Heroism and the political scientist: reflections on Richard Iton, Nick Nelson, and Hanes Walton

Abstract

Earlier this year, political scientists Hanes Walton, William “Nick” Nelson, and Richard Iton passed away. Their contributions to political science cannot be over-emphasized. In this essay I use literary critic Albert Murray (who also passed away this year) to argue their work can best be understood as heroic attempts to expand the contours of the discipline, attempts that attack “social science fiction” while simultaneously promoting a blues-inflected conception of black life.

Keywords:

• black politics
• black political thought
• Albert Murray
• political theory
• social science fiction

Notes

1. Murray writes the following about Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: A Case for National Action:Moynihan insists that his intentions were the best and perhaps they were. But the fact remains that at a time when Negroes were not only demanding freedom now as never before but were beginning to get it, Moynihan issues a quasi-scientific pamphlet that declares on the flimsiest of evidence that they are not yet ready for freedom! At a time when Negroes are demanding freedom as a constitutional right, the Moynihan Report is saying, in effect, that those who have been exploiting Negroes for years should now, upon being shown his statistics, become benevolent enough to set up a nationwide welfare program for them. Not once does he cite any Negro assets that white people might find more attractive than black subservience. Good intentions notwithstanding, Moynihan's arbitrary interpretations make a far stronger case for the Negro equivalent of Indian reservations than for Desegregation Now … . (Murray 1970, 28)

Murray makes a similar critique of Kenneth Clark's political work in the Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited program (HARYOU – one of the first of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs):The opening mongraph for HARYOU, Kenneth Clark's Youth in the Ghetto, A study in the Consequences of Powerlessness and a Blueprint for Change is a monument to social science nonsense and nonsensibility. It demonstrates again that other Americans, including most American social scientists, don't mind one bit what unfounded conclusions you draw about US Negroes, or how flimsy and questionable your statistics, or how wild your conjectures, so long as they reflect degradation. And anybody who thinks this statement is too strong, should try giving positive reasons for, say, Andrew Brimmer [first black governor of the Federal Reserve], General Davis [Benjamin O. Davis, first black general officer of the Air Force], Carl Stokes [first black mayor of Cleveland], John Johnson [publisher of Ebony and Jet and founder of Johnson publications], and see if most social scientists do not insist on negative ones, nor will their insistence be based on any celebration of the dynamics of antagonistic cooperation. (Murray 1970, 25)

2. Many Americans of African (and part-African) ancestry who are forever complaining, mostly in the vaguest of generalities, and almost always with more emotion than intellectual conviction, that their black captive forefathers were stripped of their native culture by white Americans often seem to have a conception of culture that is more abstract, romantic, and in truth, pretentious than functional. Neither African nor American culture seems ever to have been, as most polemicists perhaps unwittingly assume, a static system of racial conventions and ornaments. Culture of its very essence is a dynamic, ever accommodating, ever accumulating, ever assimilating environmental phenomenon, whose components (technologies, rituals, and artifacts) are emphasized, de-emphasized, or discarded primarily in accordance with pragmatic environmental requirements, which of course are both physical and intellectual or spiritual.

There is, to be sure, such a thing as the destruction of specific cultural configurations by barbarians and vandals. But even so, time and again history reveals examples of barbarian conquerors becoming modified and sometimes even dominated by key elements of the culture of the very same people they have suppressed politically and economically. In other words, cultural continuity seems to be a matter of competition and endurance in which the fittest elements survive regardless of the social status of those who evolved them. (Murray 1970, 180)

3. Writing about the “routine” police response to black rebellions, Murray (46) notes with what appears to be wry humor “Most police forces seem to feel that they cannot handle black disorders without super weapons!” Black radical thinkers in his estimation fell for the “fakelore of white supremacy.”

4. “Part of the failure of most Negro leaders, spokesmen, and even social technicians is that they really have been addressing themselves all these years to moral issues and not the actualities of local, state, and national power.” (Murray 1970, 61).Any number of black spokesmen who should know better have become so exhilarated with visions of a black millennium that they seemingly completely forget that secession has been tried and found unfeasible. Save your confederate money boys – the antique rates gonna rise again. White suburbanites are only moving to the outskirts of town, they're not seceding from the stock exchange, or even A&P. Nor do many rhetorical separatists seem to have investigated, or even to have heard anything at all about, life on the Indian reservations. But then neither do many seek to bother themselves in the least about such establishment-oriented nuisances as monetary stability, balance of payments, public utilities, public health facilities, social security, food and drug regulations, not to mention heavy industry, tariff, tax assessment and collection; not even a whisper about automobile tags and drivers licenses. (Murray 1970, 208)

5. Amiri Baraka's Blues People is an important exception.

6. A quick examination of the two most important political theory journals (Political Theory) reveal a bare concern with the role race plays in conceptions of citizenship, in conceptions of justice, and in conceptions of democracy and statehood. In the first twenty years of Political Theory's existence Martin Luther King Jr appears in the text a bare three times, and W.E.B. Dubois only appears twice (minus one book review).

7. Federal policy decentralized and further segregated industrial arsenals of democracy making racially exclusive white suburbs (Katznelson 2005; Sugrue 1996).

8. Nelson and Meranto's (1977) analysis of Carl Stokes' 1967 Cleveland mayoral campaign is particularly insightful, noting how the campaign “sold blackness” to black voters to get them to turn out, symbolically fusing the needs of Cleveland's black community with Stokes' election.

9. After writing a tenure letter for one scholar at a top research institution, Hanes received a letter from the chair of the department wrote Hanes a letter back thanking him for his service and noting that Walton's letter was the longest he 'd ever received for a candidate.