Rap City, The Washington Post and Black Male Intellectuals

So my boy Michael Eric Dyson showed up on Rap City talking about his new book on Bill Cosby and the Black Middle Class. Say what you want about Dyson, bruh is circulating in a way that’s really unprecedented among black intellectuals. The Today Show, The Bill O’Reilly Show, NPR’s Talk of the Nation & News and Notes with Ed Gordon and Rap City? Few of us could roll comfortably in those spaces.

I was talking with Dyson by phone from the green room at BET when he told me that The Washington Post had reviewed New Black Man along with Charles Barkley’s Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man? Here’s some choice nuggets from Adam Bradley’s review:

***
For all its straight talk on race, however, [Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man] ends at a familiar impasse. As Martin Luther King Jr. asked almost 40 years ago, where do we go from here? That's where Mark Anthony Neal's New Black Man comes in. Neal, a professor of African-American studies at Duke University, is the author of several books and numerous articles on black popular culture. A self-described "thug nigga intellectual," he is not likely to be on Barkley's celebrity guest list. But in asserting his identity as a black male feminist, Neal challenges many of the assumptions behind Barkley's book.

Barkley's conversations are almost entirely between a black heterosexual, privileged man and other heterosexual privileged men. Even if their collective dreams of ending racism were realized, fundamental inequalities would be sustained through heterosexism, classism and misogyny. Neal addresses those inequalities by calling for a radical reframing of the way we talk about black and white, privilege and victimization. He imagines a New Black Manhood as "a metaphor for an imagined life -- a way to be 'strong' as a black man in new ways: strong commitment to diversity in our communities, strong support for women and feminism, and strong faith in love and the value of listening."

Part academic treatise, part soul-baring memoir, New Black Man is the unlikely offspring of hip-hop and feminism…With New Black Man , Neal offers a call to action by challenging not only the conventional white powers that be, but also the black men who sanction inequality by upholding patriarchy and heterosexism. In many ways, Neal's work responds better to the title of Barkley's book than does Barkley's own. Who's afraid of a large black man? Neal's New Black Man might just be the most feared man of all, for it is he who may finally realize that the path to racial justice runs through equal justice for all.
***

Nice, though homie did take me to task for being a tad too personal and for paying too much tribute to the feminist “womens” who make me the new black man I am, though it’s not like the readers of the WP are all that familiar with Jewell Gomez, Patricia Hill Collins or Audre Lorde for that matter.

And while we are on the subject of large black men—check out The Notorious Ph.D.'s (Todd Boyd) commentary on News and Notes yesterday.