Preface: A Taste for Talk

Over the past decade and a half, I’ve had the opportunity to have many public conversations about a wide range of subjects that tickled my intellectual fancy and captured the social imagination, from politics to sports, and religion to rap music. My vocation as a scholar took off just as the phenomenon of the black public intellectual was being celebrated or scorned in august publications and academic circles. Two years out of graduate school, in 1995, I found my face and work featured in a widely circulated New Yorker magazine essay that also explored the scholarship of bell hooks, Cornel West, and Derrick Bell. As the youngest member of this group of public intellectuals, I’d written only two books—one a collection of scholarly essays in cultural criticism and the other a study of the cultural renaissance and intellectual appeal of Malcolm X. I was humbled and amazed to be counted in their number, and I have worked eagerly and diligently since to justify my standing as a scholar interested in exploring complex ideas in public.

I learned early that such a desire is often frowned on by many scholars in the academy. Writing in an intelligent but clear fashion for the broad public is seen by many academics as beneath their profession or, much worse, as betraying the scholarly guild. But I didn’t become a scholar simply to impress other scholars. Because I hadn’t pursued higher education until I was twenty-one—I was a teen father who lived for three years on welfare before enrolling in college—I was much more mature and focused in my academic plans. My intellectual vocation drew from my wish to use learning as a springboard for public conversation that would ultimately make a difference to folk beyond the ivory tower.

Then too, becoming an ordained minister at about the same time that I started my formal studies meant that I never saw the academy as the only means to tell stories, challenge myths, and share learning. The pulpit had been open to me as a means of wrestling with truth and faith, and as a way to express my desire to not only study the world but, in my small way, change it as well. And because I’d been writing speeches and delivering them in public since I was eleven years old—when I entered a local oratorical contest sponsored by the Detroit Optimist Club—I had a keen appreciation for the power of the spoken word to inspire human beings to deeper thought and higher purpose. Beyond the mechanics of good speech and communication, I reveled in the sheer delight of oral expression: the beauty of speech, the sensuousness of words, and the sacred sway of rhetoric in the mouth of a master.

I yearned to grasp hold of both the great poets and writers I encountered—from Alfred Lord Tennyson and Abraham Lincoln, to James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison—and the great oral technicians who lit my path to the majesty of the spoken word, including my pastor, Dr. Frederick Sampson, and the legendary Detroit lawyer, Kenneth Cockrel, to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. From Sampson and King I learned the soaring song of intelligent and passionate sermonizing: speechmaking and homily-giving as the art of rhetorical transaction with God and human beings. From Cockrel and Malcolm X I learned that speech could be forensic and empirical: a means to prove and persuade, to argue a case, and to state facts ordered by reason and morality. In this mode, conversation, debate, and dialogue are supreme means of communication.

It is the latter mode that makes up the book you hold in your hand. I have had the privilege of engaging in stimulating public conversation with a broad range of interlocutors for nearly two decades. A lot of these conversations have taken place in university halls, in religious institutions, in public meeting halls, on lecture stages, and on television and radio. I’ve had the chance to speak with professors and pundits, spokespersons and leaders, journalists and actors, comics and commissioners, artists and activists, and with Jews, Latinos, and all sorts of black and white folk.

The big issue that unites the conversations, dialogues, and debates presented in these pages is race: how it is conceived; how it is expressed; how it is lived; how it confers power; how it undermines social stability; how it ruins or revives lives; how it is embraced and discarded. As you’ll read here, my vocation as a public intellectual has taken me from the halls of the United States Senate to the stage of major political organizations, from sanctuaries to studios. I have had the chance to break bread with political comrades and go to the mat with ideological foes. But I’ve also disagreed at points with colleagues who share my broad worldview, while striking occasional accord with figures at the opposite end of the political continuum.

These conversations, dialogues, and debates on America’s Great Problem are among the most memorable encounters I’ve had in my public intellectual vocation so far. They are more than the record of speech in search of truth and change; they are the imprint of talk meant to alter perception and sway thinking while illuminating the moral and intellectual paths down which such rhetoric can travel. Some say that talk is cheap; I say that talk is one of the most precious means we have to tap the roots of our democracy while expanding the minds that define its substance. In this spirit, I offer these words as a witness to hope—to the belief that wise words are better than wicked ways. I believe that disagreement in speech and working out our differences in word and in the world are better than hate or war. In the end, talking really is better than killing.