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Over those same years, I've also cultivated a role for myself as a movement intellectual. However small my sphere of influence, however meager my share of knowledge, I share what I know and am coming to know. I read, and write, listen and discuss, and make half-baked proposals in hopes of receiving critiques, choosing, as I do, to view criticism as an ally in my lifelong battle against my own vast ignorance.

the anti-intellectualism of the social justice community is literally killing us. We need to invest in intellectuals. Rather than valorize the legitimate frustration people feel when faced with complicated ideas, we could reach for those ideas together, as though we deserve them, as though we believe ourselves to be worthy of intellectual leadership in the world.

Their ignorance persists in spite of them being extremely hard working and intelligent, and knowledgeable about many things that are hard to master, proving their capacity to learn. And why? At least in part because the gatekeepers, the leadership, choose to defend a completely understandable ignorance in order to signify that they are not among the privileged (even if, in some cases, they are), and do so in order to claim legitimacy.

Sometimes the correct message is complicated, and doesn’t sell well in the New York Times or Congress. Fair enough. People at Enough know a lot more about marketing than me. I think they’d argue that it’s more important to get attention than to get the message exactly right. Let’s say they’re right (a point I don’t necessarily concede). Here’s my advice: If you’re going to run a vulgar campaign, have the nuanced message in your back pocket for the people in the field who actually have to take action.

As I have previously said to Chris, it deeply saddens me to have read his post today and now your comment, Laura. You deride the Enough Project without understanding the complexity and depth of their work and the very committed and wonderful John Prendergast without ever having met him. How can you possibly find that fair. How do you see that helping the people of Congo. For two professors to behave in such a cruel and immature fashion is distressing and hurtful. I realize that you are not cognizant of this, but you are truly hurting yourselves in the process

Ultimately, I don’t envy the Enough Project’s position. It’s very hard to push policy on one side, while fending off allies who want you to do more on the other. I’d be willing to bet they do have that “nuanced message in the back pocket” that Chris wants, but their job isn’t to spread the nuanced message. That’s the job of academics and implementers. The Enough Project’s job is to make policy change happen. All that said, please keep criticizing them and pushing them to do better. But in the end, if you disagree with their strategic choices, you should leave academia and launch your own advocacy campaign: pick up the phone, raise the money, knock on the doors, and prove to them that a nuanced narrative can sell.

But I think there is also a problem with Bourdieu’s conception of the public role of intellectuals, one which derives from a narrowness of vision. Bourdieu felt that “doing politics means exposing oneself to a loss of authority,” allowing one’s politics to be used as a means for discounting one’s academic work.

When people decry the lack of public anthropology, I think of all my friends and colleagues who are engaging in collaborative anthropological endeavors at the local level. I believe the problem is not that these anthropologists suffer from a loss of authority, but that these local interventions are not seen as mattering as much as the op-ed pages of the major American newspapers. Anthropologists should be careful about letting the mainstream media define “the public” for us. There are many publics and the ones anthropologists are involved with matter as much, if not more, than the one inhabited by pundits and policy wonks. Still, anthropologists could do more to bridge the gap between these two worlds. Perhaps by blogging about their work so that more people are aware of it, anthropologists could bridge the gap between these two publics.

While both campaigns have clear symbolic meaning, they include larger issues like an infusion of Black theorists in the curriculum, hiring more Black professors, on-campus workers rights and more.

Culture is a product of history. Historically, under capitalism, white workers were exploited to produce commodities, but Black workers WERE commodities. So, although the oppression of Blacks is primarily economic, slavery and colonialism produced an ideological superstructure to legitimate and reinforce white supremacy in general and anti-Black racism in particular. Since all human beings have a history and culture, one of the primary means used to exclude Blacks from the Human family is to write Black people out of history.

While the colonizer uses history to deny our humanity, for us, Our Art and History is a weapon we use to cut the throat of our oppressor. The learning of history helps us to de-colonize our minds but to be clear, there is no pre-existing ‘African nation’ prior to slavery that we are attempting to reclaim. Our intent is to supplant white imposed definitions of reality with Black definitions of the world; therefore, we assert that Black or Pan African identity is principally a product of the Black Liberation Movement. Our common oppression is not what makes us African; it is our movement for freedom that give us consciousness of our identity. Therefore, we are not just acted upon but are agents of history.