Michelle Alexander is a civil rights attorney. She has serious vocational skills, i.e., independence and the capacity to pay the bills - when and if she says unpopular things or speaks truth to power. She has powerfully documented unpopular history, practice, and facts that directly speak truth to power - and done so in a way that is broadly accessible to the American public.
These are minimum baseline requirements for serious public intellectuals, doing serious work for the common good.
Compare and contrast that with booboo the fool who was crying and reading a tele-prompted apology to the Romneys this past Saturday morning. When it's your job to compromise, clown, and entertain to fill up time on teevee, when you're answerable to a media boss, and when you lack legitimate skills to practice or teach a trade independent of a patron i.e., when your scholarship is in the dubious fields of gender, race, or sexual identity (subjects which don't even qualify as liberal arts humanities) and which guarantee the requirement of a patron who wants to use you as an organ of propaganda - YOU DON'T QUALIFY AS A SERIOUS PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL PERIOD.
For damn certain nothing remotely approaching America's foremost public intellectual, and anybody pretending otherwise in public is simply exhibiting their own intellectual failings - until of course they get their ass handed to them in their own disqus comments which they then promptly and predictably close to forestall further humiliation....,
