Interview with Houston Baker on Open Salon

“[I]n the present economy black intellectuals are invited to the grand salon and are asked to sit down at the table, and discuss the next issue of neoconservative declaration of bad black behavior. It’s kind of astonishing from a perspective of intellectual history.”—Houston Baker, in an interview with Norman Kelly

Salon has launched a beta version of Open Salon, a new site open to bloggers. It looks very promising and they’ve already got some very good people writing for the site. Norman Kelly, one of the site’s contributors, interviewed Houston Baker about his recently published book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era.

It is a fascinating wide-ranging interview, in which Baker discusses the failures of some black intellectuals, considers the complexity of Martin Luther King’s ideas, praises people such as Angela Davis and Lani Guinier, and expresses his skepticism regarding Barack Obama.