According to Manning Marable, what are the three aspects of the Black intellectual tradition?

Answer 1

In his text, "Black Studies and the Racial Mountain," Manning Marble outlined three components—Descriptive, Corrective, and Prescriptive—of the Black intellectual tradition. He defined this tradition as "the critical thought and perspectives of intellectuals of African descent and scholars of Black America, and Africa, and the Black diaspora." (Marble, 2000.)

1. The first "Descriptive" component regards the tradition's emphasis on Black people presenting their own perspectives on lived experiences and conditions they face as individuals and a diasporic community. W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) illustrates this through a stream-of-consciousness passage in The Souls of Black Folk: "I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity." (Du Bois, 1903.)
2. Manning's second "Corrective" component of the Black intellectual tradition refutes and challenges prejudices, stereotypes, and racism that white scholars press into the mainstream discourse through institutions that they direct. Carter G. Woodson's (1933) work, The Mis-Education of the Negro, exemplifies this dimension. Woodson demonstrated the lengths to which white American educators and institutions worked to hide and conceal the rich history of Black innovation in arts and sciences, cultural traditions, and resistance to several forms of oppression. In white-led institutions, “[n]o thought was given to the history of Africa except so far as it had been a field of exploitation for the Caucasian. You might study the history as it was offered in our system from the elementary school throughout the university, and you would never hear Africa mentioned except in the negative.” (Woodson, 1933.) He urged Black communities to take initiative in studying their own histories—within Africa and in the diaspora—for themselves and to refuse the white supremacist narratives that credited whites for "civilizing" Africans when they really trafficked, enslaved, deceived and still oppress them. (Woodson, 1933.)
3. The third component Manning ascribes to the Black intellectual tradition is "Prescriptive:" urging an active linkage between scholarly work and organized efforts to restructure the social systems that oppress Black people. One early example comes in investigative journalist Ida B. Wells' 1892 study, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In its contents, her work is largely descriptive of anti-Black genocide: citing statistics and African Americans' oral accounts as she assessed the scale of white lynchings upon innocent Black people and traced them to white backlash (shrouded in excessive, racist fears of crime) against Black economic successes. However, her study aimed towards a prescriptive call to action. Wells concluded her work by urging African Americans to leverage their collective agency—to "employ the boycott, emigration, and the press"—in challenging Southern white governments, businesses, and communities that enact and enable anti-Black violence and lynchings. (Wells, 1892.)

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