Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Intellectual like me...

Some years back, I was looking for a particular book on child development and was surprised not to see it in the large section of child development books at a local bookstore.

When I asked a clerk to check and see if that book was available, she checked her computer and then said that there were copies in the store right now — in the section for black writers.

I had no idea what race the author of this child development book was, and would have considered it irrelevant if I had known. But our schools and colleges have turned out millions of people steeped in the new sacred trinity of “race, class, and gender.”

I was reminded of all this recently when I noticed that my own latest book, A Man of Letters, had as its number one official classification “African-American Intellectuals.”

This book is no more about black intellectuals—I don’t even use the term “African American”—than the child development book was about race.