Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

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