High-profile black conservative intellectuals legitimize colorblind accommodationist discourse in mass media

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the current chapter’s themes on public intellectuals; also to Said on professionalism borrowed from the intellectual-history canon.
• SEED: A piece on how ‘politics of respectability’ functions as a media-favored alternative to structural critique, comparing Kennedy’s framing to historical Booker T. Washington arguments.
• ADDENDUM: Could support an essay on how institutional platforms shape which racial critiques gain visibility — analogous to how sumptuary norms signal class/identity.
• QUESTION: Is the colorblind accommodationist positioning of conservative black intellectuals a stable structural feature of media economies or a contingent phase?