And nowhere is this yearning more pronounced than in the racial climate that so divides our nation. They speak out with an effectiveness that white intellectuals simply cannot match. At the same time, however, black intellectuals are made to pay for whatever measure of fame comes with their territory. That is why I have called attention to the treatments West and Loury received in recent months. For the Marxist tradition in particular, crisis is all there is, and calm is only crisis denied.
Modern intellectuals roll to be real.
And then history obliges, and the crisis comes, and the comedy of the public intellectual begins. It is not in the absence of crisis that he cannot think. It is in the presence of crisis that he cannot think. Things start breaking up and things start breaking down, and the public intellectual cannot exceed his conventions and his vocabularies and his projects. The public intellectual begins to seem like nothing more than a person who is smart in public.