Eyes Wide Open: A Case Study Reflecting on Black Awakening (Critical Essay)

IN 1969 Robert Allen opened many eyes with his first book, Black Awakening in Capitalist America. He gave an open, honest assessment of the Black Nationalist movement, Black Nationalist leaders, and capitalism's relationship to racism in the US. He also challenged black communities and black intellectuals in particular to look at ourselves as individuals and as a community, to decide what path we would walk in the future and how we would go about getting there. His assessment of the moment offered informed advice for the generations to follow. I want to focus on the role of the academic intellectual in Black America's awakening. As an undergraduate at Yale University, I was active in many of the campus's cultural organizations, and I worked as alumni coordinator at the Afro-American Cultural Center. I would like to offer my experiences there as a case study. I will be focusing specifically on the role of black intellectuals as one way to investigate the progress and setbacks we have faced in the past forty years. Allen notes how many of the main players in the 1960s movements came from or were headed towards the middle class. They were being trained to become the new leaders of a community plagued by racist capitalism, but they were also being enticed to leave that community. He writes how "racial integration offer[ed] middle-class Negroes the pleasurable prospect of shedding their blackness." (1) It can safely be argued that this is indeed the case with some of the prominent black intellectuals and so-called leaders that have emerged in the past forty years. The reputations of Ward Connerly and Clarence Thomas come to mind. But many intellectuals have simply struggled to find a way to redefine blackness in such a way that includes their intellectual and material success. As more and more black students have graduated from universities, as the black middle class has grown, so have the notions of what it means to be black in America. The widening gap between the rich and the poor puts further stress on the formation and maintenance of a unified black community.