No series of analyses, papers, discussions, and books will stop the slaughter in our streets, or children from having children, or men from beating up women. The role of intellectuals is limited; excessive expectations will only produce disappointment. But that limited role is crucial, and fears of disappointment should not serve as an excuse for continuing along the current course. (Rivers, 1995, p. 18) Some 25 years ago, Edward Said claimed that “the world is more crowded than it ever has been with (…) intellectuals” (Said, 1996, p. 15). Yet Black intellectuals continue to be sidelined, marginalized, and ignored in public discourse. As Jeffrey Watts contends, there has been a “longstanding racist marginalization of African American intellectuals within mainstream American intellectual discourses” (Watts, 2004, p. 2). However, this “came under intense attack during the 1960s and 1970s, at least within black intellectual circles” (Watts, 2004, p. 2). In recent decades, this attack has slowly permeated into the wider/Whiter discourse in the United States, but has by no means been fully accomplished yet. Bolstering the Black archive is a crucial task to allow new generations of scholars to draw on a wider set of contributions from key Black intellectuals. Recovering Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III's interventions for our days is an important contribution to this task. Debates about the causes of Black suffering in America usually fall into one of two camps. According to Cornel West in Nihilism in Black America, “liberal structuralists” focus on the structural and societal constraints facing Black Americans while “conservative behaviorists” focus on the decline of the Protestant ethic and a growing crisis of anomie (West, 1994, p. 13). While Rivers falls most clearly in the latter group, his combined attention to structural constraints and individual morality places him idiosyncratically in relation to the two camps. As West urges, the “debate must go far beyond the liberal and conservative positions” (West, 1994, p. 12). Rivers’ essay provides an important contribution to going beyond this dichotomy. I develop three main lines of argument from within Rivers’ thought. First, that he seeks to bridge the disconnect between intellectuals and social struggle. Second, that he envisages a role of the intellectual between the vanguard activist intellectual and disinterested scholastic academics—resembling Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ idea of the rear-guard intellectual. Third, that Rivers provides the basis for distinguishing between two types of responsibility: the responsibility for and the responsibility to, with the responsibility of Black intellectuals falling into the latter, not the former, category. I therefore (re)consider the role of intellectuals under conditions of systemic racism. In September 1992, Reverend Rivers from Dorchester, Boston, MA, played a major yet underappreciated role in debates among leading Black thinkers by publishing the essay “The Responsibility of Black Intellectuals in the Age of Crack” in the Boston Review (BR) (Rivers, 1992). Drawing on the rich yet hitherto untapped historical archive centered around this essay, Rivers’ essay provides an interpretive key for theorizing the role of the intellectual today. The decline of the public intellectual, the unrealized promise of a rational democratic public sphere, the siloing and disciplining of academia, and growing racial and economic disparities all demand going beyond the classic texts on intellectuals. The relationships between theory and practice, race and class, as well as religion and politics are all crucial for social scientists presciently raised in the essay. The idiosyncrasy, controversy, and intellectual rigor of Rivers’ thought means he can and should be considered a key Black thinker, despite being overlooked in the academic literature. Moving these questions of race with widespread implications for society as a whole from the periphery of African American studies to the mainstream of history and political science is an urgent and major task. For instance, Michael Hanchard contends that “attention to black political thought might expand and complicate our understanding of modern politics and the conceptualization of the political in contemporary political theory” (Hanchard, 2010, p. 510). Most urgent according to Rivers, evident from the title of his opening call, was the crack epidemic harrowing working class and poor Blacks in the 1980s and 1990s. This speaks closely to W.E.B. Du Bois’ evolution from academically defending the ‘‘talented tenth’’ and the way the Sam Hose lynching in 1899 threw him into a dual scholar-activist role, later revising his theory of intellectuals into the ‘‘guiding hundredth’’ of struggle, sacrifice, and solidarity (Rabaka, 2016). Famously, Du Bois purchased a shotgun after the 1906 Atlanta Massacre and moved to a more confrontational line to resist White supremacy, foreshadowing many of Rivers’ concerns. In one sense, Rivers sought to bridge this disconnect and link intellectuals to social struggles. Rivers’ arguments and the ensuing debate contribute a rich set of resources for theorizing and conceptualizing the role and responsibility of intellectuals in today's political reality. Excavating this debate thus implies a dual contribution: as part of a larger effort to recenter the underappreciated theoretical contributions of Black thought and as a fresh intervention in long-standing debates on the role and responsibility of intellectuals. I develop the analysis across five sections. Section 1 introduces Eugene Rivers. Section 2 maps dominant understandings of the role of the intellectual, focusing on Antonio Gramsci as well as Rivers’ direct inspiration, Noam Chomsky. Section 3 contextualizes Rivers’ essay, including the specific and wider reasons for its emergence. Section 4 reconstructs Rivers’ essay, arguing that he theorizes a specific role for Black intellectuals, not just as Black intellectuals but also as Black intellectuals. Section 5 argues that Rivers successfully bridges the disconnect between the hermitic individual intellectual and the need for collective responses to collective problems. Moreover, he constructs a middle-way between the unrestrained vanguardism of the activist intellectual and the disinterestedness of the ‘impartial’ academic. At a time when both distrust of experts and the politicization of academia is high, Rivers offers a compelling conceptual solution. This involves shifting from a model of responsibility for to responsibility to. Rivers is a Black pastor, social activist, and founder of the Pentecostal Azusa Christian Community in Dorchester, Boston, Massachusetts. Although Rivers dropped out of Harvard, he established an enduring friendship with Cornel West and returned as a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life in the 1990s and was thus reunited with West at Harvard Divinity School. Evidence of a difficult upbringing despite college-educated parents, he joined the Somersville street gang in Philadelphia, and in his adult life founded the Ten Point Coalition, a successful intervention attempting to solve gang problems in Boston. The Ten Point Coalition came about as a direct result of frustration among Boston's clergy with gun violence following the death of 20-year old Robert Odom and the shooting by gang members of a young man named Jerome Brunson at Odom's funeral. The Coalition brought together around 300 church ministers with Rivers taking a lead in formulating a 10-point plan for ending gun and gang violence in Boston. Rivers was featured on the front page of Newsweek for his efforts and gained recognition in both Boston Magazine and the New Yorker (D. Kennedy, 2001). Eugene Rivers frequently collaborates with his wife, Dr Jacqueline C. Rivers, a Harvard PhD mentored by Orlando Patterson whose concept of social death is a recurring theme in Eugene Rivers’ thought and something of a Rosetta stone through which to interpret the dominant themes of black discourse in the 1990s. Jacqueline Rivers’ thought is likely to have had a major impact on his, particularly given the many cases of wives and women partners playing key roles in the development of the thought of (officially) single-authored texts by men. Jacqueline Rivers is a Harvard sociology lecturer, a frequent public speaker, and a Christian thought leader who like her husband is against equal marriage and abortion. Yet it is Eugene Rivers who is the more prolific writer and a more public figure. Although it would be an important task to map her thought as well as how it has influenced Eugene Rivers, I limit my inquiry to considering his thought and practice. Writing in a long tradition of Black religious intellectuals who variably have attracted controversy in the public sphere including Calvin O. Butts, West, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Jeremiah Wright, Rivers is a contentious figure to the American establishment. In his wide-ranging history of Black intellectuals, Charles Banner-Haley says Rivers is “like Cornel West only without the overtly Marxist perspective” (Banner-Haley, 2010, p. 81). Indeed, Rivers characterizes his own practice as speaking “with the mind of an intellectual but with the heart of a pastor” and in a recent Fox News interview considered himself “a pastor of the poor and an intellectual” (Okholm, 1997; Rivers, 2020a). He served as an advisor to George Bush Sr., and appealed for Black Americans to engage in bipartisanship. He endorsed George W. Bush Jr.’s faith-based social policy initiatives, to the extent that the New York Times called Rivers the “point man for the Bush church-state collaboration” (Niebuhr, 2001), which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) claimed was unconstitutional (Formicola & Segers, 2002). What is more, influential far-right conspiracy theorist and convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza used Rivers’ essay to argue for abolishing the (limited) social welfare programs that exist in the United States (D'Souza, 2016). Rivers had a strained relationship with Reverend Jesse Jackson who Rivers considers a relic of an outdated model of Black activism based on partisanship, affirmative action, and civil rights. In an interview with the Boston Phoenix, Rivers summarized his objectives as “cultivating a new, younger black leadership that understands that politics is not about rhetoric or merely protest. Sometimes it is protest and direct action, but those activities are simply part of a multifaceted strategy, with the end game being programs, policies, and results” (D. Kennedy, 2006). He thus explicitly seeks to depart from the civil rights movement of MLK and Jackson. Yet Rivers also castigates Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam as a dead-end for Black emancipation, claiming that “Farrakhan exploits our indifference to the poor” (Okholm, 1997, p. 15). Interestingly, both of Rivers’ parents became members of the Nation of Islam. Rivers likewise criticizes Black Lives Matter (BLM) for being a mistaken ideological project. While lauding the collaboration of Black and White people in fighting police violence, he simultaneously rejects BLM: “Although I have fundamental disagreements with the Black Lives Matter organization and its agenda, these young people have been able to exhibit a level of interracial solidarity that we haven't seen in the churches since Martin Luther King” (Rivers & Rivers, 2020). He specifically calls for “agape love” as the kind of love for all humankind that is unconditional, transcendental, and decontextual. Yet his disagreement with BLM concerns its support for LGBTQ rights and what he considers to be a Marxist ideology underpinning it (Rivers & Rivers, 2020). Rivers favors self-help and self-reliance in a clearly Protestant vein of thought, a running theme in his thought is thus the importance of industriousness and antimaterialist frugality characteristic of Protestantism. This seems to be the limit to his collective and nonmoral vision of the intellectual. There are therefore several ambiguities and ambivalences in his thought that mean his argument cannot simply be accepted at face value. The starting point of Rivers’ thought is a concern for the poor—ending poverty, especially the poverty haunting Black Americans. This speaks to the realism of his thought, grounded in the reality of existence and in the politics of race and racism, which is irreducible to a moral question alone. In a recent lecture, Rivers summarizes his intellectual position as “taking a political theology of Pentecostalism and applying it as a form of liberation theology with an emphasis on serving the poor concretely” (Rivers, 2020b). Yet he is not speaking from a position of Black nationalism or ‘racial capitalism.’ Rather, he begins with a critique of capitalism tout court: “Western civilization itself is saturated, not merely with racism, but with the elementary gesture out of which racism is constructed, binary opposition: the splitting of the world into the dominated and the dominant” (Okholm, 1997, p. 17). This is not to say that White supremacy does not play a central role for him—it absolutely does: as evidenced in the claim that “the conceptual foundation for economic inequality is the ideology of white supremacy,” to the extent that “every other form of oppression and domination is mediated through the lens of white supremacy” (Okholm, 1997, p. 17). Rivers subscribes to the position that racism is embedded so centrally in the English language that it goes beyond merely conscious racist expressions but is preconsciously reproduced in the very basis of the language (the use of Black and White as modifiers, for instance), akin to Robert B. Moore's and David R. Burgest's arguments (Burgest, 1973; Moore, 1976). The relationship between theory and practice is a central pillar in debates within critical circles (Habermas, 1991; Rossi, 2015; Verovšek, 2018). The roles and responsibilities of intellectuals play a major role in these debates. Broadly speaking, whereas realists focus on speaking about and with real emancipatory political practices like social movements or radical political parties, idealists focus on speaking about truth, understanding, and normativity in more abstract and moral terms. Realists, like Raymond Geuss, frequently scorn the idealists for apolitical status quo-abetment (Finlayson, 2015a; Geuss, 2008). Idealists, like Jürgen Habermas, focus on how the realization of a rational, democratic public sphere could help solve political disagreement (Habermas, 1991). Beyond such more fundamental and principled disagreement, Alice Baderin identifies the strategic task of negotiating “democratic restraint” whereby intellectuals adjust their theorizing to better align with public attitudes (Baderin, 2015). Compatible with recent attempts to complicate the neat separation between realists and idealists (Verovšek, 2021), Rivers provides a compelling formulation of a middle-ground that negotiates between these two outer positions. The starting point for Rivers’ conceptualization of intellectuals as collectively embedded emerges with Gramsci and Chomsky, however. Rivers refers to Gramsci at several points in his work (Rivers, 1992, 1995). He even goes so far as to say that he accepts Gramsci's notion of the organic intellectual (Rivers, 1992). Warning against the dangers of speculative philosophy, Gramsci proposes a new agenda for how to theorize the intellectual vis-à-vis social movements and political organizations. Speculative philosophy refers to unreflexive philosophy that does not take its point of origin in the really-existing social problems of its time (Gramsci, 1971, p. 370). He first conceptualizes intellectuals not just as a specific subsection of the dominant class, which philosophers mostly are, but as a social practice undertaken by a range of different thought-workers: teachers, journalists, policy advisers, or party cadres are just some of the figures who count as intellectuals on such a conception. Thus, on his view, everyone is an intellectual, but not everyone has the function of a professional intellectual. Second, Gramsci distinguishes between traditional and organic intellectuals. The former are those with formal training as intellectuals, akin to the conventional speculative philosopher, often removed and abstracted from social conditions. Organic intellectuals, on the other hand, are characterized by belonging to and directing the ideas of their social class (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 5–23). This is what Rivers is against: a conception of intellectuals as those concerned with questions outside immediate social relevance: answering the big, enduring questions of humanity around art, science, and metaphysics. The organic intellectual, by contrast, emerges from the subordinated class and thus not only knows but both feels and understands the plight of their class (Gramsci, 1971, p. 418). Even as the organic intellectual secures a certain amount of social and cultural capital, they remain committed to (class) struggle (Celikates, 2018). While Rivers is influenced by Gramsci's account, the linchpin for his argument is Chomsky's writings on intellectuals (Chomsky, 2017). Chomsky specifies a special normative responsibility and moral duty of intellectuals. According to him, “opportunity confers responsibility” (Chomsky, 2017). He elicits suspicion about experts and intellectuals because they furthered rather than countered the war effort in the case of the Vietnam War (Chomsky, 2017). While he embraces Gramsci's collective account, Rivers simultaneously writes in tradition of pessimistic conceptions of the intellectual coalescing with Chomsky's essay. This is a fairly long tradition that emerges with the 1940s postwar writings of socialist Dwight Macdonald who sardonically mocks leading wartime reporter Max Lerner for his ascription of wartime guilt to incapacitated working class Germans. Macdonald claims that holding individuals “morally responsible for the deeds of the ‘historical entity’ he gets himself born into” should be abandoned (cited in Chomsky, 2017). What Macdonald offers is therefore a first move from individual moral responsibility, qua unbounded agency, toward an account of responsibility more sensitive and attuned to structural forces that negotiates vis-à-vis the peculiar scope for agency among intellectuals. Macdonald's position implies that intellectuals like Lerner fail to understand the structural and systematic characteristics of domination that prevent the formation of radical social alternatives (cited in Chomsky, 2017). What intellectuals ought to be doing is challenging power through a class-based comradely critique, not abetting it (Slothuus, 2021a). However, this is difficult if dominant intellectuals are traditional, rather than organic, intellectuals, since they might know the subordinate position but neither feel nor understand it. Rivers’ essay concurs with such a view. This point is elaborated by Chomsky. He specifies how intellectuals have a unique ability in seeing through ideological distortions and mystifications, as well as “unique privileges” which gives them the ability and responsibility to “speak the truth and to expose lies,” as well as a duty to “see events in their historical perspective” (Chomsky, 2017). Along a Gramscian line of thought, this is not an intrinsic quality or characteristic of a particularly gifted section of society, but emergent thanks to particular individuals’ social function as intellectuals. However, a central recurring theme in Chomsky's essay is the perceived failure of intellectuals to criticize and challenge the status quo. Rather, intellectuals largely perform a status quo-abetting role, justifying and defending existing forms of domination and exploitation. In contrast to this view, Michael Walzer claims that social criticism should take the form of interpretation, and that this is not necessarily status quo-abetting (Walzer, 1993). Chomsky's critique is a result of their social function, and works bidirectionally—only those with a powerful enough standing can meaningfully challenge the status quo, yet only those who pose no significant threat to the status quo can rise to become powerful. Arguably, however, the influence of Chomsky seems to suggest precisely the opposite. According to Chomsky, as powerful intellectuals become affluent, their principles erode and the challenge they can pose to power consequently weakens. This suggests that social movements and subordinate people should not have very much faith in the emancipatory function of intellectuals. Yet Chomsky's dichotomy falls short of providing a sufficient conceptualization of intellectuals as well as strategy for their role and responsibility in effecting radical social change. By taking the negative effects of intellectuals on the American war effort in Vietnam specifically and the Cold War generally, he focusses too narrowly on the role intellectuals can have in reinforcing and justifying the status quo. To be sure, many intellectuals do this. There is nothing inherently progressive or radical about intellectuals, indeed they might generally defend the existing social order. One of the most famous contemporary intellectuals, Jordan Peterson, is a good example of this. Chomsky does not devote enough attention to the role of intellectuals in radically transformative social movements and is contextually blinded by the impotence of antiwar intellectual efforts. For example, the role played by intellectuals in the emergence of the new social movements and the new left in the 1960–1970s points to a significant role intellectuals can play. Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis were both instrumental in providing the theoretical backbone for a wide range of social struggles. Lenin, Mao, and Kwame Nkrumah are further examples. Likewise, Jerome Karabel demonstrates how intellectuals were instrumental in undermining the foundations of Communist rule in Eastern Europe (Karabel, 1996). A major similarity between Macdonald and Chomsky, which foreshadows the position of Rivers, is a concern with individual morality and responsibility. Despite Macdonald's contextualization and attention to structural forces, he nevertheless consolidates an individualist model when claiming that “only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster” (Chomsky, 2017). Yet this is a model of responsibility that anchors the strategic role of intellectuals in a moralistic and individualistic framework. One of many problems with this is that it incapacitates and depoliticizes by focusing the conversation and judgment on the moral standing of the person, their virtuousness, and the possibility of hypocrisy. This leaves little scope for agency because the focus is on the characteristics and personal identity of the writer and does not think of intellectuals as in symbiosis with movements and social struggles. As will soon be evident, Rivers was directly inspired by Chomsky's essay on intellectuals. Prior to Rivers’ intervention, the question of not just the role and responsibility of the intellectual tout court but specifically the Black intellectual had surfaced a number of times. After Du Bois’ formulation of the talented tenth, the vision of a tenth of Black Americans rising to a sufficient social status to function as the intellectual and spiritual leaders for Black emancipation, Harold Cruse's 1967 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is the most crucial contribution to discussions among Black intellectuals (Cruse, 1967). In a nutshell, Cruse's argument is that Black emancipation requires an amalgamation of Black intellectuals and ordinary Black people, akin to Gramsci's conception of organic intellectuals. On its 25th anniversary, Cruse's influential text was reconsidered in an edited volume by one of the foremost scholars of Black intellectuals, Jerry Watts (Watts, 2004). Yet here there is also no mention of Rivers or the debates by any of the authors, despite the timely and important interventions they otherwise provide. What makes this even more peculiar is that Rivers invited Watts to the initial debate, yet Watts did not participate. Neither did Orlando Patterson, who was also invited (Rivers, 1992). Despite the urgency Rivers appeals to, as well as the enduring contemporary topicality, it seems that the debates have been overlooked or ignored by scholars, possibly because of Rivers’ controversial and unorthodox positions, which can now be explicated. Rivers is suspicious of partisanship and as a community activist sees little prima facie benefit in unconditionally supporting progressive movements. “In the absence of a program or a mobilization of intellectuals around the needs of the poor, what is the functional, political difference between such conservatives as Alan Keyes or Thomas Sowell and such progressives as Henry Louis Gates or Cornel West?” (Rivers, 1992, p. 4). Both conservatives and progressives can speak the language of caring about the poor, and without tangible action, Rivers draws an equivalence between them. The role of theory and of intellectuals is predicated upon a program of action rather than empty talk. This conception of intellectuals can be called movement intellectuals because it develops a definite space that is nonetheless not vanguardist—intellectuals can use their particular resources to aid and accelerate social movements rather than conceive of or direct them. This is a process of legitimation, justification, and enunciation, all processes that (organic) intellectuals are particularly suited to fulfilling. This is closely related to the conception of intellectuals as a rear-guard, an idea developed for instance by Boaventura Sousa dos Santos (de Sousa Santos, 2016). The rear-guard intellectual in this context provides rich ideas for how White intellectuals can aid Black intellectuals in a meaningful way. Sousa dos Santos defines rear-guard intellectuals as those “intellectuals that contribute with their knowledge to strengthening the social struggles against domination and oppression to which they are committed” (de Sousa Santos, 2018, p. 9). This means stepping away from the limelight of vanguard intellectuals with their risk of condescension and power-grabbing and, without becoming a passive spectator, legitimating and supporting struggles. Rather than directing these social struggles, the rear-guard intellectual therefore uses their social, cultural, and academic capital to defend social movements against reactionary and status-quo biased criticism. The critical theorist is engaged in “the struggle of which his own thinking is a part and not something self-sufficient and separable from the struggle” (Horkheimer, 2002, p. 216). What really matters here are “the experiences of large, marginalized minorities and majorities that struggle against unjustly imposed marginality and inferiority” where the critical rear-guard theorist should serve the purpose of “strengthening their resistance” (de Sousa Santos, 2014, p. 9). While this might conceivably be rebuffed by questioning the extent to which this requires dispensing in full with the enlightenment concepts recalibrated above, de Sousa Santos is keen to dismiss such a claim: He does not want to dismiss “the rich Eurocentric critical tradition and [throw] it into the dustbin of history, thereby ignoring the historical possibilities of social emancipation in Western modernity,” he simply wants to go further than remain locked in place within the Western tradition (de Sousa Santos, 2014, p. 44). Because White rear-guard intellectuals qua being self-reflexive are attuned to the horrors of the exploitation and enslavement of Black Americans, they ought to maintain a healthy distance from the kind of White vanguardism that can smuggle in another set of oppressive norms under the guise of emancipation. Beyond the initial essay, the debates comprised two roundtable discussions at Harvard and MIT, alongside about a dozen subsequent commentaries in BR. A dress rehearsal for the Rivers debates took place in 1986 under the auspices of the Harvard W.E.B. DuBois Society's Graduate Colloquium, in which Harold Cruse, Cornel West, and Jeffrey Howard participated alongside a number of Harvard graduate students. The first roundtable, spurred on by the call to action, took place at Harvard on 30 November 1992 and involved bell hooks, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Glenn Loury, Margaret Burnham, and moderator Anthony Kwame Appiah. The second, held at MIT on November 17, 1993, involved Regina Austin, Selwyn Cudjoe, Randall Kennedy, and bell hooks, as well as moderator Margaret Burnham. Several written commentaries intervened in these debates, too, by Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner, Cathy J. Cohen, Noel Ignatiev, Harvey Cox, Clyde N. Wilson, Askold Melnyzcuk, Robin D.G. Kelly, Tony Martin, and Martin Kilson. Many Black intellectuals who could have enriched these debates did not participate, for instance Adolph Reed, Jr. and Patricia Hill Collins, despite the latter's publication (Hill Collins, 2005, 2013). Black women intellectuals were severely underrepresented in the debates, part of a larger issue of marginalization (Guy-Sheftall, 2004). Rivers’ immediate motivation for the essay was the rapidly rising deaths by homicide in Boston, including his own Dorchester neighborhood. These more than trebled between 1987 and 1990. Not only were most victims poor Black men, the rising homicide figures increased their proportion relative to the total number. As David M. Kennedy et al. note in the landmark US Department of Justice report Reducing Gun Violence: The Boston Gun Project's Operation Ceasefire, “crack cocaine trafficking had almost surely sparked t