On Mon, 21 Mar 2011, Doug Henwood wrote:
> West performs a caricature of a black preacher for a mostly white
> audience that eats it up. It'd be like Chomsky speaking with a Yiddish
> accent, like someone out of I.B. Singer.
He does exactly the same thing before 100% black audiences. And it's not a caricature, it's well in the mainstream of black preaching mannerisms. Turn on BET Sunday morning and you'll see lots of examples of exactly these mannerisms to exactly the same degree. Or Farrakhan for that matter. And he's not faking it, it's natural to him. He came out of the black church and his first two academic appointments were the Union Theological Seminary and Yale Divinity School. He takes theology quite seriously. It's the subject in which he's most original.
I think the problem here is that standard black preaching, with all its sing song, and exaggerated voice and facial gestures, looks and sounds to secular white intellectuals like a clown act: inherently ridiculous and impossible to take seriously. Mainly because religion itself is mockable to most of us. Adding sing song makes it just over the top.
He doesn't notice that because honestly, to black people, it doesn't look like that, even to people who hate the Black Church. It's just part of the landscape, like yiddish accents and absurd Jewish rituals used to be on the upper west side -- not a joke, just what is, even when it was funny.
I believe he has consciously cultivated this persona because he feels it squares a certain circle: it allows him to talk high social theory to people who haven't gone to college without them thinking he's an egghead. Instead he makes them feel smart. And the combination allow him to stand up in black forums and consistently talk about gay and lesbian issues and Foucault on power and bring the crowd right along with him, singing in and Amening right along.
IME, he's tremendously effective in communicating intellectual ideas to non-intellectuals. It's only intellectuals to whom he gives the creeps, precisely because he is traducing all our rhetorical mores. But since there are many more non-intellectuals in the world, this means his style makes him extremely popular and it serves a purpose others aren't.
Michael