ABSTRACT
During the Harlem Renaissance there emerged African-American intellectuals and artists who judged art and culture, not only politics, as the primary means of racial emancipation and cultural revolution more generally. The enemy of democracy, Dewey knew, is “the habit of fixed and numerically limited classifications” that are “quantitative” and “comparative.” James Baldwin affirmed the significance of the African American emerging from the “jungle of statistics,” thereby revealed not as a “problem or a fantasy” but as a “person.” Like Pasolini and Jane Addams and other great public pedagogues, Anna Julia Cooper knew there must be a “preferential option for the poor.” It is also true that even economically secure children are “neglected” by systems of education that construe them as “human capital,” restated by Jim Yong Kim, former President of the World Bank. Alain Locke carried on despite the racism and authoritarianism of his time, despite his inner and unresolved longing for love, and in the face of African-American adversaries.
