[5] The racism and violence he claims to have experienced as a youth would later prompt him to conclude: "I had been discriminated against and called 'Nigger' enough to think that what America needed was a good Black Revolution.
"[5] He more recently revised that judgment in his 2007 book combining memoir and critique titled I Don't Hate the South (Oxford University Press).
[3] From 1999 to 2006, Baker was the Susan Fox and George D. Beischer Professor of English and editor of American Literature at Duke University.
[6] Baker's work in African-American literary studies has been called "groundbreaking" for his ability to connect theory about the texts with the historical conditions of the beginning of the African-American community, namely, both their uprooting from Africa and their ability to maintain their African heritage through an emphasis on spirituality and on autobiography, which allowed them to "reinforce and reinvent self-worth in the midst of their debasement".
[3] Baker argues that the attempts to forge a black aesthetic in the 1960s were not simply descriptive, but actively creative and thus based on—and distorted by—the writers' idealism.
In Turning South Again: Rethinking Modernism/Rereading Booker T (2001), Baker suggests that being a black American, even a successful one, amounts to a kind of prison sentence.
[2] Baker also harshly criticized then-Senator Barack Obama's widely praised race-centered speech ("A More Perfect Union") stemming from controversial remarks given by his pastor: "Sen. Obama's 'race speech' at the National Constitution Center, draped in American flags, was reminiscent of the Parthenon concluding scene of Robert Altman's Nashville: a bizarre moment of mimicry, aping Martin Luther King Jr., while even further distancing himself from the real, economic, religious and political issues so courageously articulated by King from a Birmingham jail.
[8] More generally, Baker's letter criticized colleges and universities for the "blind-eyeing of male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.