Jonathan Scott Holloway

Two takes on Ta-Nehisi Coates

A curious ubiquity, which renders its subjects at once pervasive and imperceptible, stands as an enduring element of the condition of black intellectuals in American scholarly and public life. For a time in the 1990s, for instance, one couldn’t turn a corner without encountering an essay about the emergence of the ‘new black public intellectual’. But what made figures like Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Cornel West or Toni Morrison ‘new’? Other ‘new’ public intellectuals have been present throughout the twentieth century: take, for example, the ubiquitous and brilliant mid-century troika of Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Were these 1990s ‘new black public intellectuals’ so designated simply because a new generation of critics had discovered them? Had past black intellectuals’ ubiquity led, somehow, to a perception of their absence? Today we are bearing witness to a new articulation of a fairly ubiquitous black public intellectual: Ta-Nehisi Coates, cultural critic, novelist and national correspondent for The Atlantic. Since skyrocketing to prominence with the 2014 article, ‘The Case for Reparations’, and more recently with his book, Between the World and Me, Coates has garnered a litany of prestigious awards, including the MacArthur Prize and the National Book Award. Given the hyper-visibility of his accomplishments, it seems paradoxical that Coates’s work is dedicated to delineating how invisibility and impossibility have made themselves punishingly manifest in black life. He is not the first to come to this conclusion. In 1968, Eldridge Cleaver, soon-to-be Black Panther Party Minister of Information, published Soul on Ice, a brilliant and disturbing reflection on structural inequality, race, masculinity, violence and American culture. Reflecting on American popular culture and absence/invisibility, Cleaver writes that, during the upheavals of the 1960s,