586
PARTISAN REVIEW
demonstrable improvement in the conditions about which the black mil–
itants always seem to complain.
We see this anti-intellectualism playing itself out in the Newark may–
oral race. There, incumbent Sharpe James, who fancies himself a grass–
roots man, assails his African-American challenger as "that white
faggot."
White
and
faggot
are, of course, code words for denigrating a
black who is an Ivy Leaguer, who speaks perfectly standard English, and
who grew up in suburbia. Those are pathetic code words aimed against
social progress itself, against upward mobility on the part of those
blacks who refuse to accept a track for racial separatism and paranoia
and defeatism. Social mobility is actually mocked and denigrated as
"whiteness" by the apostles of racial chauvinism. This trend took on
cult-like proportions in the late 1960s, and now it is pervasive.
It
is part
of our culture; it is fashionable. It is transmitted from generation to gen–
eration in black studies on the campus, in black media, especially black
newspapers across the nation, on black talk radio, in black entertain–
ment television, and, yes, it is adopted and reinforced in the giant media.
Bill McGowan in his new book,
Coloring the News,
puts it this way:
Journalism is a profession that prides itself on its maverick outspo–
kenness and its allergic reaction to preconceived notions. Yet in
today's media climate, the search
to
state minority viewpoints and
voices has opened the door to ethnic, racial, and gender cheerlead–
ing. Most minority journalists have no problem upholding the goal
of professional detachment and nonpartisanship. But many younger
journalists, particularly members of minorities, see objectivity as a
reflection of white cultural values. This scorn for objectivity has
encouraged a form of relativism in which facts lose their currency
and concerns about feeding anti-minority stereotypes or undermin–
ing community self-esteem triumphs over candor and factuality.
A maverick viewpoint from an iconoclastic black commentator such as
myself frequently draws outrage and anger from black and white jour–
nalists, who are jolted that a black thinks independently or differently
from their stereotype of black thought and black leaders. They are all
the more infuriated because on TV I resemble Malcolm X, but I sound
like Kenneth B. Clark or Ralph Ellison or Roy Wilkins or Bayard Rustin
or James Baldwin, intellectuals the giant media either do not know or
do not remember, and who, if they do recall, they want to forget. Too
many journalists and TV producers prefer and expect from black
spokesmen bombast for the sake of bombast. And they spurn intellec-
