C O L L E C T O R S ' C A R D S Brilliant postcards Send an electronic postcard with interesting facts about our Brilliant Careers subjects ___________________ Search barnesandnoble.com for The All-American Skin-Game by Stanley Crouch ___________________   R E C E N T L Y - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE BRILLIANT CAREERS ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - BLACK VOICES An archive of stories on African-American themes - - - - - - - - - -   I N T R O Why we launched Brilliant Careers		HE CALLS TONI MORRISON A FRAUD, AFROCENTRISTS "LOST" AND GANGSTA RAPPERS "THE SCUM OF THE EARTH." BUT ACTUALLY, CRITIC STANLEY CROUCH IS A SWEETHEART. BY AMY ALEXANDER | CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- On a chilly April night in 1996, two years before she high-tailed it to the West Coast and the synergistic frontier, Tina Brown invited several hundred of her closest friends to a party at Harvard University. The occasion was publication of a special New Yorker issue, "Black in America," edited by New Yorker staff writer and African-American studies impresario Henry Louis Gates Jr. The issue's lineup of guest writers, artists and critics represented a Who's Who of black glitterati: actress and director Anna Deavere Smith on black women inmates; award-winning novelist John Edgar Wideman on Chicago Bulls bad boy Dennis Rodman; Columbia University law professor Patricia Williams on female Harvard Law School graduates, and Gates on Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan. Buried in the back of the thick issue was a writer who seemed somewhat incongruous among these swells. But critic Stanley Crouch's exploration of Duke Ellington's lasting contribution to American culture was easily the most trenchant and well-written piece in the issue. Ellington "understood the blues as both music and mood," Crouch wrote. "He knew that those who thought of the blues as merely a vehicle for primitive complaint had their drawers or their brassieres on backward. The blues knows its way around. It can stretch from the backwoods to the space shuttle, from the bloody floor of a dive to the neurotic confusion of a beautifully clothed woman in a Manhattan penthouse. The blues -- happy, sad, or neither -- plays no favorites." As the "Black in America" edition hit the stands, the burly writer departed his Greenwich Village digs for Harvard and the gala surrounding the launch of the special issue. Before C-Span cameras in a packed auditorium at the Kennedy School of Government, Crouch joined black theologian and philosopher Cornel West, writer Jill Nelson, New York Times editorial writer Brent Staples and NBC News correspondent Gwen Ifill in a discussion of the roles of blacks in mainstream media. More than your typical round of academic navel-gazing, the panel managed to achieve new heights of public theater -- and added to Crouch's bomb-throwing legend. "You see," Crouch offered, winding up for a trademark riff on race, demagoguery and the sorry state of the American press, "when you look at a nutcase like Louis Farrakhan ..." At this, the usually serene West blew his Afro: "Why do you have to call the minister out of his name? Don't you know you diminish his humanity when you use words like that!" The sniping exchange that followed was a brief flash of red-hot tension in an otherwise polished discussion. Everyone in the room, from publishing executives, heavy-duty eggheads and bigfoot journalists to self-consciously grungy students, seemed surprised at the flare-up. Everyone except Stanley Crouch, of course. Some two years later, that episode is a classic entry in the pantheon of Crouchian lore, another small but full-color glimpse at the style and thinking of a successful middle-aged black man who follows few comfortable paths. Armed with an elephant's memory and a passionate knowledge of and engagement with art (blues and jazz especially, though not exclusively) and history (American, though not exclusively), Crouch delights in slaying the dragons of convention -- particularly those that guard the sometimes-insular world of black intellectuals. Crouch's troublemaking reputation was made with his first essay collection, 1990's "Notes of a Hanging Judge," which smacked the slumbering genre of race and cultural criticism out of its 30-year torpor. In that book he dared to eviscerate several African-American icons, notably Nobel Laureate novelist Toni Morrison, whom he fingered as a literary snake-oil saleswoman who "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials." "Beloved," Crouch wrote, "reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries. Were 'Beloved' adapted for television (which would suit the crass obviousness that wins out over Morrison's literary gift at every significant turn) the trailer might go like this: 'Meet Sethe, an ex-slave woman who harbors a deep and terrible secret that has brought terror into her home.'" And so on. This was, we now know, particularly prescient criticism, considering the bombastic outcome of Oprah Winfrey's recent big-screen version of Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Crouch also took down filmmaker Spike Lee ("a nappy-headed Napoleon"), while championing young white artists like Quentin Tarantino, whose use of the term "nigger" Crouch defended in his next essay collection, "The All-American Skin Game." In a piece lauding another nontraditional black writer, Albert Murray, Crouch praised him for not being "taken in by ... the simplistic versions of heritage [or] protest that led to the political Zip Coon shows of LeRoi Jones, Eldridge Cleaver, and the like." N E X T_ P A G E .|. Crouch's critics: He's a sellout, a race traitor and a loudmouthed cultural opportunist   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - R E S O U R C E   P A G E Click here for more information about the people profiled in Brilliant Careers. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.