Brandon James Render responds to Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
At the Whiteboard
In a 2013 graduate seminar, my professor held up a dry erase marker and asked students to come to the board to answer the question, “What does it mean to be an intellectual?” At first, no one took our professor up on the offer. Some of us collected our thoughts, jotting down answers on our laptops. Others looked around nervously, afraid to be cold-called to the board by a professor notorious for singling out students with difficult questions.
After a few moments of silence, I slid out of my chair and walked to the front of the class. I stood at the board for a moment, marker in hand as I continued to think about my answer. Finally, I started to write. “An intellectual is someone who uses their creativity and originality to produce ideas that have meaning.” As I returned to my seat, the professor stood there, reading and re-reading my definition aloud. Then, he turned to the class and said, “What do you think? Who agrees with this definition?” Every student in the class raised their hand, and a few even commented on why they agreed. As I sat there, however, proud of my contribution to the class discussion, the professor picked up the marker and drew an X through my definition. “I don’t believe this is what it means to be an intellectual at all,” the professor said. After crossing out my answer, he went on to reference a series of texts a person should read before they could even consider themselves to be an intellectual.
It didn’t matter to me then, and it doesn’t matter to me now. I remain confident in my response, albeit more sophisticated in my rationale these days. It should be no surprise that when I discovered Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “organic intellectuals” shortly after completing this class, it immediately resonated with me. Instead of my professor’s formalized methodology to becoming an intellectual, I believed—and continue to believe—that a less formal description is necessary. In fact, I see this learning experiment as the first step that I myself took in becoming an intellectual historian.
The following semester, with the question of what it means to be an intellectual still rattling around my mind, I took a Chinese intellectual history course. We focused on ancient thinkers such as Mencius, Lao Tzu, and, of course, Confucius. We placed ideas in their historical context and traced their evolution through other prominent Chinese thinkers. Every now and then, I added to the discussion and offered to read translated passages aloud to the class. What I remember the most, however, is thinking about the connection between Chinese intellectuals and the Black historical figures that interested me. I wondered what would happen if we applied this intellectual history approach to Black Americans. Or, in other words, what does it mean to be a Black intellectual?
Over the next few years, I read everything that I could find, joined professional organizations, and applied to PhD programs that focused on the Black intellectual tradition. I found that there were other historians asking similar questions and building an entire field around the subject of Black intellectual history. It didn’t take long for me to realize that my trajectory as an intellectual historian was shaped by my professor’s question of what it means to be an intellectual.
Tracking Crossings
Since those graduate seminars eleven years ago, I continue to think about what it means to be an intellectual, the meaning of intellectual history, and, specifically, my role as an intellectual historian. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History reinforced my views while also challenging me to think deeply about the evolution of ideas in the United States. From the earliest colonists to contemporary America, Ratner-Rosenhagen identifies and elucidates the ideas that shaped what would become the US. In particular, as Ratner-Rosenhagen discusses the evolution of ideas, she offers important context on how the meaning of intellectual history changes over time as well. For example, when discussing “the ideas undergirding competing moral viewpoints,” she argues that intellectual historians are responsible for “[comprehending] how those actors came to their understanding of their world and their role in it.” Later in the book, Ratner-Rosenhagen builds on this idea by taking “lived experience” into account—a practice that many intellectual historians have gravitated towards since the social transformations of the 1960s and 70s. Although it sounds straightforward, this approach allows us to consider the diversity of thought that is present in all periods of US history. Whether those ideas have been captured by historians or serve as uncharted territory for future scholars to discover, lived experience needs to be a part of how we study intellectuals and intellectual history.
Ratner-Rosenhagen’s introduction to US intellectual history has multiple strengths. First, the international, intranational, and temporal frameworks, or “crossings,” that the author discusses in the book’s introduction are simple but effective outlines for understanding how ideas in the US fit into a global context and move back and forth across time. I found Ratner-Rosenhagen’s articulation of ideas crossing temporal boundaries compelling and useful to my own research on the evolution of racial colorblindness. In addition to ideas of race forming over time, so too has race-neutral logic. It has shaped aspirations of equality and offered a future in which justice will supposedly arrive in a colorblind form. So too, racial ideologies and race-neutral logics move backward in time to shape how we understand the past. Ratner-Rosenhagen emphasizes how the ideas that made the US have affected the past, present, and future all at once by “crossing” among them. Racial colorblindness is a sound example of this imagining of time and historical consciousness.
Another element of the book that strengthens The Ideas that Made America involves Ratner-Rosenhagen’s sensitivity to the unique personalities of the intellectuals within the study. For example, not only does the author spend time breaking down and explaining ideas, she also registers the intellectual’s voice. On occasion, she even takes on the spirit and characteristics of the thinkers who popularized modes of thought in her own prose. For example, when describing pragmatist Richard Rorty’s influence in the later decades of the twentieth century, Ratner-Rosenhagen uses Rorty’s snappy, authoritative phrases to enhance the author’s point.
This feature of the book is valuable because Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how intellectuals articulated their views. When it comes to studying intellectual history more fully in connection with its “crossings,” an attunement to lived experience, and attention to the possibilities of an organic intellectual’s tone, style, and form become just as important as the content of the ideas themselves. Although some readers might not find this aspect of the book appealing, I found it to be engaging and informative. Ratner-Rosenhagen’s evocations of past intellectuals in form as well as content humanizes the intellectual. It makes them alive, and adds context for how ideas resonated with audiences in particular historical moments.
Tracing Harmful Ideas
Like all brief histories, however, this book also inevitably has its fair share of shortcomings. Most troublingly there are many ideas in US intellectual history that contributed to enormous harm, not only to people in the United States, but also across the globe. These sorts of “crossings” are not thoughtfully expressed in the book. In most cases, readers are only introduced to intellectuals who produced prejudiced ideas. We learn far less about those who suffered the consequences because their intellectual histories are missing. For example, Ratner-Rosenhagen describes the co-optation of Charles Darwin’s ideas that resulted in the concept of “social Darwinism,” a cherry-picked interpretation of On the Origin of Species that developed in the latter-nineteenth century. This idea of “survival of the fittest” reached the US at a crucial time in the nation’s history and had fraught consequences for African Americans. As Reconstruction faltered and Black Americans’ political hopes were dashed, many white Americans—and even some Black Americans—believed that the formerly enslaved and oppressed were unfit for citizenship.
In short, adherents of social Darwinism posited that Black Americans received every opportunity to achieve equality and full citizenship, but could not take advantage due to cultural and intellectual inferiority. Even though Ratner-Rosenhagen hints at the consequences of misguided interpretations of Darwin’s work, there is a particular danger in presenting “ideas that made America” from too sanguine a perspective, even if the author recognizes that, for lack of a better phrase, these were bad ideas. It is important to note that these ill-formed ways of thinking were not important merely in and of themselves, but also that those harmed by them have been just as essential in shaping intellectual history as the thinkers who are responsible for producing and disseminating these modes of thought. Responses to forms of discrimination and oppression offer some of the most vibrant intellectual histories around.
Another issue with Ratner-Rosenhagen’s brief history is that, at times, she fails to follow through entirely on the frameworks she maps out in the introduction to the book. She misses a number of opportunities to reinforce and emphasize how international, intranational, and temporal frameworks persisted even as US intellectual history evolved. For example, toward the end of the book, Ratner-Rosenhagen argues that ideas were moving quickly in the mid-to-late twentieth century because they were based on “intellectual habits and commitments long present in American thought.” This would have been a valuable place to discuss how these ideas, particularly as they related to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and his critique of multiculturalism in higher education, crossed the temporal boundaries described at the beginning of the book. Bloom’s conservative criticism offered a throwback in response to the ongoing effort to open up US society and thinking, so what about this kind of reactionary “crossing” found in conservative thought? Mostly, crossings in The Ideas That Made America are restricted to positive transmissions of ideas, but how do we make sense of the retrograde as well as the progressive?
Critical Race Theory As an “Idea That Made America”
Despite these critiques, The Ideas that Made America gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own research. I found the temporal framework to be a useful approach to the re-articulation of racial colorblindness and its evolution throughout the twentieth century. In my research, I do not only position the civil rights and Black power era as constituted by a set of social movements, but rather as an intellectual movement that fundamentally re-shaped Americans’ collective interpretation of race. In response to these shifting ideas of race, a conservative movement sought to reject the historicization of the concept entirely. Racial colorblindness as historically critiqued and then reasserted disappears from accounts of the past. As Kimberlé Crenshaw argues, various social and political articulations of race-neutral thought on both the right and the left discouraged scholars from centering it in their narratives. To redress this constraint, my work recovers the inconsistencies, contradictory discourses, and evolutions of racial colorblindness. Examining it as intellectual history makes it a valuable site for study and a critical point of interrogation.
Intellectuals such as Crenshaw in fact play a crucial role in my study on race-neutral ideas in higher education. Her work on critical race theory has framed a deep investigation of racial colorblindness for almost four decades. Although most scholars, whether opponents or advocates, view critical race theory as a legal framework, in my research, I expand it as a methodology for engaging with larger Black intellectual traditions. In reading the sources and inspirations for Crenshaw or even Derrick Bell, “the man behind critical race theory,” it becomes apparent that Black intellectuals—not only lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall, but also philosophers, historians, and activists ranging from Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells to Carter G. Woodson—played an important role in the development of critical race theory and its critique of racial colorblindness. Woodson, for instance, lamented the state of Black education in the early twentieth century, and argued that the curriculum sought to erase the history of slavery and racism that plagued the United States’ past. In other words, Woodson claimed, the education system taught students to “forget that they are Black.”
Generations of Black scholars produced ideas such as justice-oriented race-consciousness, equitable admissions policies, and Black Studies. These crossed temporal boundaries and went on to define the contours of an intellectual tradition we might understand as far broader than just a recent phenomenon. Focusing on racial ideologies helps us better understand the deeper development and intellectual qualities of critical race theory, a theory that reveals racial colorblindness and its inability to deliver justice even as it clings to hopes for the transcendence of race as a discriminatory category.
In addition to temporal crossings when it came to the intellectual history of racial colorblindness, Ratner-Rosenhagen’s concise description and development of mid-twentieth-century liberalism framework also forced me to reconsider the deeper implications of liberalism itself. As intellectuals such as Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey “wrestled over the scope and limits of human power to foster a just and sustainable democracy,” their articulations of liberalism presented the concept as a process. This revealed the tensions in other forms of liberal thought. Racial liberalism, for example, was not only an outgrowth of colorblind interpretations developed in the push for desegregation, it was also a feature of a wider political philosophy that gained traction as part of the New Deal, Cold War, and Black civil rights movement.
Interlocking interpretations of political thought, such as aspirational nondiscrimination practices and policies, linked the colorblind framework to a more sweeping liberal sense of justice. From the expansion of federal powers and national defense to community programs and direct-action protest, mid-twentieth-century “modern” liberalism contained an element of racial colorblindness that never fully reckoned with the racist dimensions of liberalism itself, much less the more reactionary dimensions of American life. By eliding racial factors to minimize their significance, mid-twentieth-century liberalism wound up ignoring racism’s enduring qualities, not only in American social relations, but also in the nation’s intellectual life. While Ratner-Rosenhagen actually spends little time on racial liberalism, the implication of her analysis of mid-twentieth-century liberalism is that racism was folded into it even as liberals attempted to overturn decades of Jim Crow through a rhetoric of racial colorblindness.
The contours of an intellectual history of race lurk throughout Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book and function as an undercurrent. Toward the end of the book, however, she makes explicit references to race in her examination of debates over multiculturalism in the latter part of the twentieth century. This is another missed opportunity to return to the temporal “crossings” she identifies in the introduction. How, readers might wonder, did the liberal framework of the mid-twentieth century, with its racial colorblindness, actually lead to the multicultural debates a few decades later?
It is not a coincidence that these two framings are present in close chronological quarters: the failures of liberalism, particularly as it relates to race, forced Black Americans to rearticulate a framework for race-consciousness in an era when colorblindness was starting to become the dominant interpretation of race in the US and in other parts of the world. This does not mean that advocates of multiculturalism should be grouped together with segregationists, to be clear. The latter used race to reinforce racism while the former used, and continues to use, race to attempt to move beyond racism. Despite this, conservative and even some liberal critics of multiculturalism have often insisted upon liberalism itself as the most appropriate framework to achieve social and political equality. They have chosen notions such as John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” as a starting point (an unfortunate term in this case when one thinks of W.E.B Du Bois’s point that Black Americans lived “behind the veil” during the heyday of Jim Crow segregation).[1]
Crossings abound. Those harkening back to liberalism’s racial colorblindness wind up associating the more radical approach to racial recognition found in multiculturalism with conservative reactions to racial equality and recompense. This is a strange kind of “crossing” indeed!: of ideological positions, of regional locations (Southern and Northern US contexts), and of temporalities. Meanwhile, it distorts what linked multicultural thinking back to mid-twentieth-century liberalism itself. Multiracial coalition-building seeks to return to the kernel of liberal tolerance and multiplicity itself with a more frank recognition of difference and inequality. It does not want to undo liberalism, but realize it. It wants to lift the veil of ignorance, not keep it in place.
The trajectory from a mid-twentieth century liberal framework to the multiculturalism of the latter-twentieth century and conservative appropriations of colorblind ideology suggests that the Black intellectual tradition that critiqued racial colorblindness is both a part of and a challenge to the primarily European-oriented intellectual tradition Ratner-Rosenhagen examines in her book. When I present my research before an audience, I typically receive a question that indicates Black Americans in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s were unaware of the contradictions that marked the establishment of Black Studies within the context of higher education in the United States. How, an audience member always asks, did they not see the irony of demanding a place within the mainstream university for a program that did not agree in principle to the primacy of the core intellectual traditions of these institutions?
Instead of answering this question, I ask the audience to think about the ongoing role of the Black intellectual in American society. Black students, faculty, and administrators establishing Black Studies programs were not merely cognizant of the paradoxes of wanting “in” on an institution their field saw as illegitimate in many respects, they also embraced the situation. While they were not interested in developing programs of study or approaches to knowledge production that had to be palatable to white critics, they nonetheless had their own investments in certain aspects of the liberal project. Most crucially, the Black intellectuals who formed these programs joined an already-existing alternative intellectual tradition that forced both advocates and opponents of multiculturalism to trace American contradictions about racial equality and justice back to their original sources and exclusionary practices. Higher education in the United States was established, after all, to serve white students’ particular interests and it fed, institutionally and intellectually, white Americans’ attempts to create subservient Black communities. To want “in” was also to want “out” of this pernicious system. Getting inside higher education could provide a way to transform it.
Beyond the X
In Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book, Black Americans form a key part of the “conversation,” particularly when providing dissenting perspectives. Her brief allusions to Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright within broader articulations of existentialism are a great example of the nuances Black Americans brought to American thought. More passages similar to these Black literary pioneers’ interventions would have built more depth into Ratner-Rosenhagen’s narrative without sacrificing the focus of her book. What I wish to show even more methodically in my own research is how, despite any number of setbacks, Black intellectuals have played a critical role in shaping the ideas that made America, even if they have often been ignored, dismissed, or their mere mention produced a backlash. It is not my goal, however, to focus on racism and discrimination alone, but rather to reveal how Black Americans—for better or worse—contributed to the broader intellectual history of the US. In this sense, I hope to extend and expand the “conversation” Ratner-Rosenhagen begins to map out in The Ideas That Made America. I wish to write in a similar style, stating my claims clearly to engage in a conversation with my audience, but leaving some of the heavy lifting to the reader who wants to work out additional implications of my findings.
To note more thoroughly the ironies and tensions found in racial colorblindness and critical race theory across time is to add to the story Ratner-Rosenhagen begins to map out in her book. There is a clear connection between ideas about race in liberalism and its multicultural reconsiderations as well as its conservative reactions. To be sure, Ratner-Rosenhagen could have illuminated these “crossings” for readers with more precision, but refreshingly, she has not written a polemical text. Instead, she offers a more open-ended one. She does not seek to put an authoritative stamp on intellectual history. Instead, her survey invites readers into a conversation. Rather than cover every facet of American intellectual history, she creates a narrative with many possibilities for further inquiry, disputation, and dialogue. There is a capacious quality to the book that allows us to continue analysis and discussion.
When I look back on my graduate seminar in 2013, I don’t think it was my professor’s intention to embarrass me in front of the whiteboard. If it was, it was an unsuccessful attempt. Instead, I think that it was a way to challenge me, and the rest of the class, to contemplate intellectual history, a concept that as students we did not yet have the context or depth of knowledge to understand. In addition to sparking my career as an intellectual historian, it also helped me to become a better critical thinker and served as a new pathway to the world of ideas. This simple question—what does it mean to be an intellectual?—became a point of reference as I completed my PhD and even now as I teach classes on Black intellectual history.
When I pose this same question to my own students, however, I’m excited to learn about their conceptualization of intellectual history and what it means to them. Instead of drawing an X through their definitions, I encourage them to keep thinking creatively about how we interpret, how we find multiple meanings, in intellectual history.
About the Author
Brandon James Render is an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His current book project, Colorblind Universities: The Making and Unmaking of Race in Higher Education, traces the intellectual history of racial colorblindness through admissions, department structures, and curriculum throughout the twentieth century. He teaches courses on African American history, Black intellectual history, and post-1945 social and intellectual movements. Aside from research and writing, he enjoys other creative projects like music and filmmaking.
Notes
[1] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903).