When we were giants.
When we were giants. Olga Popova/Shutterstock.com

Back in 2003, the notable black American intellectual Manning Marable—who died in 2011, and whose last book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, is his masterpiece—invited me to contribute an essay on the state of black America culture to his journal Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. The thing that I confessed in the essay I submitted, and was published in the issue "Who Owns Black Art?," is the powerful and growing feeling that black culture is in decline.

The essay, "The Burden of the Golden Age," actually attacked this feeling, which caused me shame and anxiety. It was wrong to feel this way. Humans habitually inflate the past and undervalue the present. That's how it goes because the past is frozen in time, and so is readable. The present is constantly on the move. Who can make sense of it? Who can say which way it is really going? It is impossible for us to see if there is a Muhammad Ali among us. Nothing is settled. The future is cold when it comes to the past but red hot when it comes to our moment—the tip of time's arrow. Anything can still happen.

That was the crux of my essay.

Yet to this day, I still can't shake the horrible feeling that the age of black American greatness is over. We can expect no more Nina Simones, James Baldwins, Malcomn Xs, John Coltranes to come our way. The days of making them like that are done. But why might this be the case? What has changed? How did we go from Ali to Tyson to nothing so quickly? Was there something in the social climate of those distant times that made cultural giants possible?

I once read of a period in this planet's long history that had so much oxygen in the atmosphere, much more than we have today, that it produced dragonflies "as big as birds." Did the cultural climate of the 1960s expand the young Cassius Clay into a larger-than-life Muhammad Ali—this icon of American popular and political and linguistic culture? If so, and I cant help feeling this is so, we may never see the likes of him again.