I recently heard a joke about a fish. It’s been around for a while, but it was new to me: One day, two young fish were blissfully swimming along, enjoying their youth and the confidence that springs from the faith that one understands the world with perfect clarity. Coming toward them was an elder fish, with an earned, patient happiness that comes with knowledge and self-awareness. As they passed, the older fish acknowledged the younger ones with a greeting, “How’s the water?” The younger fish continued on their way in silence for a few moments. Then one of the younger fish said to the other, “What the hell is water?”
They could not see the obvious for its ubiquity. In their ignorance, they took for granted the very thing that sustained them.
Rereading The Last Intellectuals, I flashed back to my oral exams 20 years ago and found myself wondering, again, how one could write about the New York intellectuals without engaging the ubiquitous and brilliant troika of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. Those figures, among others, made up my water.
For a time in the 1990s, you couldn’t turn a corner without running into a new essay about the “new black public intellectual.” But what made them “new”? In my own research, I ran into these “new intellectuals” across the length of the 20th century. Were they new because a different generation of critics discovered the water around them? Or are we all swimming in different water?
In 1968, Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party’s minister of information, published Soul on Ice, a brilliant and disturbing reflection on structural inequality, race, masculinity, violence, and American culture — I suppose I could have just said “American culture.” Cleaver wrote about the systemic determination to refuse to believe in the full breadth of black humanity and how that refusal caused so much damage in the black world. This is a point that cannot be emphasized enough, because it underscores an abiding theme in black critical discourse and because for so many black intellectuals, the very act of creating a critical discourse was about survival.
Feminist theorists like Audre Lorde made this much plain:
“For women ... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. ... The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”
We have heard this urgency in other scholars and writers. For example, in the first of the two essays in The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin tells his nephew, or, rather, prepares his nephew for a country dedicated to black impossibility: “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.”
Fifty-two years later and here we are bearing witness to a new black public intellectual who seems fairly ubiquitous and who, with his hard-hitting and graceful critiques, is delineating how invisibility and impossibility have made themselves punishingly manifest in black life. I am referring to Ta-Nehisi Coates.
In his recent book, Between the World and Me, Coates borrows explicitly from Baldwin’s structure in The Fire Next Time — Coates’s book is an extended letter to his son — and builds upon Baldwin’s assessment of our national character. Coates’s letter is written with a moral and mortal urgency that is linked directly to the murder of one of his Howard University classmates and, to Coates, the physical embodiment of black possibility. Between the World and Me is a simultaneous canvassing of American history and the contemporary moment. Collectively, the past and the present are intertwined in often brutalizing and heartbreaking ways, both in service, Coates claims, to a logic of structural domination.
‘So much of the work of black public intellectuals is dedicated to insisting that they even exist.’
Claudia Rankine saw this as well in Citizen: An American Lyric, a book that won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was nominated for the same award in criticism. (Poetry, it turns out, is not a luxury for Rankine, either. It is critique and genre and fundamental.) Rankine captured the same moral rage we find in Coates. Here, though, there is more nuanced language, which also speaks to a sorrowful mixture of resignation and resilience. Rankine’s is not defeated or passive, but she knows that the battle is long and that friendly fire is endemic to that reality. You hear this when she writes, “You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.”
Ralph Ellison prefaced Coates and Rankine. In “The World and the Jug,” what I consider his finest piece of critical commentary, Ellison took particular umbrage with Irving Howe in the 1950s — at the height of the rage for the New York intellectuals who are so important to Jacoby’s book — for Howe’s inability or unwillingness to believe that there might be more than one type of “Negro writer.” Howe was a friend of a certain type to Ellison, and this is part of the reason Howe’s insistences were so galling. Blacks had a broad and complicated humanity that was no different from that of any other people, but Howe could not see it and criticized Ellison and Baldwin for failing to follow the lead of Richard Wright and produce “protest literature.” Ellison unleashed his anger:
I did not intend to take the stance of the “knowing Negro writer” against the “presuming white intellectual.” While I am without a doubt a Negro and a writer, I am also an American writer, and while I am more knowing than Howe where my own life and its influences are concerned, I took the time to question his presumptions as one responsible for contributing as much as he is capable to the clear perception of American social reality. For to think unclearly about that segment of reality in which I find my existence is to do myself violence. To allow others to go unchallenged when they distort that reality is to participate not only in that distortion but to accept, as in this instance, a violence inflicted upon the art of criticism.
Cleaver. Lorde. Baldwin. Coates. Rankine. Ellison. The list goes on, and the observations compound one another. Ideas contort with structural realities that terminate, almost inevitably, in violence. Language deflates, and compels its authors to more hard work, as it falls upon ears that will not hear or eyes that refuse to see. Indeed, the fact that so much of the work of black public intellectuals is dedicated to insisting that they even exist, that they possess a fundamental humanity that speaks to their race, or for their race, or in spite of their race ... it is all so damning.
It has a long past. It is the present. It will have a future.
It is the water.
Jonathan Holloway is dean of Yale College and a professor of African-American studies, history, and American studies.
