Black Captive in a White Culture?


By EMILY EAKIN


   DURHAM, N.C. A. Baker Jr. ranks somewhere near the top. An expert in
African-American studies, he helped found the discipline 30 years ago
and now has an endowed chair at Duke University.

Among black scholars, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West may have
bigger public profiles, but Mr. Baker's academic influence is
arguably just as great. He is a former president of the Modern
Language Association, the author of several hotly debated books and the
editor of American Literature, that field's leading journal. He is also,
at 58, a disarmingly friendly scholar with a mischievous wit, a
full-time assistant, a plush office and the ear of deans and administrators.

And yet, as Mr. Baker sees it, in some ways he has more in common
with the black inmates in America's jails than he does with his white
colleagues down the hall. In his new book, "Turning South Again:
Rethinking Modernism/Rereading Booker T." (Duke University Press), he
elaborates his view that to be a black American successful or well off

From slavery through segregation, he points out, blacks were
physically confined, first held against their will on plantations and
then relegated to black communities. Today, he argues, the
confinement of blacks continues. Only now, instead of slave quarters
and the backs of buses, they inhabit jails and public housing
projects.

Or else, he writes, more insidiously, blacks are psychologically
constrained, trapped in anxiety-ridden relationships with white
culture. "American `history,' " he concludes, "thus reads out, in
black-majority vocabularies, as enslavement, incarceration,
imprisonment."

"It's not that white academics don't work extraordinarily hard," said
Mr. Baker, impeccably turned out in a gray wool suit and tie. "But
what they have that I lack is a sense of leisure, an absence of
endangerment, a look of being unconcerned that at any moment they
could die."

His is an exceedingly pessimistic view of American social progress
where race is concerned. And it is getting a public airing at a time
when judges are rolling back affirmative action measures,
policymakers are trading accusations over the number of black men in
jail, and black-studies scholars are debating whether race should be
studied at all. (In one controversial new book, "Against Race," Paul
Gilroy, a black British scholar at Yale, proposes abandoning the
concept of race altogether.)

But if Mr. Baker's book arouses strong reactions, that would be only
business as usual for a scholar who, as Michael Birubi, an English
professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, put it,
"comes up with provocative, even extravagant kinds of claims."

At the height of the culture wars in 1988, for example, Mr. Baker
told The New York Times that choosing between Pearl S. Buck and
Virginia Woolf was "no different from choosing between a hoagy and a
pizza." That remark was endlessly recycled by right-wing pundits as proof
of lax standards on the left.

More often, however, his severest critics have been his own
colleagues in black studies. When in "Blues, Ideology and
Afro-American Literature" (1984), he proposed analyzing the blues
with French post-structuralist theory, he was accused of being a race
traitor.

"I cannot fathom why a black critic would trust that the master would
provide him or her with tools with which he or she can seek
independence," wrote Joyce A. Joyce, at the time a black-studies
scholar at the University of Maryland at College Park.

When in "Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's
Writing" (1991), he seemed to put a positive spin on the incest
depicted in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," one black feminist
accused him of insensitivity to rape.

Then there was the controversy over Mr. Baker's "Black Studies, Rap
and the Academy" (1993). Much of the book was devoted to a defense of
rap as an authentically black and potentially subversive art form.
But he came down hard on Mr. Gates for testifying on behalf of 2 Live
Crew, a rap group charged with violating Florida's obscenity laws
with their album "As Nasty as They Wanna Be," which Mr. Baker
considered a "sexist mediocrity." Mr. Baker was then accused of letting
professional rivalry get the best of him.

"It is hard to believe that he would want to associate himself with a
book so intellectually weak, so ugly linguistically and so obviously
animated, to no good reason, by rank jealousy of a fellow academic,"
wrote the Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy in a famously
critical review of the book in 1993.

But such furious dissent is one measure of his impact. Scholars
consider his rebarbative, theory-laden prose a must-read. Even his
critics acknowledge that he, as much as anyone, has helped bring
African-American studies into being and develop as a field.

Moreover, some suggest that high-pitched battles are par for the
course in a discipline where there is pressure to speak and write on
behalf of an entire race but broad disagreement about what that
entails.

"The claim to speak for a constituency is a burden that both
energizes and hamstrings black intellectuals," said Mr. Birubi.
"Imagine Lionel Trilling having to defend Lenny Bruce just because
he's Jewish."

Ann duCille, a professor of black studies at Wesleyan University,
agreed. "For African-American scholars, politics is an important part
of the process," she said. "The question `What does our work mean for
the people?' haunts us all."

Mr. Baker, for one, is working on a manuscript about neo-conservative
black intellectuals, including Stephen Carter and Shelby Steele, who
have both criticized affirmative action. "There is no affiliation of
a Carter or a Steele with the black majority," he said.

And he makes no bones about his concern that Harvard's
African-American studies department, which shares an endowment of
nearly $40 million with the university's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute
for Afro-American Research and is stocked with high- profile
academics, has lost its political and scholarly edge. As evidence,
he cites a book of biographical sketches of 100 important black
Americans edited by Mr. Gates and Mr. West, both at Harvard , in
addition to the news that Mr. West is recording a spoken-word album.

"What Gates and company have wrought at Harvard is extraordinary by
any measure," Mr. Baker said. Nevertheless, he added, "the product
that is most visible, whether it is C-Span panels, rap albums or this
coffee table book of black history, is unfortunate." (Mr. Gates
declined to comment. Mr. West did not respond to messages left at his
office.)

Mr. Baker didn't start as an activist- scholar. A native of
Louisville, Ky., he earned his Ph.D. in Victorian literature at the
University of California at Los Angeles. In 1968 he joined the
English department at Yale, determined to write the definitive
biography of Oscar Wilde. Then the black power movement intervened.

As Mr. Baker tells the story, enhanced by dramatic pauses, voices and
gestures: "There was that day when three black students came to my
office and said, `When are you going to teach the black literature
course?' I said: `Surely, you have the wrong Baker. I don't do that.'
They said: `Let's repeat the question. When are you going to teach
the black literature course?' "

Six months later Mr. Baker was teaching the Yale English department's
first course in African-American literature, and Black Panthers were
hanging out in his apartment. Soon he was invited by the textbook
publisher McGraw-Hill to compile one of the first anthologies of
African-American literature.

"I grew my hair really long, my wife was making dashikis and we were
reading everything," Mr. Baker recalled.

By the time he left Yale in 1970, its program in African-American
studies was widely regarded as the nation's best. He went on to teach
at the University of Virginia and then at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he founded the Center for the Study of Black
Literature and Culture.

While they were living in Philadelphia, Mr. Baker, his wife and their
10-year-old son were robbed and brutally attacked in their home by
two black men. His wife, Charlotte Pierce-Baker, now a research
professor in African-American studies at Duke, was raped. Eventually she
wrote a book about the ordeal, "Surviving the Silence: Black Women's
Stories of Rape" (1998). Although Mr. Baker has not written about it
specifically, the experience "has affected everything," he said.

The move south three years ago gave him the title of his new book and
inspired his anxious reflections on black confinement. Yet when he
talks about Duke's "stunning record" on black undergraduate
enrollment (10 percent, among the best of selective private
institutions in the country), he could be a recruiter from the
admissions office.

But Mr. Baker doesn't linger on the positive. He relates a recent
incident in which his son, now 30 and a mental health worker at a
hospital in Atlanta, was stopped while driving at the speed limit by
a policeman who held a semiautomatic weapon in his face. After a
search of his car, his son was allowed to go on without a citation.

A case of racial profiling? Or mistaken identity? For Mr. Baker,
these questions are beside the point. "Imagine my white colleagues,"
he said. "I can only hope that their children never end up at the end
of a semiautomatic weapon."


 Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information

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