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THE BLACK PHAROAHS
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Clyde Winters: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Glider: [qb] [QUOTE][b] While Dickerson's rhetoric exhibits echoes of black nationalism, she turns an unforgiving eye to that philosophy's more recent manifestations. "Carpetbagging Afrocentrists," as she terms them, are at least as much to blame for the predicament of black America as approval- seeking blacks. "Instead of carrying out substantive studies of African history," writes Dickerson. "These charlatans imagine glorious achievements, such as the Bronze Age of African development, airplanes or routinized surgery." Dickerson dismisses today's nationalist community roughly as "Afrocentric hustlers" who are invoking "mytho-ancestors, so far outside the past, as to be in fables." [/QUOTE][/b] [/qb][/QUOTE][QUOTE] At some points in her treatise, Dickerson journeys into interesting, and gutsy, terrain. Her critique of the Condoleezza Rice predicament is illuminating and saddening. I've written about my crush on the National Security Advisor and her counter-intuitive allure. But I suspect that Dickerson's opinion, even in its overstated form, is closer to the truth. "To white men, [Rice] is not a woman. To black men, she's not a fuckable woman; even the vaunted black penis cannot bridge the chasm between them ... Her having thrived is somehow an affront to the black man. What black masculinity does to white men, black female competence does to black men." For almost anyone identified with any sort of political ideology, Dickerson's analysis is a bitter pill to swallow. Unfortunately, the book tops out at just that. For all her flame-throwing, caustic denunciations and grenade lobbing, Dickerson does almost nothing to realize her essential thesis--the assertion that "black" is somehow a woefully inadequate way of describing African-Americans. That's because, for all its bluster and vitriol, Blackness never emerges as much more than a directionless rant. And not even a credible rant. Its targets are often strawmen conveniently substituted for less vulnerable objects.[b] In the section of Blackness that attacks Afrocentricity, Dickerson ignores the legion of authors who've written on the subject, instead electing to attack Iyanla Vanzant. But Vanzant, a self-help guru, is only vaguely informed by Afrocentricity and certainly has never presented herself as any sort of intellectual. Furthermore, at this point, Vanzant's franchise has extended beyond black people--she had a talk show produced by Barbara Waiters. Afrocentricity, is surely responsible for producing its share of crackpots. But Dickerson at once ducks the jokers (Leonard Jeffries) and the more serious scholars (Temple University professor Molefi Asante, for instance, who basically invented Afrocentricity). Instead she picks on Vanzant, thus substituting a bait and switch for a valid critique. [/b] When a strawman Strawman - The first of the series of DoD requirements that led to Ada (Woodenman, Tinman, Ironman, Steelman). Strawman was produced by the HOLWG in Apr 1975. slides beyond her grip, Dickerson just makes a generalization and states it as an unassailable truth. "Blacks often ask what their country can do for them, but never the converse," writes Dickerson. This would come as news to the thousands of African Americans in the armed services (puzzlingly, Dickerson once numbered among them) and African Americans who've died in every major American war, even without the basic guarantees of citizenship. Even when veering into the realm of history, Dickerson can't resist the temptation to take extremely complex problems and reduce them to two dimensions. She claims that Africa was the source of the slave trade because it was "the least urbanized continent" and was "defenseless." There are reams of scholarship dedicated to discerning why one of Africa's chief exports turned out to be slaves. Dickerson has, evidently, consulted none of it. That's because she has no need of scholars or scholarship, and the lion's share of her sources are authors (Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson, James Baldwin) who are dead. The result is that Blackness feels extremely dated. Certainly it's admirable that Dickerson is not beholden to any particular ideology. But in her efforts to not be pinned down, Dickerson mounts an intellectual scorched earth campaign and never settles down to stake out any ground of her own. [URL=http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0404.coates.html]web page[/URL] [/QUOTE] [/QB][/QUOTE]
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