states? Unfortunately, it’s not that the South is better at keeping people out of prison. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite: Mississippi has a 65.3 percent Black incarceration rate, Georgia has a 62 percent rate and Alabama is at 58.5 percent — putting each of them in the seven-worst states for Black incarceration. The difference is that, unlike their Northern neighbors, Southern states aggressively lock up White people too. They have made a more equitable criminal justice system not by imprisoning fewer people of color, but by imprisoning more White people.
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The black-white wealth gap is unchanged after half a century. Economist: Melanin and money
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Few Americans remember Greenwood, a once-prosperous African-American neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was known as Black Wall Street. In 1921 Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was charged with attempting to rape a white lift-girl in a downtown office building. An incensed white mob gathered at the courthouse to lynch him, then proceeded to Greenwood for two days of rioting, looting and murder. City officials aided and abetted the violence. In the end 35 blocks were destroyed, 10,000 black people were made homeless, and as many as 300 were killed. Residents reported airplanes flying overhead, dropping explosives. It was one of the worst incidents of racial violence since the civil war. Tens of millions of dollars in black wealth were destroyed or stolen. No compensation was awarded to either the victims or their descendants.
American history is replete with horrific episodes that prevented the accumulation of black wealth for centuries: first slavery, then indentured servitude under Jim Crow, segregated housing and schooling, seizure of property and racial discrimination. The result was that in 1962, two years before the passage of landmark civil-rights legislation and the Great Society program, the average wealth of white households was seven times greater than that of black households. Yet after decades of declining discrimination and the construction of a modern welfare state, that ratio remains the same. The mean of black household wealth is $138,200—for whites, that number is $933,700.
Median wealth is smaller, but even more lopsided. The typical black family has just $17,100 compared with the typical white one, which has $171,000. The discrepancies are caused by low incomes and by debt. Compared with whites, black Americans have higher debt loads: 19.4% of black households have net wealth at or below $0, compared with 9.2% of whites. There had been slow improvement over the decades, but the Great Recession of 2007-08 wiped this out, since blacks were disproportionately harmed by the subprime mortgage blow-up. Because of that, home-ownership, the conventional wealth-building tool of the middle class, stands at 42% among blacks—only one percentage point higher than it was in 1968—compared with 73% for whites.
Determining what lies behind the persistent wealth gap is essential to fixing it. The thinking ascendant on the left blames both present-day discrimination and the long history of racist public policies, such as redlining, an official practice that made it harder for blacks to get mortgages, and so permanently disrupted the transmission of wealth between generations.
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Every morning before sunrise, when most residents in the southern coastal city of Kismayo are asleep, Fardowsa Mohamed Ahmed, 32, goes to the beach to purchase fresh fish, which she will sell in the market.
Like most women in this business, she depends on men to catch the fish. Men dominate the fishing sector. It is considered “men’s work” in Somali society. But Ahmed is determined to push her way in.
“They say it is men’s work,” she says. “They don’t trust that we are strong enough to run a boat or manage a business. They want us to sell things like milk on the roadside or stay at home.”
Ahmed was introduced to the industry by a friend, and she soon discovered that other women were challenging stereotypes, switching from selling milk and tea, which could pay for a day’s food, to selling fish, which could pay for food and help cover school fees.
“It was like a door of hope had opened for me in the sea,” she says. “I was hesitant at the beginning but I now feel empowered.”
To pay rent for a space in the market and to buy an icebox to store her fish, Ahmed took out a $300 (£246) loan from Kaah International Microfinance Service (Kims), the first privately owned microfinance institution in Somalia, when it opened in 2014. She has been able to gradually expand her business.
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The collapse in international oil prices, having dealt a devastating blow to Nigeria’s finances, now threatens the West African nation’s shaky federal political system.
Earnings from crude sales will plunge 80% to 1.1 trillion naira ($2.84 billion) this year, the nation’s budget office said last month. A protracted loss of income could leave most of Nigeria’s 36 states unable to function. It would also aggravate long-simmering tensions in the oil-rich Niger River delta for local control of natural resources.
“Apart from one or two, none of the current 36 states can survive a prolonged loss of oil revenue,” said Clement Nwankwo, executive director of the Abuja-based Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre. “For them, that means an existential crisis. That will throw up a lot of questions, including whether the current federal structure is viable.”
The federal government of Africa’s biggest oil producer has been doling out money to its states for the past half century.
The revenue-sharing formula allocates 53% of available federal revenue to the national government, 27% to the states and 20% to local administrations every month. Lagos, which includes the commercial capital, and Rivers, which encompasses the oil hub of Port Harcourt, are the only two states that generate significant revenue, with the rest reliant on their cash injections to survive.
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Days after Brazil registered its first coronavirus death in March, the country began to close down. Businesses and restaurants were shuttered and people were told to stay home.
That's when Rosangela Jesus dos Santos's life changed unimaginably. The 47-year-old diarista, or daily housekeeper, was fired by most of her employers.
"They said it was because of the virus," she says. "I went to a different house every day of the week and some clients are elderly, I understand."
Rosangela is scared. She hopes she can return when the outbreak is over but for now, she's been left working just one day a week. Her remaining employer gives her a mask but at no point have they told her to stay home for her safety. She's wary of the virus but she knows if she doesn't work, she won't get paid.
"I need to work - my family is big, that's the truth," says Rosangela. "I would like to be working and I'm used to it, going out early and coming home late."
Home for Rosangela is Paraisopolis, Sao Paulo's second-largest favela. Her small house is tucked away, a few hundred metres down a narrow and winding alley - so common in Brazil's poor neighbourhoods.
On the way, you pass dozens of similar buildings, windows wide open on to the alleyway, families inside yet living very publicly. There is little option in these crowded neighbourhoods.
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To honor “the many Black Trans people who [have] been murdered by state-sanctioned violence”—including Nina Pop (28) and Tony McDade (38)—the grassroots Okra Project will dedicate $15,000 to create the Nina Pop Mental Health Recovery Fund and the Tony McDade Mental Health Recovery Fund, according to a recent announcement shared on Twitter.
On May 3, Nina Pop, a Black trans woman, was found stabbed to death inside of her Missouri apartment; and Tony McDade, a Black trans man thought to be the 12th trans person to die violently in 2020, was shot five times in the back and killed on May 27 by a Tallahassee Police Department (TPD) officer. Responding to these deaths and the emotional toll they ultimately take on a community, the Okra Project launched the Pop and McDade recovery funds to provide Black trans women and men with a free mental health session with a licensed Black therapist.
As the organization noted in a statement, “the Okra Project recognizes that Black Trans people are feeling the weight of our siblings being murdered while their murderers, whether it be the assailants or the police force that puts very little effort into finding their killers, walk free.”
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At 110 years old, Louisiana native Lawrence Brooks is proud of his service and says he would do it again.
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THE MEMORIES ARE more than 75 years old now: Cooking red beans and rice halfway around the world from the place in Louisiana that first made the recipe. Cleaning uniforms and shining shoes for three officers. Hopping in foxholes when his trained ear could tell the approaching warplanes were not American but Japanese.
The man who keeps these memories is older still. At 110, Lawrence Brooks is the oldest known U.S. veteran of World War II. This month marks the 75thanniversary of the end of the war in Europe. Of the 16 million U.S. veterans who served, about 300,000 are still alive today, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. (Hear from the last living voices of WWII.)
Brooks is proud of his military service, even though his memories of it are complicated. Black soldiers fighting in the war could not escape the racism, discrimination, and hostility at home.
When Brooks was stationed with the U.S. Army in Australia, he was an African-American man in a time well before the Civil Rights Movement would at least codify something like equality in his home country.
I was treated so much better in Australia than I was by my own white people,” Brooks says. “I wondered about that. That’s what worried me so much. Why?”
Rob Citino, Senior Historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, says the U.S. military then had “racist characterizations” of African-American soldiers during the war.
“You couldn’t put a gun in their hands,” he says of the then-prevalent attitude. “They could do simple menial tasks. That was the lot of the African-American soldier, sailor, airman, you name it.”
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