MFS Modern Fiction Studies

Almost from the moment Henry Lyman Morehouse (for whom Morehouse College was named) coined the term “Talented Tenth” in 1896, debate has raged over its rhetoric, viability, and potential abuses. Popularized seven years later by W. E. B. Du Bois, the Talented Tenth was framed as a theoretical concept for assimilating formerly enslaved African Americans into mainstream culture and suturing their beliefs to American ideals. Not only were concerns raised over who should be uplifted, but serious challenges developed over what measure of man (or woman) served as the litmus test to measure racial fitness. Nigel I. Malcolm’s new work, Rethinking Racial Uplift: Rhetorics of Black Unity and Disunity in the Obama Era, further complicates those arguments by shifting the discourse to examine uplift in a “post-civil rights era” and against burgeoning beliefs in a “post-Black” [End Page 648] America. Malcolm deconstructs racial uplift using the ongoing rhetoric of its merits and shortcomings, and the faulty praxis on which it was implemented as viewed by contemporary scholars. Malcolm topples the romanticized historical function of racial uplift—namely, aiding the social advancement of poor Blacks—and the role of the Talented Tenth as its altruistic crusaders. Both require the modern, unapologetic examination Malcolm provides of the Talented Tenth as supporters of their own individual growth and security (and that of their children), rather than as empowerment agents to the impoverished members of the race.

In chapter 1, “Race, Class, and Fear in Twenty-First Century America,” Malcolm examines unity and disunity using Ta-Nehisi Coates’s rhetoric of making and unmaking Blackness espoused in Between the World and Me (2015). Placing Coates in conversation with Du Bois, who lamented the albatross placed on Blacks as habitual problems, Malcolm demonstrates how the twoness of being Black and American presents itself through fear among the impoverished. Coates situates the fears of the “Abandoned” (5) as all-encompassing, operating as fears of perpetual violence against them from law enforcement, abusive parents, and unruly Black youth. Malcolm, however, sees these fears as rooted in class rather than race. He views it as a misstep to see all Blacks as cohesively linked and living in fear of both white racism and the toll it afflicts through pathology within poor Black neighborhoods. By overlooking class and how different groups live and experience Blackness based on their proximity to economic, political, and social power, Coates, in Malcolm’s estimation, mostly sees through his own upbringing among the Abandoned—the class of impoverished Blacks who have been blamed for their low status by both whites and Blacks and left to fend for themselves.

Chapter 2, “Slaves to the Community: Blacks and the Rhetoric of Selling Out,” examines the ostracization faced by Blacks who traverse standards of Blackness with Malcolm returning to Du Bois’s rhetoric of double-consciousness. The exploration includes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s utopian “I Have a Dream” speech and Randall Kennedy’s Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (2008). Malcolm examines Kennedy’s rhetoric of selling out through the public excommunications of those refusing to uphold the responsibility of uplift. In Malcom’s view of uplift ideology, the community takes precedence over the individual, making Blacks “slaves to each other” (29) rather than to whites. Malcolm explores Kennedy’s theory that individual freedom cannot exist or must be suppressed if the racial group is to maintain cohesion. But Malcolm situates the rhetoric of selling out as antithetical [End Page 649] to the dreams and aspirations—the equality and equity of the civil rights movement—that sought to erase the color line.

In chapter 3, “Black Man’s Burden: The Rhetoric of Racial Uplift,” Malcolm examines Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint’s Come on, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors (2008), returning the gaze to Du Bois’s Talented Tenth and the belief that racial uplift demands the transformation of the man (or woman) furthest down through building their character and morality. The Talented Tenth find themselves in the difficult position of being unable to leave the flock behind without being branded as “sellouts” while also being unable to lead them effectively. Malcolm finds Cosby and Poussaint’s rhetoric works to soothe the Talented Tenth and relieve them of the stress and burden of being unwilling or unable to uplift others. Malcolm suggests that if the middle-class does accept the debt of uplift, they do so out of residual memory of the Talented Tenth’s historic mission.

Chapter 4, “Identification, Division, and the Rhetoric of Black Disunity,” revisits Eugene Robinson’s Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (2010) and examines the four distinct subgroups that he theorizes exist instead of a single cohesive group. Malcolm considers the rhetoric of Black disunity and the four Black Americas (Transcendent, Mainstream, Emergent, and Abandoned) as a product of the growing assimilation of Blacks into American society. Where disparate communities once worked together, Malcolm sees a disintegration of racial solidarity based on Black individuals finding cultural similarities with those outside of Black communities. The individual, he insists, takes precedence over the group, and once identified on their own merits, has fewer ties to other Black people. Black leaders and Black agendas have been replaced by “leaders who are Black promoting agendas that favor a social class more than a racial group” (79).

Chapter 5, “Divided Loyalty: Race, Class, and Place in the Affirmative Action Debate,” opens a discussion of the Affirmative Action debate by noting that with the members of the Talented Tenth aligned easily with whites, poor Blacks are kept in spaces of social inferiority. Using Sheryll Cashin’s Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America (2014) as a springboard from which to situate his argument, Malcolm sees the middle class as striving to ensure the social advancement of their own progeny instead of racial uplift for poor Blacks. The rhetoric of selling out actually helps keep Blacks on their side of the color line, managing and being managed by their own. Here, Malcolm returns to his belief that class, not race, unifies Blacks, whites, and other Americans of similar status: “So whether [End Page 650] they are depicted as welfare queens, super predators, or undeserving, the masses of poor Blacks are in fact pawns in a game played between white and Black elites” (90).

In Chapter 6, “Blacks and the Rhetoric of Individualism,” Malcolm uses Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now (2011) to query the possibility of Black people identifying as people without reference to race or skin color. Touré examines the tensions between individual Blacks as opposed to those between Blacks and whites. Malcolm argues that the identity politics within a race cages the liberty of the individual Black person. He challenges Touré’s placement of race ahead of class in a society where racial hierarchies seem to perpetually situate Blacks on its bottom rung and where Blackness has become synonymous with poverty, lack, and criminality. This bias encourages those able to secure even the slightest modicum of social and economic elevation to develop an aversion to linked-fate theories.

Malcolm moves away from a classic Black nationalist perspective on collective action and racial unity and instead gives a pragmatic examination of class and the changing notions of unity and community in the era of Obama. He contends with the often-overlooked reality that there has never been a single, homogenous Black community, but rather diverse Black communities that thrive alongside one another and where individuals and groups with shared interests overlap into, collaborate with, and migrate between spaces. What Malcolm introduces at the close of chapter 5 is perhaps the overarching theme of the entire work: in spite of what theories of uplift suggest, the poor have and always have had agency and the ability to determine their own outcomes. Uplift often takes place within impoverished groups and through the resources of their communities. Oseola McCarty, who earned a pittance over the 60-year period she worked as a wash-erwoman, would have appeared poor to the Talented Tenth, yet she provided an endowment scholarship of $150,000 for Black students who wished to attend the University of Southern Mississippi. McCarty epitomizes the grassroots, intra-class uplift historically utilized by the Abandoned to challenge extralegal social inequalities. In the hands of marginalized communities, uplift worked to build self-sufficiency meant to defy both racial and class-based discrimination. The poor do not need saving by self-appointed leadership from outside their own ranks, or to Malcolm’s well-crafted point, the poor consider the rhetoric of the Talented Tenth condescending. Successful challenges to systemic social and economic inequalities have occurred with cross-class cooperation, including “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns. [End Page 651]

More than 120 years after Du Bois popularized the concept of the Talented Tenth, we find it lodged in American minds and romantically lauded for its benevolent mission. Malcolm valiantly assesses the illusion of unity and the instability of uplift rhetoric in the wake of civil rights advances in a post-Obama era. This analysis of uplift forces Americans to take a closer look at the Talented Tenth and recent attempts by scholars and political scientists to wrest its past promises to a changing Black identity. Not all readers will agree with his assessment; however, Malcolm’s work is overdue and proves a necessary addition to discourses on racial uplift and the intersectionality of race and class.