Eddie Glaude Jr. & BlackPlanet.com

Eddie Glaude Jr. evidently found my previous post on him here, as he re-posted it, without comment, on his own blog on BlackPlanet.com. There were two initial responses by others. After I discovered Glaude's blog: I responded to one particularly irritating individual who calls herself Brilliantrose. This is my retort, written on 2 Jan 2009:

Clearly, Brilliantrose did not understand a word I wrote. Checking my original blog, I do not see any confusion between "ethic" and "ethnic"; hopefully Brilliantrose knows the difference. I chose to write "ethnic" instead of" racial" because "ethnic" suggests a cultural formation rather than a biological category, and hence speaks more directly to mindset.

Brilliantrose also mistakenly assumes that I have a high regard for the Ivy League, but my point is that whatever their origins, however humble they may be in some cases, black intellectuals who have made it to the level of professor at Ivy League institutions have enjoyed opportunities for expansion of their ideological perspective than average uneducated persons do, and so they have a choice whether to undergo the risky business of ruffling the feathers of their own alleged constituency or pander to popular ignorance, an ignorance which obviously pervades the middle class as it does the poor.

As for needing many voices, additional voices are useless unless they have something enlightening to say. One essential property of a modern democracy that black communities as well as fundamentalist rednecks have yet to learn is the precious principle of separation between church and state. Religious revelation has no place in public argument or policy. Eddie Glaude, as an allegedly progressive theocrat, is apparently too dense to understand this. He gets away with it by basing himself on ethnic provincialism, i.e. a narrowly tailored black religious rhetoric, peppered with scraps of philosophical concepts totally at odds with the irrational basis of religious belief. This just serves to retard the intellectual development of black America as surely as the black church has done.

And that's where it ended. I looked further into BlackPlanet.com and found it as disgraceful as I had been warned about.

I found two active groups of relevance. Freethinkers New Trinity is as full of crackpots as the rest of this site. Today's Atheists of America is much more reasonable, but still extremely limited. So, while a few people with intelligent thoughts emerge on this site, it is so hopelessly idiotic and oriented toward the lowest of low common denominators, no one should be caught dead on it. Glaude hasn't posted on it all year to date: if there is a reason for this, it's anybody's guess.