Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
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~. iii1~i-i<br />
Black Life, White "Experts"<br />
Life magazine, perhaps the most influential of all the Establishment<br />
publications, put the case very simply in its recent profile of the reigning<br />
white expert on black people, Daniel Patrick Moynihan . Explaining<br />
why Mr. Moynihan has achieved such eminence and authority<br />
in two Administrations by stealing the insights of W.E.B . Du Bois<br />
and E . Franklin Frazier and then distorting them, Life said the following<br />
:<br />
` . Moynihan is white, and it is a fact of our times that white<br />
people in power tend to listen more closely to white advisers . . ."<br />
The black reality must be authenticated by the white expert before<br />
it is admitted into acceptability. In the world of books, the practice<br />
is no less prevalent . No opinion about black books and authors is<br />
more authoritative than Robert A . Bone's . When the Johnson Reprint<br />
people brought out a handsome facsimile edition of Alain Locke's<br />
classic The New <strong>Negro</strong>, the white expert on blacks Allan H. Spear<br />
was selected to write the new introduction . August Meier, the expert<br />
on black history, is serving as general editor of the American <strong>Negro</strong><br />
Life Series which Atheneum is publishing.<br />
Herbert Hill, whose official position has been for some time that<br />
of Labor Secretary for the NAACP, appointed himself chief guru<br />
of black literature some years ago . Now, with the surge of interest<br />
(and possibility of huge earnings) in black history, Mr . Hill has leapfrogged<br />
over to history and is now a grand guru in that discipline .<br />
Word has it that he has been named general editor of a series on black<br />
history to be published by Simon and Schuster .<br />
Apart from the overall distastefulness of the whole business of<br />
white experts presiding over black work, the opportunism inherent in<br />
the practice is monstrous . These white experts on black people eagerly<br />
capitalize on their white skins and their easier access to the<br />
editors and publishers to grab off fat advances and fees . The black<br />
community is not without remedy against these practices, however .<br />
Many of the new books being planned are earmarked for sale to<br />
schools and libraries in the metropolitan areas where, often, black<br />
children are more numerous than whites in the public schools (New<br />
York, Chicago, Washington) . Vigilant black parents and teachers,<br />
made aware of those books which are the products of black scholarship<br />
and planning, can defeat the white experts in the end . They can<br />
insist that, where practical, the books used in the schools and libraries<br />
utilized by their children be books conceived and produced by black<br />
people .<br />
Corrections<br />
NEGxO DIGEST wishes to correct two grievous errors made in the<br />
NEGRO DIGEST March 1969 49