Cosmopolitan Defense

To the Editors of The Crimson:

It seems my comments in The Crimson (February 25) on the cosmopolitan imperative as a viable lifestyle at elite colleges did precisely what I had hoped they would do--provoke counter reflections by the ethnocentric spokespersons among Black students like Anthony Ball, Timothy Wilkins, Alan Shaw, and Christopher Farley. But these counter reflections radiated more heat than enlightenment, and while I'm not against some heat in such discussions it should be used to sharpen and advance enlightenment--not obscure and hinder it. I have several comments to offer by way of rebuttal.

1. Black students at Harvard with ethnocentric identities do not have a very good grasp of their own behavior. At the root of such behavior is an emotional preference (and for a few an intellectual preference as well) for certain parochial moorings--which might be race-linked for Black students, religious-linked for Jewish and Mormon students, language-linked and nationality-linked for Hispanic students, etc, etc. I did not say in my February 25 letter that as such parochial preferences were inferior to cosmopolitan ones, and if the quintet from the Black Students Association (Anthony Ball--Kenneth Johnson--Darryl Parsons--Brian Stevens--Timothy Wilkins) read attentively, they would not find in that letter what they claim I said, that I dismiss "as parochial the Church-of-Latter-Day-Saints and Hillel House."

The quintet uses this innuendo to protect their own parochial proposal for a Third World Cultural Center from my criticism, but this just won't protect it I'm afraid. It happens that it was in terms of the functions of parochial moorings that I characterized Harvard students who are linked to such moorings, through Newman Club, Hillel House, etc. And from this functional vantage point (not an inferior-superior vantage point as the quintet charges) I said that some students (maybe say 35 percent of Jewish students, 35 percent of Catholic students, 50 percent of Mormons, etc.) "trek Harvard's cosmopolitan cross-roads...." The quintet from the Black Students Association just doesn't read very well.

2. The analytical confusion among those Black students with ethnocentric identities is further revealed in the naive arguements by the quintet (and also by Christopher Farley and James Kearney--March 4) that the wider Harvard community is obligated to fund and sustain a Third World Center. Though the quintet and Alan Shaw disagree with me--owing perhaps to their low leadership expectations of Black students--I still consider it a pathetic and disorienting contradiction for Black students with ethnocentric identities to ask others (whites) to generate resources to sustain their parochial preferences.

I did not say in my February 25 comments, as the quintet suggests, that parochial moorings are off-limits to cosmopolitan Blacks or cosmopolitans among any other ethnic group. I said that Black students with ethnocentric identities have a dysfunctional approach to cultivating parochial moorings, a phony leadership approach that will not and cannot translate the cultivation of parochial moorings into viable benefits (whether emotional, economic, power, intellectual) for Black Americans. Cosmopolitan Blacks who want to cultivate genuine connections with some Black parochial moorings are, for the most part, just more sophisticated, mature and skillful in these matters than Blacks with ethnocentric identities, for they above all will reach into their own pockets and pay for cultivating ties to parochial moorings. I, by the way, consider myself one such cosmopolitan Black, and though the quintet leaders of the Black Students Association are ignorant of it I have very good if not superior credentials in the matter of sophisticated cultivation of Black parochial moorings.

3. This leads me to several brief comments about requirements of effective Black leadership in a period where the Afro-American elites or bourgeoisie are now national elites, not ghetto elites.

On balance very few graduates of Harvard or any other upper-middle and top-level college, whatever their ethnicity, will become ghetto elites. This means that increasingly Black graduates of Harvard must find ways to impact positively upon the crises of unemployment (60 percent for Black youth) and societal pathologies (crime, unwed-motherhood, unwed-fatherhood, disorganized neighborhoods) from their position in national or cosmopolitan job markets--in new technology firms, research firms, law firms, multinational corporations, federal and state bureaucracies, etc. Effectiveness at this depends upon many things to be sure, but certainly one crucial factor will be Black elites' ability to influence the attitudes (ideological, racial, moral) and the political and public policy choices of their white occupational peers and these peers' professional associations and-interest groups.

The capacity of Black elites to exert such influence is premised on the degree and quality of Black students' interactions with their white student peers here at Harvard College and elsewhere. Black students with ethnocentric identities fail to grasp the salience of these interactions to the future capacity of Black elites to get American power structures to fulfill their obligations to the Black poor--namely, to bring the Black poor to parity in average standard of living available in our affluent country. No doubt some contribution to the future leadership capacity of Black students is available through the kind of neighborhood-uplift activity that Seymour Society students do, and though the quintet of the Black Students Association (and Farley-Shaw-Kearney, too) aren't aware of it I helped to stimulate the founding of Harvard Seymour Society. I encouraged them when they needed encouragement and fed the founding members at meals at my house and at lunches in Harvard Square that I paid for.

But, as a pragmatic cosmopolitan, I would repeat the formulation I made in my February 25 letter--that "Black students at Harvard (and other colleges too) who have chosen cosmopolitan identities rather than ethnocentric ones will in the future perform their Black leadership requirements better...." I would also repeat my critique of Black Alumni weekend. First, it's an illconceived use of Black bourgeois resources. And since the quintet informs us in its letter that the Black Alumni affair last weekend was (sadly, I think) heavily funded by Harvard resources, this event is also an illconceived and illegitimate use of Harvard's funds. We are after all in a neoconservative era (meaning many new middle-class white folks display paranoid-style antipathy toward new Black social mobility) and such short-sighted ethnic-hiving off of Alumni activity by Blacks could spark a similar ethnic-hiving off of Alumni activity by other ethnic groups (Italians, Irish, Poles, Jews and alas even WASPS). The zero-sum or foreclosure power game around Harvard's resources that flows from this infantile parochial approach to Alumni status at Harvard cannot, I assure the ethnocentric novices who run Harvard Black Student Association, be won by Blacks. Indeed, this frightening scenario would be detrimental to all of us--to all Americans--and especially detrimental to the cosmopolitan imperative that Harvard has played such a painstaking role in advancing in 20th century America. Martin L. Kilson   Professor of Government