There they were, two Fridays ago, these Uncle Toms, Aunt Jemimas, Steppin Fetchits, Jacky Jackies — you come up with the term of abuse and I will hurl it — hobnobbing with federal Communications Minister Helen Coonan at the gala launch of the National Indigenous Television network.

He is well read on a wide range of subjects, certainty, but he is hardly adequately engaged with the academic literature across the plethora of fields he so often seeks to adjudicate definitively. Maybe that’s not a fair expectation, but some more modesty in his approach would go a long way to defuse the problem. After all, even a true pragmatic, libertarian polymath such as Richard Posner — who makes many real academic contributions in a wide variety of fields — cannot avoid charges of his lack of depth in pure economics or pure jurisprudence; And Pearson isn’t a Posner by any means.

Pearson tends to fill in the gaps in his approach with narrative - latching on to specific personalities and creating goodies and baddies from what he finds. Sometimes these narratives arrive with some real sensibility about them, but other times they are little better than square-peg-in-a-round-hole agitprop. His farcical article on Obama and Shelby Steele is a head-desk case in point of the latter.

I think sometimes Pearson has carried the mallet of rugged individualism around for so long that he can only really see do-gooder left-liberal moles to whack, real or imaginary. That’s definitely a real blind spot, and it dampens his ability to cut through on the issues, which can be magnificent when it is aimed and calibrated properly.

There’s also this funny political obstinacy I get about him which strikes me as somewhat petty and counter-productive. Now, I don’t pretend to really understand what it must have been like to manoeuvre through successive governments, deal with all the actors who have contributed to the failure of indigenous policy fail over the years, including the stereotypical naïve lefties who are his bete noire. However, I really cannot fathom how he became so ensconced as an apologist for Howard right-wing zeitgeist in the Liberal Party, alienating so many potential allies with indulgent attacks, which look plainly foolish in light of Rudd’s then imminent ascendency. In that sense, he shares a certain degree of self-inflicted lost-in-space political irrelevance with someone like Christopher Hitchens.

Agreed on the moratorium on the slur ‘uncle tom’ — it’s unhelpful and unfair — don’t use it.

An example of this was revealed in an interview Mr Pearson did not so long ago about indigenous education and disadvantage. He said words to the effect of “I send my kids to private schools because I can, who wouldn’t want to do that if they could”.

Well, Mr Person I wouldn’t.

I don’t believe that we should structure our educational system around a concept that puts decent education up for sale. A system that routinely disadvantages kids due to their socio-economic status. A system which makes parents feel they are denying their children a start in life by not sending them to a private school. A system that sees fathers trying to hold two jobs to pay school fees simply so that their kids can succeed. A system that entrenches advantage and entitlement.

As an aboriginal person, Noel Pearson was subject to disadvantage that others can only imagine, and his perspective on both his own experiences and those of his people are an invaluable resource for those of us far more fortunate – the ignorant white majority. However, as an educated person, his approach to educational solutions can be as biased as the next man and should be assessed that way.

To truly measure the worth of Mr Pearson’s words, we need to respect his heritage and experiences but also understand that he is a privately educated man in a white world with his own white-man biases.

Mr Pearson is disparaging of the progressive left, but as the disadvantaged in white Australia will surely attest, the system of private education established and protected by the conservative right will not provide the answer which he seeks.