Professional Black Intellectual calls out Kanye West and Jim Brown for their Uncle Tom-ism

Peniel Joseph doesn’t waste any time declaring his bona fides in his screed currently on view at CNN. It’s right there in his title. If Kanye cared about black folks he’d have voted for Hillary!

And in case you didn’t get it, he spells it out again in his first paragraph; thanks to Kanye and all those other un-enlightened black folks who failed to vote for Hillary, black people lost the election.

Sure… because the Clintons have done so much for black folks in America?..

A quick peek at Peniel’s Wikipedia page reveals a man who’s made a damned fine career out of being a Professional Black Intellectual. Looks like he’s founded some iteration of “black studies” programs pretty much everywhere he ever landed a teaching gig.

In the academic world “Black Studies” is a close cousin of Gender Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Feminist Studies, Queer Studies, etc. All your major institutions of higher learning have indulged these fields of study in the last twenty or thirty years or so because it proves beyond a doubt how tolerant and inclusive they are.

While engineering, business, and the hard sciences remain the meat and potatoes of every worthwhile post-secondary institution, and their alumni provide the gravy for their endowment funds, it’s crucial to show that you’re a bastion of diversity and have an eye out for the welfare of the oppressed.

There’s a word for that.

Tokenism.

Mind you, it’s given Peniel and many like-minded Professional Black Intellectuals a soap-box from which to mega-phone their insights… such as Donald Trump is a racist douche-bag and Hillary loves black people.

As near as I can tell Trump became a racist around the time he officially declared his intention to run for the White House. Before that he was almost a token honorary white dude among professional black activists.

Why do you suppose that changed once he was in the ring with Hillary?