"I affirm whatever I think has the best chance of working, of being both inspirational and unsentimental, of reasoning across the categories of false division and beyond the decoy of race."

Said Stanley Crouch, quoted in "Stanley Crouch, Critic Who Saw American Democracy in Jazz, Dies at 74/A prolific author, essayist, columnist and social critic, he challenged conventional thinking on race and avant-garde music" (NYT).

Espousing that pragmatism, he found ready adversaries among fellow Black Americans, whom he criticized as defining themselves in racial terms and as reducing the broader Black experience to one of victimization. He vilified gangsta rap as “‘Birth of a Nation’ with a backbeat,” the Rev. Al Sharpton as a “buffoon,” the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “insane,” the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison “as American as P.T. Barnum” and Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” as “opportunistic.”

By contrast, he venerated his intellectual mentors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who, by his lights, saw beyond the conventions of race and ideology while viewing the contributions of Black people as integral to the American experience.

(Mr. Crouch disdained the expression African-American, saying: “I use Negro, black American, Afro-American. And I might throw brown American in eventually. I don’t use African-American because I have friends who are from Africa. But I do use Afro-American, because that means it’s derived but it’s not direct.”)

Mr. Crouch said he had largely taught himself to write by devouring books as a child and then drawing on an innate lyrical sensibility.... Mr. Crouch attended, though never graduated from, two community colleges, but his stature as a writer led to teaching positions at Pomona, Pitzer and Claremont Colleges, all of them in Claremont, Calif., east of Los Angeles....  His father was a heroin addict and hustler who was in jail when Stanley was born and didn’t meet his son until Stanley was 12. His mother was a housemaid who raised Stanley, his older sister, who became an accountant, and their younger brother, who died of complications of gunshot wounds in 1980.... Frequently confined to his home with asthma, Stanley read voraciously....

His writings on race often ran against the grain of liberal orthodoxies. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Deirdre English, a former editor of Mother Jones magazine, said that in the anthology “Notes of a Hanging Judge” Mr. Crouch “sets himself apart from and above the tides of current opinion, sternly hammering a gavel of righteousness — or sometimes only righteous indignation.”

She cited his “refusal to accept the notion that victimization and degradation are the defining motifs of African-American history,” which means “abandoning any notion of African innocence or superiority” and denying “that white racism ever had the power to reduce the black race to a traumatized martyrdom.”

In exhorting Black people to shoulder responsibility and debate reasonably, she wrote, Mr. Crouch “comes off less like a hanging judge than a knowing and anxious father figure.”...

Here's a short video from about 2008 (I think) that shows his charismatic speaking style: