Black thinkers are either in terminal decline or reviving the world of "public intellectuals," according to current and diametrically opposed covers on two of America's most determinedly intellectual magazines.
You pays your $2.95 and you takes your choice, to paraphrase Punch, the sadly missed British satirical magazine.
Your choice is:
The March 6 issue of the weekly New Republic proclaims "The Decline of the Black Intellectual" on a black-on-black cover.
The March Atlantic Monthly, on a cover showing a clenched fist holding a fountain pen against a white background, announces "The New Intellectuals."
"Sophisticated, politically, morally aware, at times fiercely contentious," says the Atlantic Monthly cover blurb, "the breed known as 'public intellectuals' has seemed close to extinction. Suddenly they're back. And they're black."
At the New Republic, reporter-researcher Andy Lamey allowed as how the two magazines focusing on the same subject, albeit from different angles, "was one of those coincidences that come with the territory."
At the Atlantic, editor Cullen Murphy also chalked it up to coincidence.
"It certainly seems to be one of those topics in the air," he says. "I guess it's not surprising magazines print the same things."
Mr. Murphy said he hadn't read the New Republic piece, "but just reading the covers we seem to have a difference of opinion."
Both magazines have a liberal bent, but the New Republic is far less doctrinaire and predictable than Atlantic Monthly.
The Atlantic Monthly article by Robert S. Boynton, a prolific writer on cultural affairs, was seen at the New Republic as an overview of contemporary black intellectuals.
Leon Wieseltier's piece, Mr. Lamey says, was an "engaged," "in depth" critique of one black intellectual, Cornel West, the Harvard philosopher who wrote the best-selling "Race Matters" and a half-dozen other books on being black in America.
Mr. Wieseltier is the New Republic's literary editor and resident intellectual. Mr. Boynton has also written for the New Republic occasionally.
Both writers went looking for "public intellectuals." Neither Mr. Boynton nor Mr. Wieseltier really defines a public intellectual other than somebody who thinks a bit and speaks or writes in public.
Mr. Boynton found a consensus for declaring the species extinct. He thought maybe a group of African-American writers and thinkers could resuscitate it.
In his search for public intellectuals, Mr. Wieseltier read Mr. West's books. He didn't like them. He doesn't like the way Mr. West thinks, the way he writes, or even the way he dresses. Mr. Wieseltier, in fact, doesn't so much as critique Mr. West, who couldn't be reached for comment, as whack him.
The books, he says, are "almost completely worthless."
That judgment comes in the second paragraph of his three-part, 5 1/2 page essay. He takes off from there:
"West's work is noisy, tedious, slippery," he says, not to mention "sectarian, pedantic and self-endeared. . . . His judgment of ideas is eccentric." And then: "West's eccentricity is surpassed by West's vanity."
Etc., etc.
Mr. Boynton's piece in the Atlantic Monthly is a cooler, more measured survey of 20th-century "public intellectuals."
He compares contemporary African-American thinkers with the first black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier and John Hope Franklin, the generation that included Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray and James Baldwin and the mostly Jewish New Yorkers of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s like Philip Rahv, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin.
All of these people are household names in households that subscribe to the New Republic and Atlantic Monthly, a couple hundred thousand Americans.
Mr. Boynton says "our image of the public intellectual is locked safely in the past." He sees a chance for a revival in people like Mr. West, Hen
ry Louis Gates, Stephen Carter, Toni Morrison, Derrick Bell and Patricia Williams.
He's much kinder to Mr. West than Mr. Wieseltier is.
In "Race Matters," Mr. Boynton says, Mr. West "lays out a distinctive political-philosophical vision, rejecting ethnic nationalism and exploring the subtle connections between marginalized groups -- blacks and Jews, for instance, who have deeply rooted common interests that, he argues, ought to bring them together."