Interesting. Look what he wrote less than a year ago.
The blacker-than-thou paradox divides***I remember those days well, a heady time when African-Americans took education for granted as the sure route to self-improvement and the subsequent uplifting of the whole race.
On my tiny Texas campus of fewer than 1,000 students, only fools refused to read and study diligently. Only fools destroyed their brains with drugs. Only fools physically hurt their brethren. In fact, "being smart" was in. We called it being "heavy." We even expected jocks to be heavy. All musicians, especially the jazz types, were heavy.
Black power meant just that: being black and powerful, being armed with education and the drive to improve our lot in a hostile environment where the very concept of racial egalitarianism was still alien to most white Americans. Black power meant sharing the good and eliminating the bad.
In time, the concept of black power changed. Instead of being a sentiment that united us, it became a source of deep division. Those who followed Martin Luther King and his nonviolent movement, for example, were not as black as those who followed, say, Malcolm X's philosophy or that of the fearless Black Panthers.
No longer bringing us together, black power had become a negative litmus test for one's degree of "blackness." We had entered the "Blacker than Thou" era. On campuses nationwide, black students separated themselves into enclaves.
If you could quote from Frantz Fanon's book The Wretched of the Earth: The Handbook for the Black Revolution That Is Changing the Shape of the World, you were one black brother or sister.
And if you had an African name, wore a dashiki, sported a huge Afro, followed the Socialist Workers Party, talked like a Trotskyite, peppered your speech with Marxist aphorisms, majored in black studies and planned a trip to Africa, you were the essence of blackness.
The ultimate blacker-than-thou paradox occurred on traditionally black campuses. Nearly all of these campuses had parallel student government organizations. One was the legitimate body elected by the entire student population and was usually called the Student Government Association. It had the blessings of the administration and faculty.
The other was a self-appointed organization, usually called the Black Student Union. Assorted radicals belonged to it. In other words, the BSU was blacker than its duly elected counterpart, the SGA. I was president of the BSU at Bethune-Cookman College and founder and editor of the BSU newspaper. ***