Elite-educated public intellectuals must unlearn privilege to serve pressing social issues

Evidence

What appears missing in the current work of many celebrity black public intellectuals is a model of leadership embraced by W. E. B. Du Bois later in his life, which was posited as a principle of self-critique and strategy for practical politics. Du Bois recognized that the allegedly “best” educated people, offering advice from the Olympian heights of ruling-class private institutions, are not necessarily those who are most enlightened ethically or politically. We can draw two conclusions from Du Bois’s insight. First, public intellectuals, especially those whose pedagogical journeys are largely fashioned in elite Ivy League institutions, must use their scholarship as tools in order to address the most pressing social issues of the time; but they also must be attentive to those ideas, values, and practices that they need to unlearn given their formative sojourns among the rich and the powerful. Second, such intellectuals must do more than cross those borders that separate the university from the commanding heights of the dominant media; they must also cross those boundaries that separate academically based, public intellectuals from the politics of “hopeful hope” often exhibited among cultural workers struggling in the public schools, community arts programs, social service centers, shelters for battered women, and other spheres where such intellectuals toil without the fanfare of media hype or celebrity status. Moreover, the work of being a public intellectual suggests more than offering sound bites on talk radio and television news programs; it suggests refusing the lure of self-promotion and the need to attract public attention. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2669

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Du Boisian model of public intellectual leadership as self-critique plus practical politics, contrasting it with celebrity intellectualism.
• XREF: Connects to arguments about public sphere theory — Habermas and Williams’ ‘university as public sphere’ — and critiques of the professionalization of scholarship. — connects to: Social privilege blocks access to knowledge one is unequipped to understand. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 37