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PARTISAN REVIEW
the reporters, supposedly objective reporters and journalists, have to
give their own opinions about the subjects that they cover from Mon–
day through Saturday. So they have at least twenty-five minutes every
Sunday to talk with each other about their own opinions. Opinionated
airheads, I call them. Around the dials, not just on ABC. These are anti–
intellectual dumbbells. Everything is reduced to a sound bite, to a ver–
bal brawl.
I don't know if we've lost the common culture, but I know that we
have lost our class as a nation. We have downgraded critical thinking
and moral clarity, and we have upgraded jingoism and relativism. We
are training our people, not educating them. Anti-intellectualism is in
favor and on the rise in, of all places, the mediums of information and
on the campus, where we prepare do-gooders rather than people who
are good at what they do and how they think.
It
is anti-intellectual for
our educational institutions to institutionalize mediocrity, to make
stereotypes about race fashionable. It is a mockery of higher education
for the president of Harvard to back down from his request that a
prominent, celebrated, tenured black faculty member devote more time
to the classroom, more time to scholarship, and less time doing rap
CDs. Some vexing and subtle forms of discrimination still exist in Amer–
ica today and in the academy in particular. But asking Cornel West to
earn his fat paycheck is not discrimination. It is terribly destructive to
cast Cornel West as a victim of racial arrogance. That is, in my judg–
ment, sheer racial rhetoric. Why can't rational thinkers boldly detest
dilettantism?
We are suffering through paternalism in the academy and paternal–
ism in journalism, making race men into icons. How do we explain
giant media's obsession with and celebration of racial buffoonery? The
publishers of our biggest newspapers and magazines have given full cov–
erage, in their news and editorial pages, to the most anti-intellectual
racemongers among us. How else do we explain three puff pieces, pro–
files of the racial militant AI Sharpton, in the
New Yorker-yes,
the
New Yorker-in
the last several years? Last February, the puff piece by
Elizabeth Kolbert dubbed Sharpton "the people's preacher." She did so
on the basis of Sharpton's racial pretense and posturing, his separating
himself from black intellectuals, who remind Sharpton, and paternalis–
tic white journalists, of the dreaded white man. Indeed, Kolbert depicted
Sharpton as a colorful, flamboyant, grassroots leader, because he con–
signs the black middle class, and any other blacks who do not resemble
stereotypes of buffoonish minstrels, to the damnable category of
"Negro." Such a group stereotype, explains psychologist Kenneth
