America’s public-intellectual debate long excluded and marginalized black thinkers

Evidence

Reading Jacoby’s earlier attack on academics in higher education, it is clear that the lament over the decline of public intellectuals excluded black intellectuals, who appeared at the time to occupy the margins of scholarly and popular discourse. While specific individuals like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou received attention in the national media (as artists and not intellectuals), the scholarly and popular press focused primarily on whites when it addressed the general malaise in intellectual life in America. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2635

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to critique of the canon and whose voices count as ‘intellectual’ vs ‘artist’. — connects to: Anti-intellectualism and academic exclusion silence Black women from both ends