When the Colonized Join the Colonizers to form a New Global Rainbow Coalition Series Part 1
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Harvard’s Three-Ring Circus, Starring the Minstrel Scholar, Roland Fryer
General Gordon Baker Jr. was a 24-year-old student activist at Detroit’s Wayne State University when he received a letter from the local draft board in 1965. He responded in writing that he had no interest in fighting in Vietnam but would gladly go to war
“when the call is made to free South Africa, when the call is made to liberate Latin America from the United Fruit Co., Kaiser, and Alcoa Aluminum Co., and from Standard Oil; when the call is made to jail the exploiting Brahmins in India in order to destroy the Caste System; when the call is made to free the black delta areas of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina; when the call is made to FREE 12TH STREET HERE IN DETROIT!”
Unsurprisingly, the draft board declined to give Baker a weapon of any kind, but his reference to 12th street was prophetic, for that was ground zero of Detroit’s 1967 uprising that erupted after the vice squad raided an after-hours speakeasy known colloquially as a “blind pig.” Nearly 17,000 police officers and soldiers patrolled African American neighborhoods during the siege, firing indiscriminately into nearby homes. The 46th Division of the National Guard, for example, fired 155,576 rounds of M-1 ammunition over a span of six days.
When finally the smoke had cleared, 43 people lay either dead or dying in what was the nation’s deadliest insurrection until the uprising in Los Angeles 25 years later after jurors acquitted four white police officers for assaulting a Black motorcyclist, Rodney King.
Ironically, Baker was not available to answer the call to liberate 12th Street in Detroit. He was in Cleveland when police raided the blind pig and arrested for violating curfew immediately upon his return. Still, he observed that during Detroit’s insurrection, patrol officers and the National Guard would only allow African Americans past their barricades if they were injured or heading to work. Said Baker, who would go on to co-found the League of Revolutionary Black Workers:
“That let us know that our only value to the system was as workers.”
That was certainly true in 1967 when Detroit’s Big Three automakers were the engines of America’s global economic dominance. But the country has endured a sharp reversal of fortune since the Reagan White House began to hollow out the manufacturing sector in an attempt to lower wages, bust labor unions and silence radical Black voices such as Baker’s, particularly on the shop floor.
The policies that we today know as neoliberalism—austerity, privatization, deregulation and relaxed currency controls– did in fact succeed in shrinking employees’ paychecks that were gobbling up more than half of national income as recently as 50 years ago. But in cutting wages, investors killed the goose that laid the golden egg, or, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, bit their nose to spite their face by slicing deeply into the consumer buying power that is the source of their obscene profits.
Along with smoke and mirrors, debt is all that sustains today’s post-industrial economy. You needn’t be an economist nor a communist to understand the U.S. as an airplane that has shut off its engines in mid-air; it is only a matter of time before it crashes.
In his 1971 book, The Choice, the Black journalist Samuel Yette argued that in the minds of the white ruling class, Blacks had been rendered obsolete by America’s Golden Age of industrialism that was just beginning its postwar descent.
“The wood is all hewn, the water all drawn, the cotton all picked…and only a few shoes remain to be shined.”
But in the ensuing years, an African American managerial class has reinvented itself as a character witness for a kleptocratic ethno-nationalist project that is on its last legs. Producing neither cars nor cotton nor anything of material value, the westernmost outpost of European settler colonialism no longer has any use for Blacks other than as spokespeople for its discredited ideas. What was once a smattering of African American petit bourgeois merchants who ran interference for monopoly capitalism has expanded into a cottage industry of minstrels who are willing to defend the indefensible long after the horse has left the barn.
Within that context of Western exceptionalism—the America that never was yet must always be, to paraphrase Langston Hughes– there is no bigger fraud in the Academy today than Harvard’s shucking-and-jiving, skinning-and-grinning, chicken-and-butter biscuit-eating economics professor Roland Fryer, who attributes the nation’s yawning racial achievement gaps to genetic differences in intellect between African Americans and whites. That is, of course, contradicted by the Human Genome project and reams of peer-reviewed research that show no significant racial differences on IQ tests when prenatal care is accounted for. (In fact, when differences have been detected, they tend to be small and favor African American babies.)
Emblematic of his “scholarship,” Fryer authored a controversial 2019 paper that found that police were no more likely to kill African Americans than they were whites, rejecting myriad databases that clearly show Blacks are three times more likely, on average, to be killed by law-enforcement than are whites.
In 2005, a 27-year-old Fryer told the New York Times:
“I basically want to figure out where blacks went wrong. One could rattle off all the statistics about blacks not doing so well. You can look at the black-white differential in out-of-wedlock births or infant mortality or life expectancy. Blacks are the worst-performing ethnic group on SAT’s. Blacks earn less than whites. They are still just not doing well, period.”
Continuing he said:
“I want to have an honest discussion about race in a time and a place where I don’t think we can. Blacks and whites are both to blame. As soon as you say something like, ‘Well, could the black-white test-score gap be genetics?’ everybody gets tensed up. But why shouldn’t that be on the table?”
In his fawning for Mister Charlie, Fryer is at once a farcical character and a leading figure in a movement to marry knowledge production to politics in a desperate attempt to restore the ruling class’ reputation while the nation grapples with a deepening moral and financial catastrophe that is entirely of the oligarchs’ making. In this way, the U.S. harkens back to the Dark Ages when the Church or a royal family manipulated scientific inquiry to rubberstamp its legitimacy. Fryer’s profession was, in fact, created to counter hot takes from the British satirist Jonathan Swift, whose portrayal of the aristocracy as monstrous hoarders stood in stark contrast to the theories of overpopulation and scarcity proffered a century later by an early economist, Thomas Malthus.
According to a 2019 New York Times’ article, university tax records revealed that Harvard paid Fryer $600,000 in 2016 to put his thumb on the scientific scale to tilt the balance of power in favor of the rich and powerful. Consider, as one example, Fryer’s authorship of a ridiculous paper trafficking in discredited genetics theories. The 2005 Times’ magazine article continued:
“Glaeser and Fryer, along with David M. Cutler, another Harvard economist, are the authors of a paper that traffics in one form of genetic theorizing. It addresses the six-year disparity in life expectancy for blacks versus whites, arguing that much of the gap is due to a single factor: a higher rate of salt sensitivity among African Americans, which leads to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, stroke and kidney disease.
Fryer’s notion that there might be a genetic predisposition at work was heightened when he came across a period illustration that seemed to show a slave trader in Africa licking the face of a prospective slave. The ocean voyage from Africa to America was so gruesome that as many as 15 percent of the Africans died en route, mainly from illnesses that led to dehydration. A person with a higher capacity for salt retention might also retain more water and thus increase his chance of surviving.
So it may have been that a slave trader would try to select, with a lick to the cheek, the “saltier” Africans. Whether selected by the slavers or by nature, the Africans who did manage to survive the voyage — and who then formed the gene pool of modern African-Americans — may have been disproportionately marked by hypertension. Cutler, a pre-eminent health economist, admits that he thought Fryer’s idea was “absolutely crazy” at first. (Although the link between the slave trade and hypertension had been raised in medical literature, even Cutler wasn’t aware of it.) But once they started looking at the data, the theory began to seem plausible.”
Fryer’s theories are as intellectually bereft as those of Samuel Cartwright, the antebellum physician who coined the term “drapetomania” in 1851 to describe as “insane” enslaved Africans who tried to escape the bondage that was their “natural state.” This strange malady could only be cured, of course, with the most brutal beatings.
Fryer’s notion that slave traders determined salt retention by licking them is equally as ass-backwards; the sweat of Africans with a higher capacity for salt retention would taste less salty, not more. And more vitally, the empirical evidence is clear that African Americans’ hypertension is mostly tied to social determinants of health that are wholly the product of a byzantine network of racially discriminatory systems. In her toolkit intended to help medical professionals address their racial biases, Margaret Flowers, a physician and activist in Baltimore wrote:
“Racial disparities in health outcomes are not based on biological factors but on systemic ones – for example, the environment in which a person lives and their access to medical care.
A study of over 3 million veterans treated in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) demonstrates this. While in the general population, black people have a lower life expectancy and are two to three times more likely to die of heart disease than white people, black veterans in the VHA have a lower death rate and less heart disease than white veterans. In the VHA system, a type of single payer healthcare system, all people have the same access to care and it is provided for free.”
Fryer’s path to Harvard is the kind of “up-by-your-bootstraps” story that white liberals love, a paean to downtrodden Blacks who need only a few alms and some sage advice to transcend their hardscrabble beginnings for a lucrative career helping defend the settlers’ colonial project from criticism. As Fryer tells it, his biological parents abandoned him, and similar to 2Pac presumably, he grew up on the mean Florida streets of Daytona Beach with his “drug family,” a band of young street criminals and crack dealers. Most now are either dead or incarcerated while Fryer—who he is careful to note did not himself deal drugs and only hustled fake purses from a car trunk—had guidance from his grandmother who instilled in him the work ethic that is apparently absent from so many African Americans’ lives. Not only has Fryer found riches and redemption as a swarthy subcontractor for white supremacy, but an exalted status as a scholar: in 2007, New York City’s Schools Chancellor Joel Klein hired him as Chief Equality Officer.
Moreover, his willingness to tap dance for Mr. Charlie has insulated him from a scandal that would almost certainly derail the career of less audacious Uncle Toms. Eleven years after becoming the youngest African American ever to earn tenure at Harvard, the university placed him on administrative leave in July of 2019 after an internal investigation found that he had created a hostile work environment and engaged in “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” against at least five women who worked for him over the span of a decade at a university research lab. The university’s student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, urged the administration to fire him.
Redolent of Adam Clayton Powell’s admonition that “Harvard has ruined more Negroes than bad whiskey,” Fryer is part of a generation of Black intellectuals, journalists, and politicians who are protected and paid handsomely to essentially dishonor both your lying eyes and the ideas promoted by authentic, working- class intellectuals such as General Baker, who died in 2014, or credentialed scholars such as Anthony Monteiro or Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Included in the list of minstrel intellectuals are the economist Glen Loury; the linguist John McWhorter; quisling politicians such as New Jersey’s U.S. Senator Cory Booker and Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser; and my former Washinton Post colleagues, the retired columnist Eugene Robinson—who claimed, absurdly, that the Biden administration was powerless to stop Israel’s wanton slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza– and former Los Angeles Times Executive Editor Kevin Merida, who banned reporters who signed an open letter critical of Israel’s massacre of Palestinians from covering the genocide on the patently ridiculous grounds that the letter represented an ethics violation.
And one of the clearest examples of the protection afforded nattering Negro nabobs of neoliberalism is the former NBA player, Sacramento Mayor and alleged pedophile Kevin Johnson, who has been accused multiple times of sexually assaulting or harassing teenage girls and young women. In 2009, Inspector General Gerald Walpin, investigating Johnson for misuse of federal funds at a charter school he founded, uncovered evidence of sexual improprieties. But when he referred the case to federal prosecutors, he was fired by Johnson’s BFF Barack Obama, representing one of the few times in U.S. history that a white man has taken the fall for blowing the whistle on a Black man.
Johnson’s political career is diametrically opposed to that of the late Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Barry whose redistributive policies created more Black wealth than arguably any mayor in U.S. history yet was arrested by the FBI for the flimsiest reasons; the NBA guard Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, a devout Muslim, who was blackballed for refusing to stand for the national anthem; and General Baker, who was one of 4,000 white and Black workers who walked off the job at a Detroit area Dodge plant on May 2, 1968, to protest dangerous speedups on the assembly line. A cadre of Polish women actually instigated the strike, but the plant’s management blamed Baker and another African American Bennie Tate, firing both men but reinstating all the white employees who participated in the wildcat strike.
Chrysler blacklisted Baker from working in the auto industry and although he circumvented the blacklist with the use of a fake ID, the wildcat strike sparked the formation of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, or DRUM.
Unlike the Black Panthers who centered their work on college campuses and among the lumpenproletariat, DRUM focused on the point of production, demanding, among other things, an end to racism in labor unions, a retooling of the employee grievance process, a rollback of plant speed-ups and constantly expanding quotas, and, rather innovatively, the reinvestment of auto workers’ union dues in the ghetto.
These ideas excited Black workers in ways that Fryer’s Vichy scholarship never could, inseminating a proliferation of alphabet-soup mutinies nationwide, beginning with the organization of the city’s General Motors Cadillac plant, or CADRUM, the Ford assembly line, or FRUM, a UPS chapter, or UPRUM, the Eldon Avenue plant, or ELRUM. Eventually, the shopfloor rebellions crisscrossed the continental 48, springing up at auto plants in California, New Jersey, and Georgia, public transit systems in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, the American Federation of Teachers, the U.S. Steelworkers union, and the Building Service Employees International Union. In 1969, Baker joined with a handful of other Black nationalists to form an umbrella group, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, to keep track of all the bees in the hive.
Like the Panthers, DRUM could not withstand the government’s crackdown on radical Black organizations, nor the internal strife that it ginned up. But if DRUM taught us anything it is that the ideas that best inform Black liberation will come from the hood and not Harvard, and from organic intellectuals like Baker and not snake oil salesmen like Fryer.
What we have also learned from the era that birthed organizations like DRUM is that any successful liberation movement must reckon with traitors such as Fryer if it has any hopes of succeeding. Post-colonial governments in South Africa and Mozambique held tribunals in which victims confronted informants and others who collaborated with their oppressors, immunizing from prosecution those who confessed their treacherous misdeeds in full.
Other countries found redemption in violence, whether by firing squads as in post-revolutionary Cuba or through street justice. In a 2003 Washington Post article, I wrote of Argentina:
“Every now and again…someone would spot him in a nightclub or a bar, and begin to jeer. In no time at all, an entire mob would join in, chanting ‘murderer, murderer’ until Alfredo Astiz had no choice but to flee.
Perhaps no Argentine is as reviled by his countrymen as Astiz, the blond, blue-eyed, navy captain who was implicated in the kidnapping and murder of women, children and nuns during the horrific betrayal that was Argentina’s ‘dirty war,’ the seven-year purge of an estimated 30,000 suspected dissidents by a military junta that seized power in 1976.
Women have spit on him. Men have chased him with crowbars. While he was waiting for a bus a few years ago in the Patagonian city of Bariloche, Argentine media described in a well-known case, a man walked calmly up to him and in a conversational tone asked:
‘Are you Astiz?’
‘Yes I am,’ Astiz answered.
The man punched him twice in his face and kicked him in his groin before Astiz ran away. Every year since, on the anniversary of the assault, the townspeople hold a block party in the exact spot where the punches were thrown, to celebrate the humiliation of Astiz.
‘He is our Judas,’ said Hebe Bonafini, president of Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo, a human rights group. Bonafini’s two sons disappeared 26 years ago. ‘In Argentina, we see our torturers every day. The devil lives next door.’
The retribution that Argentines meted out to Astiz mirrors Black Chicagoans response to an African American informant named William O’Neal, who provided FBI agents with a layout of the Panthers’ westside Chicago headquarters, and slipped a sedative into Fred Hampton’s meal the evening before the fatal December 4, 1969 raid. The late managing editor of Black Agenda Report, Bruce Dixon, a Chicago native, told me that for years someone would spot O’Neal in public, and shout:
“That’s him! O’Neal! Get him!
At which point either a foot chase or a beatdown would commence.
O’Neal would eventually end up committing suicide but the FBI essentially deputized O’Neal— who had gone on a joy ride in a stolen car and agreed to spy for federal agents to avoid doing hard time– in its conspiracy to assassinate the reputation, or the body, of the Black militancy that is the tip of the proletarian spear in America. For O’Neal’s “uniquely valuable services which he rendered over the past several months,” the agency paid him a $200 bonus.
The price has gone up substantially, but that is, in a sense, identical to the deal that Fryer and his ilk have cut for themselves.
THE TIMELINE
How we got Here:
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2025
Columbia University complies with the Trump administration’s demands to put the School of Middle Eastern Studies under receivership.
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2005
In a keynote speech at Harvard University President Lawrence Summers asserts that innate gender differences largely explained women’s underrepresentation in science fields.
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1971
A Virginia lawyer, Lewis J. Powell, writes a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, exhorting big business to purge leftists from university teaching positions.
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1970
A second attempt by the University of California’s Board of Regents to fire Angela Davis from her UCLA teaching job fails.
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1968
Black Student Union leads protests at San Francisco State University that produce the College of Ethnic Studies.