Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Abstract

No series of analyses, papers, discussions, and books will stop the slaughter in our streets, or children from having children, or men from beating up women. The role of intellectuals is limited; excessive expectations will only produce disappointment. But that limited role is crucial, and fears of disappointment should not serve as an excuse for continuing along the current course. (Rivers, 1995, p. 18) Some 25 years ago, Edward Said claimed that "the world is more crowded than it ever has been with (. . . ) intellectuals" (Said, 1996, p. 15). Yet Black intellectuals continue to be sidelined, marginalized, and ignored in public discourse. As Jeffrey Watts contends, there has been a "longstanding racist marginalization of African American intellectuals within mainstream American intellectual discourses" (Watts, 2004, p. 2). However, this "came under intense attack during the 1960s and 1970s, at least within black intellectual circles" (Watts, 2004, p. 2). In recent decades, this attack has slowly permeated into the wider/Whiter discourse in the United States, but has by no means been fully accomplished yet.Bolstering the Black archive is a crucial task to allow new generations of scholars to draw on a wider set of contributions from key Black intellectuals. Recovering Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III's interventions for our days is an important contribution to this task.Debates about the causes of Black suffering in America usually fall into one of two camps. According to Cornel West in Nihilism in Black America, "liberal structuralists" focus on the structural and societal constraints facing Black Americans while "conservative behaviorists" focus on the decline of the Protestant ethic and a growing crisis of anomie (West, 1994, p. 13). While Rivers falls most clearly in the latter group, his combined attention to structural constraints and individual morality places him idiosyncratically in relation to the two camps. As West urges, the "debate must go far beyond the liberal and conservative positions" (West, 1994, p. 12). Rivers' essay provides an important contribution to going beyond this dichotomy. I develop three main lines of argument from within Rivers' thought. First, that he seeks to bridge the disconnect between intellectuals and social struggle. Second, that he envisages a role of the intellectual between the vanguard activist intellectual and disinterested scholastic academics-resembling Boaventura de Sousa Santos' idea of the rear-guard intellectual. Third, that Rivers provides the basis for distinguishing between two typesThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.