The black public intellectual need not be wise, but he had better have answers. There were dissenters in the tradition. There was Derrick Bell, for instance. But mostly I felt the expectation that if I was writing or talking about problems, I should also be able to identify an immediately actionable way out-preferably one that could garner a sixty-vote majority in the Senate. There was a kind of insanity to this-like telling doctors to only diagnose that which they could immediately and effortlessly cure. But that was the job of the black public intellectual-not to stimulate, not to ask the questions that kept them up at night, not even just to interpret the drums but to interpret them in some way that promised redemption. This was not work for writers and scholars, who thrive in privacy and study, but performance-prophets who live for the roar of the crowd.
( Ta-Nehisi Coates )
[ We Were Eight Years in Power: ]
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