Title: “Why Black Marxism, Why Now?”
Author: Robin D. G. Kelley
Publisher: Boston Review/University of North Carolina Press
Date: January 24, 2021
Form: Foreword to the third edition of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (excerpted in adapted form in Boston Review)
Keywords: Black studies, Marxism, Racial capitalism, Black radical tradition
Here’s a short passage from Robin Kelley’s new foreword to the third edition (out this month) of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism:
“The Black radical tradition is not a greatest hits list. Cedric was clear that the Black intellectuals at the center of this work were not the Black radical tradition, nor did they stand outside it—through praxis they discovered it. Or, better yet, they were overtaken by it.”
You’ve probably seen this kind of argumentative move before. Kelley’s concern here is to express as precisely as possible the relationship between Black intellectuals and the Black radical tradition—between particular thinkers and a tradition of thinking and doing politics. To achieve this, he runs through a list of four verbs: two that don’t describe this relationship, one that does describe it, and another that describes it even better. It’s that phrase “better yet” preceding the final formulation that you’ve likely encountered elsewhere.
A search of the folder containing my editorial work pulls up several matches: “better yet,” used in this same way, appears in a PhD dissertation, in a set of peer reviews for a book manuscript, and in drafts of at least two different journal articles. The phrase gets eleven matches from the archives of Social Text, in work by writers including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Eric Hayot, and Aimé Césaire (twice!). There are plenty variants, too: in my own writing, I’ve relied on the slightly more provisional “Or perhaps better”—though if I came across that phrase as an editor, I’d likely suggest cutting the “perhaps.” Sometimes it’s a different adverb or adjective: “or more concisely,” “or more bluntly,” “or more radically.”
The argument against this move might be that once you’ve reached the best formulation, you might as well delete the prior, less good formulations for the sake of conciseness and to avoid confusion. This is definitely sometimes true. “Better yet” also risks coming across as a bit self-indulgent: for example, in instances where “better” doesn’t mean more precise, but rather “more fancy-sounding-ly” or “more punnily.”
Kelley’s use of the device, though, is effective and worth learning from. What makes it slightly unusual, I think, is the directionality of the sequence. It’s not just a movement from one OK term to another better term. It’s something a bit more zig-zagging, even dialectical. (“Even” is another variant of this move!)
Kelley starts out with two terms he explicitly rejects:
“the Black intellectuals at the center of this work were not the Black radical tradition, nor did they stand outside it”
These two verbs—“were” and “stand outside”—express two polarities. At one extreme is the idea that the Black intellectuals he’s discussing were synonymous with the Black radical tradition; at the other, the idea that they were wholly distinct from it. That tells the reader that the truth lies somewhere between these two poles. Which brings us to the next candidate: “they discovered it.” Which, Kelley implies, is more accurate in terms of the proximity (but not identity) between intellectuals and tradition it signifies, but gets the voice—the who did what to whom—wrong. The final term—“were overtaken by”—makes a shift from active to passive, to foreground the tradition over the particular intellectuals. (“Discover,” with its colonialist connotations, suggests the opposite.)
I’d call this triangulation: moving toward the most precise articulation by positioning it somewhere between two poles. That’s why it wouldn’t work as well if Kelley deleted what comes before the “better yet”: the first two terms set up the spectrum, the third shows where, and the fourth switches the valence.
I like the idea of using “better yet” and its cousins as a way of showing thought in action, of taking the reader through your thought process. I also think it’s especially common in academic writing because academic writers are often trying to name concepts or gradations of concepts that haven’t yet been nailed down in language. But I think the strongest argument for “better yet” is in uses like Kelley’s: it’s about precision.
This is a post from Editorial Letter, by Philip Sayers. Editorial Letter is a newsletter about writing better arguments; you can read more about it here. Email me by replying to this newsletter or at pcgsayers@gmail.com.