John McWhorter reviews Randall Kennedy’s new book, “Sellout: The Politics of Race Betrayal,” which argues that blacks should be more careful about who they call a sellout and, at the same time, argues that many sellouts are motivated by money.
“[I]n “Sellout,” Mr. Kennedy issues a call to wield that term more thoughtfully. He is dismayed at the “appalling sloppiness” with which so many use the label, and even suggests that “errant accusers should be made to feel the pain of ostracism just as their targets do.”
“Mr. Kennedy is patient enough to devote most of “Sellout” to dignifying this kind of sandbox name-calling with sustained analysis. His main observation is that the views of most black “sellouts” can be legitimately analyzed as founded in the same concern for black uplift as the politically correct liberal orthodoxy. Just as the liberal firebrand considers himself to be doing good in calling on whites to desist in their racism and devote a Marshall Plan-style operation to saving the black poor, the black conservative who argues that poor blacks must learn to fend for themselves because no human beings have ever thrived without learning how to do so can make his argument with great love for his people.
“The notion that there are “Uncle Toms” rubbing their hands together and taking money from “the white man” is, in a word, primitive. It resembles the reasoning style of preliterate cultures, which rely on mythical archetypes and unquestioning Manichaean dichotomies as the only way to make sense of the complexities of existence within a prescientific mindset. Black Americans are surely more intellectually advanced than this, and Mr. Kennedy’s book should be taken as what it actually is: a cool, clean case against the use of a backwards epithet that discourages something black America can hardly do without — coherent and original thought.
