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. ...