Drugs, jewels and Versace, writers need therapy

I keep getting e-mails from people asking to respond to this Shelby Steele interview and this column from Stanley Crouch:

In an embarrassing commingling of radical politics, racism, and anti-Semitism, faux academics such as Jeffries, Molifi Asante, father of Afrocentrism, and Tony Martin of Wellesley taught unscholarly rants given to claiming the impossibility of white America ever giving black people a fair chance; that Jews controlled the African slave trade trade; and that they also conspired in modern times against the black scholars like themselves who could liberate the black mind. In short, as much bull as the campus market could bear...

It should be obvious by now that hip hop--a black popular music already degraded by violence, misogyny, and crude materialislm--was the last spittoon in which those academic hustles found sympathy. Insecure middle class black kids wallow in this version of "street knowledge" in order to give themselves a feeling of "authenticity" and, in some cases, to profit from their interpretations of this aesthetic junk for white friends who never lose a taste for any version of minstrelsy--black nationalist, revolutionary, thug life, you name it. The Birth of a Nation with a back beat.

Barack Obama, a fiercely accomplished student, Constitutional scholar, and first class writer, may well provide a symbol of the way out of this dungeon of propaganda posing as "authenticity" or "black consciousness." As they used to say, "Crack them books, boys and girls, you might learn something."

What no back-hand for Kente-Cloth, dashikis, kufis, Maulana Karenga or Ma'at? I keep telling this neighborhood kids that the Nguzo Saba will be the death of us all! Seriously is this like 1994? Am I back on campus, arguing with these Nation niggers over Kimet? I read these cats and all I hear is Gza, "Shit is played-out, just like neckloads of sterling\Suede-fronts, bell-bottoms and tricolor shearlings."

I think Stanley Crouch is the sort of writer who feels comfortable attacking the flawed identity politics of black nationalism out of one side of his mouth, while deploying those same politics out the other. It's all fine and good to tackle some shit Molefi Asante was preaching almost twenty years ago--there is some disreputable shit behind Afrocentricity. But Crouch is worst, because he hides his essentialism behind a veneer of humanism and respectability. This is the same dude who, only a couple years ago, embraced Alan Keyes's claim that Barack Obama wasn't black.  But now Obama evidently is black, but only because Crouch has found a use for him--clubbing his ancient adversaries from culture wars past.

The dishonesty inherent in that approach runs right through Steele. Conservatives who give this dude a platform to basically call the president-elect of the United States an Uncle Tom (what else is a bargainer?) are not serious. I've said my piece many times on Steele, but I guess it bears repeating. Here is a dude who repeatedly argued that white guilt was causing us to lose the Iraq War. Who subtitled his book "Why Obama Can't Win" and now plans to take that subtitle off in future editions. I am thinking out loud here: What is this if not intellectual cowardice? How are these cats not running a hustle? In what time are we living when the president is smarter, and more nuanced in his analysis, than the people charged with analyzing him?