What's wrong with Gerald Early?

In The Center of It All, "Has Summers Lost His Faculty?"

On Cornel West leaving Harvard: "This made the front page in The New York Times, in part as a story of race and racism in the academy. But I thought that if a black man can have a choice between working at Harvard or working at Princeton, this hardly seems like a story of victimization. It might even seem an old-fashioned story of progress. (Or, otherwise, in America, some blacks are becoming mighty high-priced victims!)"

"I learned when I was a kid to be enough of a conservative to every liberal and enough of liberal to every conservative to put people in the quandary of whether they should court me madly as a convert or distrust me as traitor. I take my lessons from baseball: be a good pitcher and give the batter what he wants but not quite in the way he is expecting to get it. There is no other way to live." (more)

On Corretta Scott King's funeral, "Trash Talking Funeral Talk"

"I have no idea if conservatives think blacks don’t know how to run their own funerals or even care. But they have as much right as anyone else to criticize what is said at a black funeral. When Mr. Lowery defended his remarks later by talking about “speaking truth to power” and how Mrs. King would have approved and how what he said, was, in fact, her position, it sounded like a lot of pious, self-serving flapdoodle from an old civil rights leader who wanted to attract attention to himself for a few minutes because he had a lot of people listening to what he said. The old dissenter still had teeth!

White conservatives had a right to criticize it, if they wanted to. Liberal blogs like the one above seem to think that no white can criticize anything blacks do “for one of their own.” This smacks of a certain sort of condescension and racism that is as bad as some conservatives saying that blacks can’t do anything right because they’re black and afflicted with all those pathologies that lead to gang warfare, illegitimate babies and bad music. My goodness, what would we do in America if not for the carnival of dementia that passes for race relations. I might have to consider living in another country." (more)