What We Are Reading:
The State of Culture

Samantha Hill

In the new issue of Salmagundi,Thomas Chatterton Williams, Margo Jefferson, Darryl Pinckney, John McWhorter, and Orlando Patterson debate “The Black Intellectual & The Condition of the Culture”:
 

            Thomas Chatterton Williams: It’s an honor to be here with writers and thinkers whom I’ve looked up to and tried to model myself on for years, as I’ve tried to find my own way. In preparing for this conference over the past year, I kept returning to Bob Boyers’ original framing 1 through the lens of Harold W. Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. That book is one of the works like [Allan Bloom’s] The Closing of the American Mind that people may or may not have read, but whose title alone seems to resonate with everyone for an enormous variety of reasons, though often, as is certainly the case for me, not for the same reasons that motivated the author in the first place. But as I thought about it, it occurred to me—as others have pointed out—that one of Cruse’s undeniable achievements was really just to think long and hard about what American-ness, and thus identity, means and could mean. This was an urgent project in his day, and it may indeed be of even greater urgency in our own. What would it mean to re-think American-ness in the post-Obama, post-post-racial era of Donald Trump? What I liked about Cruse was that he was so thoroughly anti-status-quo, so unimpressed with radical rhetoric that did not entail some connection with meaningful action. This is, I think—a distinction between rhetoric and action—worth dwelling on. Action can be defined pretty generously. It need not have anything to do with a determination to go out and get arrested, but at minimum, I think, moving beyond mere rhetoric requires some form of alignment between one’s words and one’s behavior.…