The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Read Online Free Page A

blacks—is part of the black freedom struggle too. Protest marches were crucial to our liberation; sit-ins and boycotts were fundamental to our freedom; and the court brief was decisive in striking down legal barriers to our social flourishing. But the will to clarify our aims and examine our identity is, in its own way, just as important to our freedom as the blows struck in our defense by revolutionary stalwarts. Neither does love cancel out criticism; nor should it prevent black intellectuals from publicly discussing hard truths about black life that might embarrass or anger us. The role of the black intellectual is to discover, uncover, and recover truth as best we can, and to subject our efforts to healthy debate and examination. I learned from Malcolm X in particular that the black freedom struggle is no good without self-criticism and holding each other morally accountable.
    It must be admitted that the black intellectual is sometimes wary of being candid about our blemishes because the nation is in chronic denial about its flaws, even as it can’t seem to get enough of cataloguing black failure. That’s why the black intellectual’s desire to tell the truth is seen by many blacks as naive and traitorous. To make matters worse, some mainstream critics argue that black intellectuals pollute the quest for truth and knowledge when they use it to fight oppression. But if we’re honest, we’ll admit that the quest for truth and knowledge is never free of social and cultural intrusions. Knowledge and truth are never divorced from the ends for which they exist. Even those drunk on a belief in objectivity must acknowledge that culture and custom are at war with the idea of an unchanging reality that transcends our means to know it. That doesn’t mean that anything goes, that there are no moral landmarks to which we can point, that tradition must be jettisoned and history arbitrarily revised, that truth is up for grabs to the highest intellectual bidder, or that knowledge is hostage to emotion.
    And neither am I trying to sidestep the paradox of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. It is important, however, to rigorously question such an ideal; it is much more difficult to achieve than we might imagine. Even when it looks as if someone has successfully pulled it off—for instance, when Einstein huddled in a Berne patent office to tackle Brownian motion and the theory of relativity—we must look deeper. Einstein had no idea that he would be called upon to follow the trail of his discovery to the killing grounds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And even if we say that Einstein simply wanted to figure out the relationship of space andtime for knowledge’s sake, that turns out not to be true either. He had bigger fish to fry: through knowing the relation of time to space, Einstein wanted to know how reason ordered the universe. That’s why he famously disputed the view of indeterminacy put forth by Heisenberg in his uncertainty principle by declaring, “God does not play dice with the universe.” What Einstein’s example proves is that hardly anyone pursues knowledge for its own sake, not now at least, and not in our culture, even when they believe they do. We want to know things because we want to do better, be better, or get better—or to do awful, hateful things to our fellow citizens, to get back at traitors, to punish enemies, and to exact revenge on conquerors.
    Of course, the sheer pleasure of knowledge, of engaging great ideas and wrestling with great thinkers, is not in dispute—Socrates’s dialogues, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Beethoven’s concertos, Newton’s calculus, Douglass’s autobiographies, all have great intrinsic worth. I am not arguing for a crude instrumentalism to every bit of knowledge; nor am I saying that every fact has to fit in place and serve a concrete function. That sort of thinking suits a mechanical view of the world long since demolished by science and common sense. There is