Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era by Houston A. Baker, Jr.


this is through breaking up comfortable arrangements that prevent change and
accountability; and soon enough, new arrangements of that sort will develop
and it will be time for another change. Meanwhile, we need to keep plugging
away on the harder and more important jobs that will make a real and last-
ing difference.

CHARLES L. GLENN
Boston University

Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the
Civil Rights Era by Houston A. Baker, Jr. New York, Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2008. 272 pp. $24.95.

Houston A. Baker of Vanderbilt University, one of the most talented and in-
sightful scholars of this era, has researched and written a brilliant analysis of
the works of leading post-Civil Rights Movement African American public in-
tellectuals. Employing a well-known methodology of textual analysis of the
published tracts and tomes of these public intellectuals, Baker offers persua-
sive and compelling evidentiary arguments and findings that this current crop
of public intellectuals has betrayed and abandoned the ideals and goals of the
Martin Luther King, Jr.-led Civil Rights Movement.

To attain his objectives, Baker begins his book with an autobiographical
account of his early years in “Little Africa,” in Louisville, Kentucky. But he
concludes from this point of departure, the limitations and weaknesses of such
an approach, which is currently the centerpiece of the works by African Amer-
ican conservatives, neoconservatives, and centrists. He reveals that one cannot
project, as these current public intellectuals do, from individual personal
journeys to the black majority (African American masses) without suffering
all types of logical and epistemic difficulties. Yet none of these post-Civil
Rights public intellectuals deal with this critical fault and the manner in which
this critical fault undercut and undermined their political prescriptions for the
black majority.

Having illuminated the epistemic and logical problems inherent in the auto-
biographical approach, this book creates a model for the African American pub-
lic intellectual that is centered in Martin Luther King, Jr. and to an extent W.E.
B. Dubois and shows that this model sought to elevate the black masses and
not just the black elites and/or “Talented Tenth.” Unlike the current crop of
public intellectuals, Baker’s model of King focuses not on the “I Have A
Dream” speech but upon King’s letter from the Birmingham jail and on his
struggle with the Memphis sanitation workers. This generates a different
and a more-focused King, one committed to the rise of the black majority.
And with this model of King as a public intellectual, Baker is now ready to
compare and contrast this current crop of so-called public intellectuals with
this formal, essential, and paramount model. None of the earlier critics and

192 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY



evaluators of these current public intellectuals have been so astute and careful
in creating a standard model.

But Baker does not lump all of these conservatives and neoconservatives
together in one category, as many of their critics do. He divides them into
two categories: centrists, that is, those African American scholars at Ivy
League universities, like Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, and Michael Dyson,
who always end up on both sides of the same public issue simultaneously,
thereby trivializing it; and neoconservatives, that is, those who argue that race
no longer matters and that blacks are now themselves their own worst problem.
The latter group includes Shelby Steele, Stephen Carter, John McWhorter, and
others of their ilk. And despite their differences, both groups, when Baker com-
pares and contrasts them with the model of King and DuBois, end up betraying
the Civil Rights Movement and the black majority in their communities.

To date, no other book is so careful in its conceptualization, theoretical for-
mulation, organizational and structural characterization, and textual analysis of
the works of these current black public intellectuals. Thus, I highly recommend
this exceptional work of scholarship, for it is worth the price of the ticket.

HANES WALTON, JR.
University of Michigan

Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions: Public Recognition of Sexual
Diversity in Canada and the United States by David Rayside. Toronto,
University of Toronto Press, 2008. 388 pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $35.00.

American scholars too infrequently avail themselves of the unique opportuni-
ties for comparison provided by Canada, a country shaped by so many similar
historical, cultural, legal, geographic, and demographic circumstances as the
United States. Much of the directly comparative work that does exist has been
done by Canadian political scientists such as David Rayside of the University
of Toronto, who extends this body of work in a new direction by studying dif-
ferent patterns of “sexual diversity” in the two countries.

This volume is stronger on depth than breadth; indeed, many issue areas
that might well be considered forms of “queer inclusion,” including repeal of
sodomy laws, anti-discrimination laws, military service, and hate crimes, are
discussed only in passing. What Rayside does provide is a thorough compar-
ative analysis of three major areas: recognition of same-sex partnerships; the
parenting rights of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals and couples;
and reforms within schools to incorporate LGB issues. On these three topics,
there can have been few major developments in either country that Rayside
neglects to cover, giving this book at times the quality of a sophisticated ref-
erence work as well as an impressive work of analysis.

The divergence between the two countries is clearest with regard to recog-
nition of same-sex partnerships. While the issue has polarized the United States

BOOK REVIEWS | 193