All,
As usual Henry Giroux delivers the truth while the phony
kneegrow surrogates for the status quo offer up empty rhetorical
spectacles masquerading as "critical analysis." Never in my entire life
have I witnessed such brazen abdication and craven opportunism by self
proclaimed black "intellectuals" and "activists" like Dyson and his ilk
(the windup Obamaphiles) who would sell their mothers for mere physical
"access" to the White House. As James Baldwin said in 1961 (!) he was
not interested in whether or not there would ever finally be a black
president but only in the far more important question of just what kind
of society/country he would be president of. I know that Jimmy is
roiling like a rotisserie in his grave at this very moment because he
now has the very ugly answer to his beautiful question in the sordid
self serving ambitions and infantile antics of such rank public
hustlers as Dyson and that eternal jackleg preacher, perennial political
ambulance chaser, and number one Obama surrogate the Reverend Al
'Porkchop' Sharpton. That these pompous conmen are now being given
almost carte blanche authority to lead the national movement by default
against white supremacist police violence throughout the country is a
huge indictment against ALL of us in this movement nationally who simply
allow them to get away with it....Please read what Giroux has to say in
this article and pass the word...
Kofi
Perils of the Public Intellectual: Georgetown Professor’s Attack on Cornel West
Posted on Apr 29, 2015
By Henry A. Giroux,
Truthdig
Truthdig
This piece first appeared in the online publication CounterPunch on April 27, 2015:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/27/the-perils-of-being-a-public-intellectual/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/27/the-perils-of-being-a-public-intellectual/
Michael Eric Dyson. (KBCS Bellevue/Seattle 91.3fm / CC BY 2.0)
Michael Eric Dyson has launched in the New Republic a bitter attack on
Cornel West. At the heart of Dyson’s critique is a discourse that
engages in character assassination but not before he makes clear what is
really at stake in his attack. Dyson resents West’s critique of Obama’s
domestic and foreign policies. But rather than judiciously and
analytically weigh such criticisms, hardly confined to West, he
positions him as a spurned lover, angry and bitter because among other
things, he did not get a ticket to Obama’s 2008 inauguration. Dyson
expands his critique by claiming that West is not a scholar, who has
lived up to the standards of decent scholarship, bolstering his case by
quoting among others, Larry Summers, the irrepressible apostle of
neoliberalism and unbridled finance capital. It never occurs to Dyson
that Summers’ critique of West may be more political than anything else.
In what appears as an act of infantilism, Dyson claims that West is a
talker rather than a scholar, as if speaking truth to power does not
have its place as a legitimate mode of political intervention or that
the realm of university-based scholarship is the only true space where
truth can hold power accountable.
Finally, Dyson decries West for
not being a prophet in the manner of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others
and for not exploring adequately the genealogy of prophecy. I want to
argue that Dyson’s attack should not be seen simply as a personal attack
as much as it is a product of the fear liberal intellectuals have about
the role of left-oriented public intellectuals and the crucial role
that pedagogy and changing consciousness plays in creating the formative
cultures that make individual and collective resistance possible. West
in this attack is simply a stand in for a range of public intellectuals
who no longer believe in existing political formations and are
redefining politics through both their words and actions.
Some
have complained that there are other more important issues to address
than to criticize Cornel West, and I partly agree with that, but at the
same time the issue is not whether West should or not be held up to
criticism. The issue is that the criticism in this case is close to
worthless and another indication of the bankrupt liberalism that wallows
in the irrelevant, personal, and soothes itself with what it thinks is a
trenchant analysis, one that in reality reads like an apology for a
politics burdened by its bad-faith defense of the status quo. Talking
about West’s personal life is a venture into the kind of spectacularized
psychosis exhibited in the Dr. Phil show and in full display in the
entertainment media. This isn’t scholarship. On the contrary, as Herbert
Marcuse once put it, this is a form of scholarshit. With the recent
killing of so many black men by the police, the increasing reach of the
punishing state, the militarization of all aspects of society, and the
cruel attack on social provisions and the welfare state by the financial
elite, you would think that Dyson as a Black intellectual would use his
talents to address a number of serious social problems. In fact,
Dyson’s article is important less because of its focus on Cornel West’s
shortcomings, personal and political, however fabricated, than as an
exemplar of the crisis facing the work of many prominent intellectuals
in the academy who have silenced themselves or lost themselves in the
corridors of power, refusing to extend their intellectual capacities to
addressing important social issues while defending higher education as a
public good and reaffirming the connection between scholarship and
social justice.
Political commitment and the work of the public
intellectual is difficult and it takes many forms from writing books to
engaging broader public spheres as a speaker, populist, organizer, and
so it goes. West is a powerful and courageous activist and intellectual.
Dyson has become a populist in ways that is not free of its own brand
of opportunism–power seduces, and Michael now has to bear that burden.
Unfortunately, he does not bear it with dignity in this case. Whatever
Dyson might say about West withers next to the intellectual and moral
comatose he displays in this assessment and putrid defense of Obama. He
writes: “The odd thing is that Obama talks right—chiding personal
irresponsibility in a way that presumes the pathology of many black
families and neighbourhoods—but veers left in his public policy.” This
is more than a form of a moral and political self-sabotage, it is a
decent into the dark cave of oppressive ideology. Tell that to the
parents of the children killed by drones, to the whistle blowers put in
prison, to people harassed by the surveillance state put in place under
Obama, or to the endless number of immigrants exported and jailed under
his administration. Maybe we should also include his tolerance for the
crimes of bankers and torturers and his intolerance for the children and
others who live close to or below the poverty line. And regarding
prophecy, it is not earned on the TV circuit talking to zombies who
believe critical dialogue is a shouting match. As my friend and
colleague, Brad Evans points out, “Dyson represents the worst kind of
liberal posturing, and is sadly more revealing actually of what is
deemed important in the academy today … ”
Dave Zirin has chimed
in on the academic catfight, but he is too nice to Dyson. He suggests
that Dyson’s critique of West’s scholarship is partly on target but that
his political critique reveals an uncritical endorsement of Obama.
There is something odd about this defense of Dyson’s scholarship given
that much of his work is about rap stars, famous black women, and, all
about his own self-proclaimed wisdom, made clear in his book, Can You
Hear Me Now?: The Inspiration, Wisdom, and Insight of Michael Eric
Dyson—a book whose title bears a a close affinity to a type of
self-indulgence on display in the smothering world of celebrity culture.
In this instance, Dyson’s critique of West as vain and unimaginative
appears more as a projection than a serious criticism. It would be too
harsh to claim Dyson’s books are examples of what might be called shoddy
work. More to the point, many of them simply err on the side of being
just irrelevant, except when you want to appear on Fox news, host an
MSNBC program or travel the celebrity culture circuit. Zirin is too
diplomatic in his attempt to suggest that both West and Dyson have
engaged in uncivil behavior and in doing so have more in common than one
might realize. But Zirin does make one claim that I believe should have
framed his essay more strongly. He writes:
Cornel West believes
in Palestinian liberation. He believes in amnesty for undocumented
immigrants. He believes that the bankers responsible for the 2008 crisis
should be brought to justice. He believes that capitalism is a driving
engine of much of the injustice in our world. He believes that Obama’s
drone program is an act of state-sanctioned murder. One can choose to
agree or disagree with these points, but one cannot ignore that West has
been relentless in his efforts to place them in the political
discourse. The word “Palestine” or “Palestinian” does not once make its
way into Dyson’s piece. Neither does “Wall Street” or “immigration.” The
word “drones” only comes up in a quote attributed to West. We can
debate how sincere West’s commitments are to these issues or whether
they are a cover for his hurt feelings and heartbreak that Dyson posits
is at the root of all the discord. But they should be reckoned with.
Does a “black politics” going forward need to have something to say
about corporate power, Israeli occupation, immigration, and drone
warfare? That’s the unspoken debate in this article, made all the more
glaring because Dyson is sympathetic—and far closer to West than
President Obama—on many of these questions.
It is the unspoken in
Dyson’s essay that raises more questions about what is really at the
heart of his critique and speaks forcefully to what the real object of
his criticism might be. While Dyson uses the rubric of faulty
scholarship and character assassination to condemn West, what he is
really doing is defending the illiberal politics of centrism, the
permanent warfare state, the power of the financial elite, the
surveillance state, the attack on whistle blowers, and the suppression
of civil liberties. At the same time, he disparages the multifaceted
role of the public intellectual, is silent about the increasing
corporatization of the university and its suppression of dissent while
making a case for accommodating the citadels of dominant power and the
regime of neoliberalism.
Others who rightly defend Cornel West
have done a good job at pointing how trivial and personal Dyson’s attack
is and how his criticisms are deeply motivated by a back-hand defense
of Obama’s ideology and policies. Max Blumenthal argues that Dyson’s
critique both ignores the eruption of new forms of politics among young
people while offering a tepid defense of a Democratic Party that has
become simply an adjunct of corporate power and the financial elite.
Against Dyson’s silly critique of West as a jilted lover, Blumenthal
offers up an informative list of West’s tireless involvement among a
range of grassroots organizations. He writes:
Few public
intellectuals have positioned themselves at the nexus of these emerging
movements as firmly Cornel West has. Earlier this month, I joined him on
a panel at Princeton University to support a group of students and
faculty seeking to pressure the school into divesting from companies
involved in human rights abuses in occupied Palestinian territory. His
presence boosted the morale of the young student activists who had
suddenly fallen under attack by powerful pro-Israel forces. Days later,
West joined veteran human rights activist Larry Hamm at Bethany Baptist
Church in Newark for a discussion on local efforts against police
brutality. It was in places like this, away from the national limelight,
where West gathered his vital energy and his righteous anger. West’s
investment in grassroots struggles ignored and even undermined by the
Democratic Party has thrown him in direct conflict with the president
and his supporters. He has been particularly withering in his criticisms
of high profile African-American intellectuals and activists who have
served as Obama’s loyal defenders.
Blumenthal has joined a number
of critics who have made clear that as a public intellectual West is
involved in a number of grassroots campaigns against a range of
injustices whether they be in protests against the incarceration state,
racism, massive inequality in wealth and power, or the massive suffering
produced by the financial elite. For instance, Carl Dix and Lenny Wolf
have done a superb job analyzing both the absences and
misrepresentations in Dyson’s attack. They point to the evolving nature
of West’s scholarship, his generosity of spirit in bringing others into
the limelight, his solidarity with a number of grassroots groups, and
his clearly endearing devotion not to a singular politics but to the
radical spirit of democracy itself. What they do that other critics do
not do is also expose Dyson’s genuflection not simply to Obama but to
the dominant registers of a lethal kind of politics that makes it
impossible to associate the United States with even a vestige of
democracy. And for that their piece should be widely read.
Many
of the articles critical of Dyson’s attack take up his critique of West
on his terms and fail to widen the parameters of the debate.
Consequently, what is missed is that West is being attacked because he
is a public intellectual who enters the political arena through a
variety of venues and attains a visibility rarely given to left
intellectuals. There is more at stake here than rendering West
self-indulgent, characterizing is work as being narrowly motivated by a
hatred of Obama, and arguing that he does not produce rigorous academic
scholarship. Of course, a minor but important question here is who
appointed Michael Dyson as an arbiter of what counts as a productive
intervention into the public sphere? What accounts for Dyson’s chutzpah
in defining what counts as scholarship, public discourse, and the
meaning of politics itself? Much of Dyson’s attack appears as an act of
policing, particularly within the new and old boundaries and spaces in
which dissent is produced, circulated, and distributed.
What
Dyson disregards in his self-appointed role of being an arbiter for
legitimate scholarship is that West does not define himself as a scholar
but as an intellectual. Nor is West first allegiance to the standards
of academic scholarship. West begins with important social problems and
uses theory as a tool to address such issues. Hence, his approach to
theory is not circumscribed by the often narrow and abstract dictates of
what the academy deems as scholarship, which I believe has in recent
years become an exercise in the production of jargon and a
depoliticizing discourse. These are crucial points that Dyson misses
entirely. West writes and acts by beginning with problems, his sense of
commitments are defined as political interventions, not as attempts to
be published by a university press or celebrated in the New York Review
of Books, though both are possible given the influence he has in
theoretically fashioning new kinds of political formations outside of
the existing parameters of power. West functions as an intellectual who
takes the educative nature of politics seriously and in doing so he
changes the rhetoric, magnifies a pedagogy of disruption, moves in an
out of a variety of public spheres without compromising his principles,
and breaks open the confusing discourse of common sense, so deeply
treasured by the apostles of oppression.
West’s politics are
performative, and are not tied to the printed word. Is he at times a bit
theatrical, sometimes appearing self-indulgent? That seems a minor, if
not irrelevant, criticism compared to his ongoing attempts to fuse
theory with action, and reach into history in order to reclaim those
elements of public memory long forgotten. And lest we should forget, he
is not the lonely intellectual preaching from the Olympian heights of
Princeton University. What is notable about his work is that he is one
of the few public intellectuals in the United States who embraces the
assumption that domination is not simply about economic structures but
also about beliefs, rhetoric, and the pedagogical. He understands that
the symbolic and pedagogical are powerful weapons to be used in creating
alternative understandings of both the present and the future. He
recognizes that such tools are crucial in creating the agents necessary
to produce the collective struggles for a more democratic future to
unfold. He works with social movements and does so as an intellectual
not a prophet or an isolated academic scholar. He is an intellectual
because he believes in the power of ideas not the rewards given to those
in the academy who become servants of power. And he believes that such
power is collective not individual, the product of social movements and
ongoing struggles not the abstract rhetoric of isolated and often
irrelevant academics. Moreover, he does not think within a single
discipline and understands that there is no closure in history.
History is open but it is only open to change if there are struggles, if
a collective consciousness emerges that understands the nature of a new
historical moment and the forces at work necessary to change it. West’s
appeal to hope is a political intervention, not an act of phrophecy–it
functions so as to make thinking troubling, and conjure up new public
spaces open to new forms of solidarity. West’s politics is a call to
educated hope, a recognition that knowledge can only speak to power and
truth when people can locate themselves in the narratives it provides.
West does that and he does it brilliantly and he does it as a public
intellectual who not only embarrasses liberals but provocatively reveals
their most poisonous and cowardly attributes. West is not a hero; he is
not a celebrity; he is not a political romantic. On the contrary, he is
a fighter. Someone who struggles in the name of justice and uses all of
the intellectual resources, outlets and ideological and affective
spaces at his disposable. Rather than impugning him, we should learn
from him, be in dialogue with him, and be grateful that such a teacher
is in our midst. And, let’s not forget that all of us who take on this
role as engaged public intellectuals will not get rewards, we will not
be invited to the White House, and we will not receive the usual empty
accolades from the mainstream press. Instead, we will be considered
dangerous, but as Hannah Arendt once said, thinking itself is dangerous
in dark times. What Michael Dyson’s critique of Cornel West has done is
make Arendt’s point obvious.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the
McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the
English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting
Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s
Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and
Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His
web site is www.henryagiroux.com.
© 2015 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
http://ccrjustice.org/…/dr.-cornel-west-joins-boycott-of-un…
Dr. Cornel West Joins Boycott of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign over Salaita Firing
press@ccrjustice.org
March 4, 2015, New York – Esteemed professor and intellectual Dr.
Cornel West has cancelled a high-profile lecture at the University of
Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in support of a boycott of the university
over the firing of Professor Steven Salaita. The university fired
Salaita, a Palestinian-American professor of Native American Studies,
from a tenured faculty position because of his tweets criticizing the
Israeli government’s bombing of Gaza last year. West was scheduled to
deliver the 2015 Thulin Lecture next month at the university on “The
Profound Desire for Justice” in the historic Lincoln Hall.
“My change of mind in regard to my cancellation of my lecture constitutes a line in the sand I could not cross,” said West. “The case of my dear brother Professor Steven Salaita is a moral scandal of great proportion and the suffering of precious Palestinians under a vicious Israeli occupation is a crime against humanity, even in a world in which ugly anti-Jewish hatred escalates.”
Since Salaita’s firing, more than 5,000 academics from around the country have pledged to boycott the university, resulting in the cancellation of more than three dozen scheduled talks and conferences at the school. Sixteen academic departments of the university have voted no confidence in the university administration, and prominent academic organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, the Modern Language Association, and the Society of American Law Teachers have publicly condemned the University’s actions.
Earlier this year, Salaita filed a lawsuit against the university and its officials, including the Chancellor and university trustees, alleging that their decision to fire him over his tweets violated his constitutional rights to free speech and due process of law, and breached his employment contract. The suit also targets university donors who, based on emails made public, threatened to withhold their contributions to the university if it did not fire Salaita on account of his political speech. Salaita is represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the law firm of Loevy & Loevy.
For more information on the civil rights lawsuit Salaita v. Kennedy, et al, see CCR’s page: http://www.ccrjustice.org/Salaita
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.
“My change of mind in regard to my cancellation of my lecture constitutes a line in the sand I could not cross,” said West. “The case of my dear brother Professor Steven Salaita is a moral scandal of great proportion and the suffering of precious Palestinians under a vicious Israeli occupation is a crime against humanity, even in a world in which ugly anti-Jewish hatred escalates.”
Since Salaita’s firing, more than 5,000 academics from around the country have pledged to boycott the university, resulting in the cancellation of more than three dozen scheduled talks and conferences at the school. Sixteen academic departments of the university have voted no confidence in the university administration, and prominent academic organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, the Modern Language Association, and the Society of American Law Teachers have publicly condemned the University’s actions.
Earlier this year, Salaita filed a lawsuit against the university and its officials, including the Chancellor and university trustees, alleging that their decision to fire him over his tweets violated his constitutional rights to free speech and due process of law, and breached his employment contract. The suit also targets university donors who, based on emails made public, threatened to withhold their contributions to the university if it did not fire Salaita on account of his political speech. Salaita is represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the law firm of Loevy & Loevy.
For more information on the civil rights lawsuit Salaita v. Kennedy, et al, see CCR’s page: http://www.ccrjustice.org/Salaita
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.
All,
Jamil Smith's article in the New Republic below is not only utterly pathetic and hopelessly clueless on a number of different levels but he has to be one of the most outlandish LIARS in all of American journalism. He actually has the nerve/unmitigated gall to assert that he and a colleague of his actually EDITED Michael Eric Dyson's gargantuan 10,000 word diatribe in the New Republic attacking Cornel West. You have GOT to be kidding! Who does Smith think he's fooling with this BS? Even a child can see that absolutely NO ONE came anywhere near "editing" that massive tome of an article by Dyson and if anyone simply wants to make an absolutely absurd claim that they did that individual and whoever assisted him are two of the biggest INCOMPETENTS in all of magazine journalism today and should be promptly fired! Smith's feeble defense of the magazine's publication of Dyson's rant-- in spite of the magazine's own self admitted rancid white supremacist history-- is bad enough but his idiotic claim that he actually edited the piece is just TOO much...LOL...Pleeze brother, STOP...you're killing me...LOL...
Kofi
http://www.newrepublic.com/…/why-we-published-michael-eric-…
This Isn't the Same 'New Republic'
By Jamil Smith
@JamilSmith
April 24, 2015
The New Republic
The first New Republic I recall seeing erased me. I found it in my
local public library during my junior year of high school; the edges
were a little bit tattered. The magazine had put a blond, white teenager
wearing headphones on the cover and called him “The Real Face of Rap.”
People had been reading this, I realized, and I felt acid in my throat.
The kid’s expression in the cover image hinted that even he was
surprised. The boldness of the contrarian image and the declaration
seemed intended to injure. And the article it introduced was not merely
ignorant. It bludgeoned me with its wrongheadedness. Not only did I feel
that the magazine wasn’t for me: It actively sought to invalidate me.
This was hardly an isolated incident of cultural insensitivity or obtuseness, as Ta-Nehisi Coates reminded us last December. The New Republic archives are rife with it, from an issue devoted to The Bell Curve to Stephen Glass’ inventions to the unconscionable bigotry against Arabs written by former editor Marty Peretz. But by the time the magazine, now my magazine, published its own examination of its racial legacy in February, it seemed to me that things had changed, and I had taken a job here as a senior editor.
I bring all this up because of the discussion that has arisen among readers since the publication of a Michael Eric Dyson essay about Cornel West on our site this past Sunday. The conversation has been wide-ranging, but for me, there has been one stinging question that must be addressed: Why, considering this magazine’s history of a white gaze and a white audience, did it appear in The New Republic?
I first saw that question in a post on my Facebook wall the night we published the essay, which I co-edited with my colleague Theodore Ross. Lamenting the harshness of the critique and the public manner in which it was delivered, author and Vassar professor Kiese Laymon directed this question at Dyson on Facebook: “You do this in the New Republic? This? There? Why?”
Those questions have a very simple answer: because I work here. Dyson, who I’ve known since I was a producer at MSNBC, had been working on the essay for several months. When he learned from my former colleagues that I had changed jobs, he contacted me in March and asked whether we’d consider publishing his essay. I was well versed in the hyperbolic vitriol West had directed not just at President Obama and Dyson, but also at Melissa Harris-Perry, the host of the show on which I’d last worked. Not only did I agree that a forceful response to West was long overdue, but that it should come from a fellow black intellectual. We accepted it.
I detail all of that not to defend Dyson or the essay, neither of which need it, but because others have asked, with varied intent, why it ended up here. I also offer the facts to contrast the hypothesis Jason Parham offered in Gawker. Parham wrote that the reason Dyson’s essay appeared in the magazine was “because The 100-Year-Old Magazine of Things White People Think is doing what it has done many times throughout its storied past: treating blackness as a thing to be picked apart. Only this time, they had another black man do the bidding.”
In fact, the magazine’s racial legacy was one reason why I considered it vital that we publish “The Ghost of Cornel West.” Essays like this explore black humanity with an intensity that has rarely been seen before in the pages of The New Republic. But the responses of people like Parham seem not only question the story itself, but whether our publication had undermined our stated commitment to stories and ideas that do not simply “represent the views of one privileged class, nor appeal solely to a small demographic of political elites.” Or, put more simply, that this remains a magazine purely of and for rich white folks.
Those days are over.
This is not simply a matter of head count. Yes, I and several other colleagues of color have upped the melanin quotient of the magazine’s editorial staff significantly, and we expect that trend to continue. Of greater importance to me, however, is a more widespread problem that continues to arise in our dialogues about race. Too often we continue to frame disagreements about race as a form of betrayal, and seek to erase our enemies, or even those who merely disagree with us. When “The Real Face of Rap” cover was published, I was fending off insults of “Oreo” (black on the outside, white on the inside) from fellow black students. Today I stand accused of having been swallowed up by an encompassing whiteness as a consequence of where I work.
One of the most peculiar responses that I have fielded since Sunday night was a tweet: “By the way, why are you at The New Republic?” I’m here to inspire debate, and to do quality work. I’m also here to make sure I’m a part of ensuring that The New Republic will never be the same magazine I saw in my local library as a teenager.
That won’t happen overnight. It’s already evident, though, in the increased frequency of stories and perspectives offered, from staff and contributors, that reflect the realities of people of color. Articles like Parham’s, I’d argue, are incorrect because they inflict on me and my colleagues what that 1991 New Republic cover did to entire communities: Erasure. Criticism in any debate is welcomed and necessary. But it never should include decolorization. My blackness is essential to my identity. Deny it, and you deny me. At The New Republic I am trying, with my presence and our work, to make sure no one is similarly denied, and to reflect the lives of all people. If you don’t like what we do, cool. But erasing the humanity of those with whom you disagree is no way to offer critique.
Jamil Smith's article in the New Republic below is not only utterly pathetic and hopelessly clueless on a number of different levels but he has to be one of the most outlandish LIARS in all of American journalism. He actually has the nerve/unmitigated gall to assert that he and a colleague of his actually EDITED Michael Eric Dyson's gargantuan 10,000 word diatribe in the New Republic attacking Cornel West. You have GOT to be kidding! Who does Smith think he's fooling with this BS? Even a child can see that absolutely NO ONE came anywhere near "editing" that massive tome of an article by Dyson and if anyone simply wants to make an absolutely absurd claim that they did that individual and whoever assisted him are two of the biggest INCOMPETENTS in all of magazine journalism today and should be promptly fired! Smith's feeble defense of the magazine's publication of Dyson's rant-- in spite of the magazine's own self admitted rancid white supremacist history-- is bad enough but his idiotic claim that he actually edited the piece is just TOO much...LOL...Pleeze brother, STOP...you're killing me...LOL...
Kofi
http://www.newrepublic.com/…/why-we-published-michael-eric-…
This Isn't the Same 'New Republic'
By Jamil Smith
@JamilSmith
April 24, 2015
The New Republic
This was hardly an isolated incident of cultural insensitivity or obtuseness, as Ta-Nehisi Coates reminded us last December. The New Republic archives are rife with it, from an issue devoted to The Bell Curve to Stephen Glass’ inventions to the unconscionable bigotry against Arabs written by former editor Marty Peretz. But by the time the magazine, now my magazine, published its own examination of its racial legacy in February, it seemed to me that things had changed, and I had taken a job here as a senior editor.
I bring all this up because of the discussion that has arisen among readers since the publication of a Michael Eric Dyson essay about Cornel West on our site this past Sunday. The conversation has been wide-ranging, but for me, there has been one stinging question that must be addressed: Why, considering this magazine’s history of a white gaze and a white audience, did it appear in The New Republic?
I first saw that question in a post on my Facebook wall the night we published the essay, which I co-edited with my colleague Theodore Ross. Lamenting the harshness of the critique and the public manner in which it was delivered, author and Vassar professor Kiese Laymon directed this question at Dyson on Facebook: “You do this in the New Republic? This? There? Why?”
Those questions have a very simple answer: because I work here. Dyson, who I’ve known since I was a producer at MSNBC, had been working on the essay for several months. When he learned from my former colleagues that I had changed jobs, he contacted me in March and asked whether we’d consider publishing his essay. I was well versed in the hyperbolic vitriol West had directed not just at President Obama and Dyson, but also at Melissa Harris-Perry, the host of the show on which I’d last worked. Not only did I agree that a forceful response to West was long overdue, but that it should come from a fellow black intellectual. We accepted it.
I detail all of that not to defend Dyson or the essay, neither of which need it, but because others have asked, with varied intent, why it ended up here. I also offer the facts to contrast the hypothesis Jason Parham offered in Gawker. Parham wrote that the reason Dyson’s essay appeared in the magazine was “because The 100-Year-Old Magazine of Things White People Think is doing what it has done many times throughout its storied past: treating blackness as a thing to be picked apart. Only this time, they had another black man do the bidding.”
In fact, the magazine’s racial legacy was one reason why I considered it vital that we publish “The Ghost of Cornel West.” Essays like this explore black humanity with an intensity that has rarely been seen before in the pages of The New Republic. But the responses of people like Parham seem not only question the story itself, but whether our publication had undermined our stated commitment to stories and ideas that do not simply “represent the views of one privileged class, nor appeal solely to a small demographic of political elites.” Or, put more simply, that this remains a magazine purely of and for rich white folks.
Those days are over.
This is not simply a matter of head count. Yes, I and several other colleagues of color have upped the melanin quotient of the magazine’s editorial staff significantly, and we expect that trend to continue. Of greater importance to me, however, is a more widespread problem that continues to arise in our dialogues about race. Too often we continue to frame disagreements about race as a form of betrayal, and seek to erase our enemies, or even those who merely disagree with us. When “The Real Face of Rap” cover was published, I was fending off insults of “Oreo” (black on the outside, white on the inside) from fellow black students. Today I stand accused of having been swallowed up by an encompassing whiteness as a consequence of where I work.
One of the most peculiar responses that I have fielded since Sunday night was a tweet: “By the way, why are you at The New Republic?” I’m here to inspire debate, and to do quality work. I’m also here to make sure I’m a part of ensuring that The New Republic will never be the same magazine I saw in my local library as a teenager.
That won’t happen overnight. It’s already evident, though, in the increased frequency of stories and perspectives offered, from staff and contributors, that reflect the realities of people of color. Articles like Parham’s, I’d argue, are incorrect because they inflict on me and my colleagues what that 1991 New Republic cover did to entire communities: Erasure. Criticism in any debate is welcomed and necessary. But it never should include decolorization. My blackness is essential to my identity. Deny it, and you deny me. At The New Republic I am trying, with my presence and our work, to make sure no one is similarly denied, and to reflect the lives of all people. If you don’t like what we do, cool. But erasing the humanity of those with whom you disagree is no way to offer critique.
