ABSTRACT
Cornel West's black postmodern intellectual and Jerry Gaio Watts's black heroic intellectual reflect the contemporary debates on the chasm between activists-intellectuals, academic intellectuals, and radicalism. In contrast to elite educators, privileged by maleness, advanced degrees, and university affiliations, other models of heroic intellectualism exist. Although such texts are not as privileged as those by elite educators, Mitchell, like Baker and others, has educated and continues to educate a political body of progressives. Progressive black intellectuals may be judged not by what the people say but by what they do about injustice. Neither forgoing communal acts with nonelites nor reducing introspection to the purely self-referential, contemporary intellectuals active in struggles are singularly in a postion to refrain from reading people’s lives and needs as the text of a “phantom constituency.”. Black intellectuals such as Mitchell clearly suggest that other political readings exist.
