Somewhere in America tonight, there is a black law professor.  He is popular with his students.  Only when he receives his college alumni bulletin in the mail does he think back to what might have been.

Black law professors are different from most black Americans. The typical professor who has sworn allegiance to Critical Race Theory is not of the South. Either he was not born in the South, or, he was not raised in the South. Few critical race theorists are from the lower class or the working class.  And he or she is more likely to be married to a non-black than the typical black man or woman.

Because of these differences, black critical race theorists are removed from the thought of middle black America. I conducted a focus group last week to confirm my suspicions. The participants consisted of five African-Americans whom I did not know beforehand save for one faint acquaintance. Their jobs ranged from public school principal, charter school entrepreneur, and information technology director to a University administrator and University Assistant Vice-President of Public Relations. While the purpose of the session was to discuss black careers, I kept my ears attuned to affinity for Critical Race Theory. I remained alert to the possibility that my critiques of Critical Race Theory had missed the mark.

What I heard confirmed my intuition.

During a two-hour discussion that produced twenty-five pages of transcript, not one participant mentioned Critical Race Theory. Not one participant used the term “systemic racism.” And not one participant used the jargon of “oppression” or “liberation.”
 
What I did find might surprise critical race theorists and intellectual conservatives.
 
To a person, these individuals argued that they felt Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell were poor examples of black career success. A part of me resisted these thoughts because I can separate politics from accomplishment. My participants could not. One gentleman, with eloquence, recounted how his grandfather always said that you had to watch who you associate with because that is how you will be judged. The others nodded in agreement. They equated conservatism with being “unprincipled,” evidence that the stigma of conservative thoughts remains strong.
 
When Shelby Steele wrote about the loneliness of the “Black Conservative,” he had it right.
 
But then something else happened of great interest.
 
While one participant bemoaned the lack of resources available to support entrepreneurs, the rest of the discussion became a tribute to self-reliance. One participant talked about how he had been lucky because his parents did not raise him to Blame the Man. Another participant talked about the need to be a predator in the workplace. He urged his fellow participants at my arranged “Black Table” to not be prey. Go into the workplace as if you were a homie on the street trying to survive. Scan your landscape. Take in all the intelligence and don’t become a target. Another participant urged young blacks to be strategic in their thinking about their careers.
 
One participant challenged the rule of not airing dirty laundry before a white audience with dead-on honesty. “If you have something to say, then say it!” Everyone agreed that victimology in the black community had reached epidemic proportions. One participant related how incarceration could be linked to Blame the Man thinking.
 
These words were honest words. My participants were not performing before a radical white audience. They were not holding their tongues because tenure was on the line. They spoke truth. Sometimes, the Black Table can be a force for good.
 
African-Americans who have pledged allegiance to Critical Race Theory should take a lesson from the thoughts of ordinary black folks. Yes, the Rices and Powells of the world are considered toxic examples for young children (I do not agree but this point is not about me). And yet there are other lessons here that can enrich the writing of critical race theorists. The following are applicable pointers, points inspired by John Gardner’s classic On Becoming A Novelist:

Lesson No. 1 Verbal Sensitivity

Professor Gardner wrote that serious writers are distinguished by verbal sensitivity. Do you have a sharp ear and eye for language? My participants kept returning to the same choice of words to describe the black condition — predator versus prey, strategic thinking, unprincipled, see myself in someone’s story, failure before success, Blame the Man. If critical theorists are to tell their story in a moving way, you must give the average black person an idea rooted in the language of the common folk. W.E.B. DuBois and Jean Toomer had this gift and we remember their work to this day.
 
How many critical race theorists use the words of the clerk or the schoolteacher or the administrator in their liberation tomes?
 
Instead, we are treated to words like “identity politics,” “structural racism,” and “multiculturalism.” Returning to Gardner, “[t]he trouble with such language is not only that it is cliché (worn out, overused); but also that it is symptomatic of a crippling psychological set.” When a writer uses faddish words of the day, a writer is putting on a mask, a public mask, to distort one’s view of reality. When one makes an investment in using words du jour, you lose the ability to see reality as it is.
 
No one with a distorted view of reality can write good work.

Lesson No. 2 Accuracy and Originality of the Writer’s Eye

Gardner reminds us that “[t]he good writer sees things sharply, vividly, accurately, and selectively (that is, he chooses what’s important), not necessarily because his power of observation is by nature more acute than that of other people (though by practice it becomes so), but because he cares about seeing things clearly and getting them down effectively.”
 
If you view your writing as politics, you will write about moments and characters that represent black life as one long slog through the swamp of oppression. Or, perhaps life becomes a heated rush in the Hunt for Black Identity. Whatever.
 
The critical race theorist would scan my participants for any trace of structural racism. He or she might argue that my participants didn’t have the words for their blackness. And if my participants took offense that a radical law professor tried to misrepresent them, my critical race theorist might rejoin that they are “lost Negroes.”
 
As you can see, the critical race theorist is at a disadvantage. Whereas my participants could tell it like it is, the critical race theorist is trapped in a derivative trap of his or her own making. And the more the critical race theorist strains to make sense of the real black condition, the more inaccurate is the prose. The greater the abstraction, the more stale is the writing.
 
“The writer with a truly accurate eye “ like my participants, can be concrete. The truth becomes a friend, not an adversary.

Lesson No. 3 Intelligence for Storytelling

Telling a story well means you create a vivid, continuous dream for the reader. You don’t play jargon games with the reader. You don’t test the reader by requiring that he bring some special knowledge to the table. If you want to be successful, you have to leave the reader with a sense of life’s complexity. 
 
For example, I write honest essays to the extent that I can. I aim to capture life as it is, even if we find life to be discomforting or disturbing. I have written about young and gifted black students that should say no to law schools. I have written about the truths within my own family, a black family distinguished only by our independence of thought and bemusement at the Hunt for Black Identity. I have written about old friends who have chosen extremism over artful writing.
 
I leave you with this story.
 
I know a black genius.
 
During his college days, he ranked head and shoulders above anyone else in his department. He regaled hall mates with his brilliance. I felt slow-witted and dim in his presence. For him, pushing the thoughts of Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato to their limits came as naturally as waking up in the morning or riding a bicycle. He had the authority of talent married to integrity. At his most inspired moments, one felt the presence of an intellectual artist.
 
And then an odd thing happened one year.
 
My brilliant friend lost the ability to write. I could not understand why. At first, I thought that he was so smart that he needed time to gather his insights into the human condition. In the meanwhile, I cranked out forgettable commerce clause articles. Then, he became anxious about his inability to write. His girlfriend complained about his playing around and not writing. It didn’t make sense to me. Why couldn’t he write?
 
The tenure clock continued to tick and tock, tick and tock.
 
One day while on my balcony, I understood. The very honesty that had made him a master in college did not serve him well in the political world of Critical Race Theory. He knew what he wanted to write. He knew what needed to be said. The inner censor held him back. “You can’t write that! What will they think?” “You can’t go there! How will you explain it?”
 
In the early 1990s, he reached a fateful decision. He decided to kill the intellectual artist within. He made his pact with the (insert the word of your choice). To my raised eyebrow, he reached out to an aging white radical at a top law school for “guidance.” In doing so, he gave up the one thing that made him great.
 
If I am speaking “out of school,” forgive me old friend.
 
We all should mourn the death of an artist. All Americans need more candor and honesty in their law professors. We all are diminished when the truly great settle for the derivative.
 
Somewhere in America tonight, there is a black law professor. He is popular with his students. By now, he has forgotten the old doubts. He can spout derivative musings with the best of them. Only when he receives his college alumni bulletin in the mail does he think back to what might have been. And then even the words of the old Negro intellectual do not bring him solace:

People pay for what they do
And still more for what they
Have allowed themselves to become
And they pay for it very simply
By the lives they lead.
– James Baldwin