The Shea-Butter Boogie

Against the new Pork Chop Intellectuals of the Digital Age

Porkchop pseudo-intellectualism has been a huge problem in Black America for decades. In fact, in 1967 (the very year I was born) Harold Cruse essentially complained about the exact same thing in an entire book, entitled The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. A few passages stand out:

“(Black writers) are not getting down to the facts of class factors in our struggle for freedom because they are not telling the truth about whose freedom we are fighting for and who is going to do what with whose freedom once ‘we’ get it…They are lost sheep bleating to the God of Freedom for their deliverance…(T)hey analyze nothing and clarify less and less and heap confusion on top of confusion.”

“It is…an unfortunate development in Negro life that political interracialism has become so doctrinaire that certain nationalistic Negroes have been forced to resort to race hate in order to block out the negative effect of interracialism on ethnic consciousness. All race hate is self-defeating in the long run because it distorts the critical faculties.”

Above all, this one passage seems to stand out:

“The special role of the Negro intellectual is a cultural one. He should take to the rostrum and assail the stultifying blight of the commercially depraved white middle-class who has poisoned the structural roots of the American ethos and transformed the American people into a nation of intellectual dolts. He should explain the economic and institutional causes of this American cultural depravity. He should tell Black America how and why Negroes are trapped in this cultural degeneracy, and how it has dehumanized their essential identity, squeezed the lifeblood of their inherited cultural ingredients out of them, and then relegated them to the cultural slums.”

The last passage, in which Cruse references “cultural slums,” is prescient. One has to be brutally honest here in assessing precisely what has happened to Black American culture since 1967. Fifty-six years ago there still existed a Black Arts Movement (mostly a bohemian/intellectual movement) as well as a general flourishing of Black music at that time in all genres, and the Black cultural arbiters from that very year today read like a Who’s Who of African American legends (Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner, Nina Simone, Booker T and the MGs, Aretha Franklin, Lena Horne, Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Louis Armstrong (who had a hit at the time), Coleman Hawkins, Mary Lou Williams, Ben Webster, John Coltrane (who died that year), Alice Coltrane, Duke Ellington (still performing and deep into writing his Religious Suites), Amiri Baraka, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed (The Freelance Pallbearers came out that year), James Baldwin, John Oliver Killens, David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, John A. Williams (“The Man Who Cried I Am”), Mari Evans, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker Alexander (“Jubilee”) Joe Jordan, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake (whose own musical comeback in ragtime was just a couple years away). After looking at this impressive (and very incomplete) cultural roster for 1967, one has to wonder just what in the hell Harold Cruse was bellyaching about when he wrote the above lines.

But one also has to keep in mind that Cruse was born in 1915 (he died in 2006) and, in addition to having studied extensively the history of American culture (from a New York perspective, chiefly Harlem) had a deep memory of the New York cultural scene stretching back at least to the Great Depression. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was, in a nutshell, the writing on the wall for the late Sixties, warning Black America of yet another impending (and far worse) “cultural slum” that the American white cultural elite was going to box them into.

And here we are in 2023. If it were at all possible to take a time machine back to the “cultural slums” of 1967, Black American culture today would look more like what it really is: some rotting dystopian hell-scape, far worse even than any Brazilian favela or Yemeni shanty-town. In fact it’s generally agreed upon these days that Black American culture is absolute TRASH.

Unfortunately, as one can see by clicking the above links, most of those declaiming the worthlessness of Black American (or Black Western) culture are themselves largely responsible for keeping Black culture in its current trashy state. They represent the more conservative wing of the Shea Butter Pork Chop “Intellectuals.” Of course they are not really intellectuals at all but a bunch of mid-shelf social media celebrities who’ve made a name for themselves gossiping (for the most part) about irrelevant shit, much of it having something to do with sex or some childish beef between one empty-headed “rapper” and another.

Politically speaking, it is rather hard to pin them down. On the far right of the spectrum you have the deranged and loony ankh-right, mostly male of course (some of them are so crazy they actually believe that child rape is something acceptable!!) — the most prominent of whom have found comfortable niches on social media flim-flamming gullible, credulous and (sadly) very ignorant black folk out of their hard-earned dollars to support the building of schools, museums, shopping malls, businesses, etc., that naturally fail to materialize on their opening date.

Further to the left, the Afropunk rejects (the true shea butter crowd), the vast majority of whom tend to come from the middle and upper-middle-classes, take up the majority of the “intellectual” space. Of course there are those “serious” public intellectuals such as Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates (whom many in Black America consider to be laughingstocks), Michael Eric Dyson and Marc Lamont Hill, the late bell hooks, etc. But to be honest, the latter crowd is largely a hangover of the Black intellectual failures of the 1990s-early 2000s. Today the “serious” intellectual space in Black America has become largely neglected in favor of Mickey Mouse bullshit masquerading as “serious” intellectual rigor, a perfect case in point being the “anti-racism” cottage industry (largely led by the Ibrahim Kendis of this world).

In reality, the “left” pork-chop intellectual crowd is largely female (and upper-middle-class) dominant, while the “right” team is largely petty-bourgeois or working class, male and tends to pal it up (during election time) with the MAGA monkeys. But one thing that both the left and the right pork-chop intellectuals have in common is their unhealthy fixation upon relationships, intellectual “rigor” be damned. (That last should be plainly obvious by their painfully bad grammar and awkward sentence structure.)

The “right” pork-chop side is dominated by Red-Pill and MGTOW ideology, predicated upon the premise that Western black women (chiefly American and Anglo-Saxon) put on too many airs and are running into the arms of some adolescent Hollywood fantasy hunk (or some decadent billionaire) over six feet tall. On the “left” side of the coin, the “swirlers” and part-time gay/lesbian (experimenting) folk have (on some occasions) taken to rejecting black men entirely as “dusty” and “trash.” In this author’s opinion, both are more or less right: none of these motherfuckers are sexy.