© Columbia University Press
Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era
April, 2008
Cloth, 272 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13964-9
$24.95
/ £14.95
"Baker succeeds in making his case . . . How fitting that Baker offers not just words here but action too." — Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
"Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era is a vernacular broadside, brave and funny by turns. Houston A. Baker Jr. has written as cantankerous and eloquent a defense of the legacies of the civil rights movement as one is likely to find anywhere. With relentless irony, he bares the narcissism, trickery, and entrepreneurial doublethink of neocon America, especially its black representatives. Neither do the black academostars of the Ivy League escape his wrath, sharing as they do the neocon analysis that the agony of being black in America has to do with 'pathological' behavior rather than brutal structural inequalities. An urgent and persuasive book." — Timothy Brennan , University of Minnesota, and author of Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right
"Who speaks in the interest of the black majority? Houston A. Baker Jr. scathingly argues that too many African American public intellectuals speak in profit-generating self-interest, ignoring the real challenges that confront African Americans in the twenty-first century in favor of a facile condmenation of the masses. If Martin Luther King Jr. or W.E.B. Du Bois is the yardstick, Baker suggests, too many don’t measure up Who pe. Some of these truths are hard to read, and some of them are arguable, but Baker’s Betrayal is an important, and absorbing, meditation." — Julianne Malveaux, president, Bennett College for Women