The Scholar and The Intellectual
Only rarely is dividing the world into binaries not a daft pursuit. How many times do the great black and whites of the world turn to gray with a closer look? Or, more apt, how similar good and evil appear in the dark, only for the light of day to reveal just how wrong we were about which is which? Yet it is easy to create a great divide between academics. Hidden behind a disguise of pedagogy, two camps remain at war, forever diametrically opposed to one another. The scholars and the intellectuals. Which is to say, the school of ease versus the school of burden.
The Scholar
Despite the ever-growing love of such a title, most self-proclaimed “scholars” care little of the word’s true meaning. Instead, they opt to call themselves by a name that imbues them with the most privilege, all the while, ironically, the meaning becomes self-fulfilling. The great poet Scott-Heron once asked, “what does Webster say about soul?” Here, I ask you what does Webster say about scholarship?
Entomology tells us the English word for scholar can be traced to the Old English scolere or “student,” from the Late Latin scholaris, “of a school.” Yet traced to its origin, “scholar” comes from the Greek scholastes, meaning “one who lives at ease.” And isn’t that what a scholar really is. Someone who privileges the ease of academia over the responsibility of knowledge. Someone who seeks to know rather than to understand. Someone so obviously removed from the great problems of the world they’ve spent their lives trying to reckon that they have become numb to them.
What does the brilliant sociologist’s dissertation, focusing on how hard it is to be this minority or that, then amount to? Does the newly graduated early childhood educator take what they have learned and go into the inner city to revamp elementary schools unlike their own? What of the all too clever gerontologist? Are they too eager to discuss new ways filial piety manifests itself to help the neglected aging population in their own city?
It seems that to be a scholar is the coward’s way to prestige, privileging elitism and self-aggrandizement over social action and the betterment of your fellow man. For it is a proverb, having been written, “A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.” Leaving scholars not only cowardly but foolish, hiding in ivory towers haphazardly disguised as libraries and lecture halls. Step away from their lecterns and repent or continue down the path of hubris, the choice remains theirs alone.
Programs that focus on teaching minority youth like to proclaim their goal is to create Black and Hispanic scholars. If you ask me, no such thing exists. To be a scholar is to be at ease. To find refuge in academia or to gain knowledge in time spent free of worry. And believe me when I say, black and brown students worry every day. Therefore, if my life is not easy and I do not see myself reflected in my curriculum, how can I be a scholar?
From the streets to the suburbs, no child of color is safe from the ever-present dangers surrounding the color line. The “tracks” that tear cities in two, diving the haves from the have nots, split the consciousness of a black child, as Dubious would suggest, into double. We have been written out of white pedagogy entirely. A pedagogy that claims to teach to the lowest common denominator while factoring out the black subject. Schools invalidate black and brown intellectuals, let alone anyone that doesn’t conform to white standards of intelligence. Moreover, not only are these students not allowed to find refuge in their curriculum, but their lives outside of school are filled with the mortal fear that comes with living in a body too far from whiteness to be safe. You expect then, these students, these forgotten youth, to seek out higher education in exchange for going tens of thousands of dollars in debt? Again, the foolishness of scholars.
Even those like myself, who have pursued degrees, can speak to just how much black subjects are invalidated, underrepresented, or asked to speak for their entire race. Even if we wanted to, academia refuses to let us be at ease. But what does this say of the intellectual, however? The diametric opposite of the scholar?
The Intellectual
Entomology tells us the English word for intellectual can be traced to the Latin intellectus, “comprehension” or “understanding.” An intellectual is born from the pursuit of understanding, the will to learn, grow, and to truly comprehend. Intellectuals seek to reason and to use their faculties to help others. For black and brown students, this is what we must teach them to be. Rather than locking themselves away to pursue research that will only be read by their peers, we must instill in minority youth the want to take knowledge and use it to enact change. This is the pedagogy of liberation. The only pedagogy that really applies to the oppressed.
What Dubious would call “The Talented Tenth” or Hansberry the “Young, Gifted and Black,” I call the black intellectual. Those willing not only to reason, but to reason with purpose. Students concerned with the spirit of the divine that underlies knowledge. The seemingly innate force that allows those with it to inherit what is nothing less than supernatural power. Power that bursts forth from the repository of those that came before and the wise that will come after.
As Historically Black Colleges and Universities are dying out, we must ask ourselves why. Because they are teaching to create scholars. Yet black and brown communities can not survive with only scholars at the helm. They must be, and have always been, led by intellectuals. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Lorrain Hansberry, and W.E.B. Dubois provide solid enough examples. We must stop thinking in terms of scholars, content to fill publications but not minds. We must build communities of intellectuals instead. People devoted to really understanding what is at play in their world. And likewise devoted to changing it.
