If You Ain't Black, You Ain't No 'Foremost Public Intellectual'

I don't take Ta-Nehisi Coates all that seriously. Reading him, fifty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, you'd think Martin Luther King Jr. never lived. Shoot, "12 Years a Slave" might as well have taken place during the Reagan administration.

So, his recent self-loathing rant about how Melissa-Harris Perry's the country's "foremost public intellectual" was just one more unintentional parody from the left's Wonderland of racist recrimination. (It's here, for what it's worth, "What It Means to Be a Public Intellectual.")

The piece caused a Twitter war when Politico's Dylan Byers slammed Coates idiocy. And ding! Byers was promptly attacked as racist. Byers' response is here, "What it means to be a public intellectual."

I saw this as it was developing, but didn't blog it at the time. But the controversy caught the attention of AoSHQ, "Ta-Nehisi Coates: Melissa Harris Perry Is The Country's Foremost Public Intellectual, And If You Disagree, You're Racist."

Yet, it's funny that for the left the country's "foremost public intellectuals" have to be black. Almost 20 years ago, at the Atlantic (ironically, the same outlet now employing Coates) published Robert Boynton's, "The New Intellectuals." You can see where the piece is headed by the cover artwork.

And from the essay (the Atlantic, March 1995):

ONE of the few things most intellectuals will agree on in public is that the age of the public intellectual is over. By and large, American intellectuals are private figures, their difficult books written for colleagues only, their critical judgments constrained by the boundaries of well-defined disciplines. Think of an intellectual today, and chances are he is a college professor whose "public" barely extends beyond the campus walls.

This was not always the case. Originally an intellectual was someone who was very much engaged in the public realm; the term itself was coined to describe those who waged the campaign in defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1898, Emile Zola among them. Further designating an intellectual as "public" would have struck a late-nineteenth-century listener as tautological, if not absurd. By then the core elements of a definition of the public intellectual were already in place: he was a writer, informed by a strong moral impulse, who addressed a general, educated audience in accessible language about the most important issues of the day.

That the charges against Dreyfus stemmed from anti-Semitism lent those intellectuals defending him an aura of Jewishness, and this association with the word was strengthened when the Jewish immigrants on New York's Lower East Side who gathered together in the early 1900s to study American literature also called themselves intellectuals.

Today our image of the public intellectual is locked safely in the past, associated almost exclusively with the literary and social critics who gathered around the Partisan Review in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Such writers as Philip Rahv, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and Daniel Bell formed the core of the New York Intellectuals, a group famous for its brazen style, which Howe once described as a combination of "free-lance dash, peacock strut [and] knockout synthesis."

The world of the Partisan Review was one in which ideas mattered and battles were waged in small, well-read journals–the historian Richard Hofstadter called the Partisan Review the "house organ of the American intellectual community." The favored form of expression was the literary essay; although wide-ranging and often demanding, it was free of technical jargon. Composed with the care of the expert and the passion of the anti-specialist, these essays moved easily between literary and political judgments before bringing them together in a larger moral conclusion. As cultural radicals, the New Yorkers synthesized socialist politics and literary modernism, internationalizing the culture of America by bringing the best of European arts and letters to its shores. They also held convictions about the primacy of high culture and the special role of the intellectual in society.

Their seemingly endless debates–over communism and the viability of an anti-Stalinist left, and, later, over competing forms of anti-communism–echoed the succession of political challenges confronting America, a sympathetic resonance that in turn gave these writers an influence far exceeding their numbers. Oppositional figures who prized their place on the margins, dissenting from conventional wisdom ("even when they agreed with it," Kazin noted), they believed that being seduced by mainstream culture was the greatest evil that could befall a true intellectual. "Alienation," Howe recalled, "was a badge we carried with pride."

Chronicled and romanticized in a flood of biographies and memoirs, the New York clan has become a veritable gold standard for public intellectuals. Now more praised than read, its members are literary curiosities in the museum of culture; even their most important works-Wilson's To the Finland Station, Trilling's Liberal Imagination, Kazin's On Native Grounds, Bell's The End of Ideology, Rahv's Image and Idea–are largely ignored or out of print.

The public intellectual's death knell was sounded by Russell Jacoby in his book The Last Intellectuals (1987), an indictment of contemporary academic irrelevance which argued that the New Yorkers were not only America's greatest public thinkers but also its last. Academic specialists, rather than sophisticated generalists, now dominated intellectual life, leaving us duller for the loss. "One thousand radical sociologists, but no [C. Wright] Mills; three hundred critical literary theorists but no Wilson," Jacoby lamented. "If the western frontier closed in the 1890s, the cultural frontier closed in the 1950s." With its fashionably apocalyptic title and nostalgic tone, Jacoby's book was a hit, sparking a heated debate ("Hey, what about us?" cried an army of radical academics of every political stripe). Yet even though individual thinkers here and there were cited against Jacoby's thesis, a consensus soon formed that the era of the public intellectual was indeed over.

But no sooner had the last opinion piece about Jacoby's book been written than another group of intellectuals began getting quite a bit of attention. If they didn't conform precisely to Jacoby's ideal of the public intellectual–which bears so close a resemblance to the New Yorkers that it is difficult to use as a general definition–they were at the very least developing a significant presence by consistently and publicly addressing some of the most heavily contested issues of the day. The differences were striking, though: Whereas Jacoby's intellectuals were freelance writers based in New York, most of this group is ensconced in elite universities across the country. Whereas the New Yorkers were predominantly male and Jewish, this group includes women and is entirely gentile. In contrast to the New Yorkers, who were formed by their encounters with socialism and European culture, these intellectuals work solidly within the American grain, and are products of the political upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s. And, most significant, they are black.

A COMPLEX FATE

WHEN the best-selling author Cornel West, now a Harvard professor, and the critic Stanley Crouch appeared on The Charlie Rose Show to discuss the connection between race and cities during the Los Angeles riots, they contributed to a tradition of urban social philosophy which originated with Lewis Mumford. When Henry Louis Gates Jr., also of Harvard, denounced black anti-Semitism on the New York Times op-ed page, he no doubt reached a wider audience than Norman Podhoretz ever did with similar pieces on black-Jewish relations. When Stephen Carter, of Yale, appeared on the Today show to talk about the intricacies of competing affirmative-action policies in the wake of Justice Clarence Thomas's nomination, he took his place alongside Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin in explaining the travails of a successful minority figure in a WASP-dominated culture.

Toni Morrison, whose fiction and criticism regularly (and simultaneously) sit on best-seller lists, wins both Nobel and Pulitzer prizes; the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson's study of freedom wins the National Book Award; Shelby Steele receives the National Book Critics Circle Award for his best-selling meditation on race; David Levering Lewis wins a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of W.E.B. Du Bois; the essayist Stanley Crouch receives a MacArthur "genius" grant; West, Gates, Morrison, and Steele all get six-figure offers for their next books. Add to these names thinkers such as Patricia Williams, William Julius Wilson, bell hooks, Houston Baker, Randall Kennedy, Michael Eric Dyson, Gerald Early, Jerry Watts, Robert Gooding-Williams, Nell Painter, Thomas Sowell, Ellis Cose, Juan Williams, Lani Guinier, Glenn Loury, Michelle Wallace, Manning Marable, Adolph Reed, June Jordan, Walter Williams, and Derrick Bell, among others, who appear in magazines and newspapers and on television programs around the country, and one begins to suspect that we are witnessing something bigger than a random blip on the screen of public intellectual culture.

In addressing a large and attentive audience about today's most pressing issues, these thinkers have begun taking their places as the legitimate inheritors of the mantle of the New York Intellectuals. Street-smart, often combative, and equipped with a strong moral sense, they, too, have a talent for shaking things up. This is not at all to say that the current constellation represents America's first black public intellectuals, which would be to ignore the tremendous contributions of such figures as Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, St. Clair Drake, E. Franklin Frazier, John Hope Franklin, and many others. Rather, the claim is that although opinions may differ about the work of individual contemporary authors, as a group they are indisputably receiving extraordinary attention, especially considering the marginal role of the intellectual in America. Nearly all between the ages of roughly thirty-five and fifty-five, the new black intellectuals have achieved a level of recognition usually reserved for near-emeritus figures with numerous books behind them and few years ahead.

There's lots more at the link, but there's a vast chasm in the quality of the intellectuals mentioned.

Who'd be your pick for the country's "foremost intellectual"? Or, who'd have been been your pick back in 1995? We hardly recognize half of those names nowadays, and Michael Eric Dyson's no match for the genuine intellectual giant Walter Williams. (Derrick Bell, who passed away, was Obama's Marxist mentor at Harvard, if you recall.)

Whatever. I still think it's impossible Ta-Nehisi didn't pick Soledad O'Brien as the nation's foremost public intellectual. Stop dissing Soledad!