Black celebrity intellectuals can become apologists for color-blind accommodation

Evidence

Randall Kennedy’s emergence as a preeminent black public intellectual dispensing his expertise on racial profiling, crime, critical race theory, youth, and racial pride in all of the major media suggest less the demise of what Edward Said calls the dominant discourse of professionalism than new indices to measure the shifting breadth and scope of academic professionalization and the willingness of its often high-profile, Ivy League inhabitants to increasingly become apologists for a color-blind discourse of accommodation. Kennedy’s apologies for racist practices, along with his ongoing attempts to comfort whites, reassuring them of the legitimacy of “rightful forms of discrimination” and urging blacks to adopt a “politics of respectability” appear endlessly in dominant media outlets. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2663 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colorblind inclusion of Black authors is a covert form of tokenism — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 85; White celebrity humanitarianism displaced Black Americans from African advocacy; Conservative critics explain away black intellectuals’ dissent as repressed self-hatred (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• High-profile black conservative intellectuals legitimize colorblind accommodationist discourse in mass media #expands (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2663