b20
MICHAEL THELWELL
society, a critical review of assorted black writers and artists and a rather
overstated criticism of the role of white radicals - particularly Com–
munists - in obstructing the evolution of an autonomous, indigenous
black radicalism in Harlem in the thirties and forties. The eclecticism
- both in subject and method - tends to obscure the intent and blur
the focus of the work.
One consequence of the inherent and pervasive irony in the situa–
tion of blacks in this country can be seen in the fact that Cruse is not
entirely successful in escaping some of the very same contradictions for
which he so mercilessly and much of the time unjustly flays the entire
tribe of black intellectuals. He attacks the middle-class programs and
intellectual timidity of integrationist leaders as not relevant to the needs
and aspirations of the masses. And he dismisses with less justification two
generations of black writers, artists and performers, who by virtue of their
success have "integrated" the cultural mainstream and abandoned, or
"diluted" for white consumption, the cultural possibilities of the black
community. Yet his own book had to be published "downtown," has
been mostly reviewed in white journals and is clearly not directed to the
black masses. He certainly should be more charitable.
More to the point,
Th e Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
is guilty of
the failure for which Mr. Cruse roundly denounces everyone else. The
book presents no detailed, programmatic, analytical proposals for
im–
plementing the political and economic autonomy, psychological coherence
and cultural integrity of the black community - and this is the solution
it calls for. The lack is particularly regrettable, for it tends to cloud
the virtues of the book. Like Eldridge Cleaver's
Soul on Ice,
Malik
Shabazz's
Autobiography,
certain of LeRoi Jones' essays and the work
of other young black writers, the book is remarkably free of academic
shibboleths, doctrinal strictures and dogmatic pieties characteristic of
much of the writing on "the question" by Establishment "commenta–
tors" of both races. Because the perspective of the book comes out of
the black community it looks outward to American society; there is a
kind of reversal, and Cruse is able to challenge certain facile and
platitudinous formulas built into the critical terminology of the experts,
which have long ceased to describe social realities (if they ever did).
But provocative and important observations are left unexplored here
and are, at times, almost lost in a deluge of pointless and petty
acrimony; the promise of the early sections is never redeemed.
There appear to be two central assumptions from which Cruse
works. The first is that the identity crisis and cultural confusion which
he finds at the heart of most of the black community's problems is a
