The notion of racial privilege in aesthetic judgment—which Ralph Ellison rejected in 1963—keeps reappearing in American culture. Photograph by James Whitemore / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

“You know what?” the novelist Rick Moody began his Sunday Times review of the novelist James McBride’s new book about James Brown, “Kill ’Em and Leave.” What thought compelled Moody to snag his reader’s attention with the print equivalent of a blind-side shove? This: “It’s an undeniable truth that when African-American writers write about African-American musicians, there are penetrating insights and varieties of context that are otherwise lost to the nonblack music aficionados of the world, no matter how broad the appeal of the musician under scrutiny.” By virtue of being black, Moody goes on, Stanley Crouch could plumb the depths of jazz and Nelson George could limn the contours of funk and soul more completely and knowledgeably than the most sensitive, music-literate, passionately enthusiastic white critic. Not only is this “undeniable,” it’s also, as Moody sees it, a really good thing: “This contemporary tendency in which black writers lay claim to the discourse of black music—this increasing tendency—is a much needed development for anyone who cares about modern music.”

I read the rest of the review, because I’m interested in James McBride and his work, but I never got over that lede. Moody’s point—there’s no other way to read it—is that race endows writers and critics with an extra dose of perceptual acumen. We hear James Brown with our ears, our heart, our imagination, our muscles, but also with the color of our skin, and there are essential qualities in James Brown’s music (Moody never says what they are) that a listener who is not black like Brown simply can’t pick up.

In Moody’s defense, one might say—this is the best one can say—that we respond to music, as to all art, out of our own experience, and that, in America, racial identity is experience. Both points are true, so true that they’re truisms—but, like most truisms, they don’t get you very far. In fact, they lead you down a dead-end street and into a sinkhole. The implications are so radically limiting that what looks like a compliment is more of a pander concealing an insult. Crouch, George, and McBride are supposed to be flattered that a part of their critical talent—maybe the crucial part—stems from being born black Americans. Watch out: a few more steps and you’ll find yourself saying they sure do have rhythm.

Think of Moody’s proposition in reverse: Mozart can be fully appreciated only by people of European background. You can take the most sophisticated, gifted, industrious nonwhite critic—sorry, he or she is just going to miss some crucial things (“penetrating insights and varieties of context”) for not having been born into the racial lineage of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its cultural prerogatives, its particular refinements. No one would dare say such a thing; it’s unthinkable—until you run across the story of Ryan Speedo Green.

Green is a bass-baritone and thirty-year-old rising star in the opera world; he’s also the product of a turbulent, violent childhood in southeastern Virginia. His tale is told in “Sing for Your Life,” a deeply moving book by the journalist Daniel Bergner, to be published later this year. (Bergner is a friend of mine.) Again and again on his way up, Green encounters a subtle form of racism. To some of his black classmates he’s “singing white people music . . . trying to be white,” and to some of his white admirers he’d be better off performing Joe in “Showboat” and singing “Ol’ Man River,” made famous by Paul Robeson, than attempting arias from “Don Giovanni.”

As for Green, he wants to sing opera at the highest level. Art is what allows for transcendence. He isn’t trying to live down his experience, but he won’t be defined by it, either. Being a black American is his heritage, not the sum of his existence. “He would perform the song again, he was sure of that,” Bergner writes after Green nearly breaks down upon being cajoled by yet another group of wealthy white people to sing “Ol’ Man River.” “But Joe and ‘Ol’ Man River’ would have to be part of something much, much larger, part of a career consisting of Verdi and Rossini, of Wagner and Mahler, of everything that had somehow taken root within him since he’d seen Denyce Graves in ‘Carmen’ and told [his teacher] Mr. Brown what he intended to do, of everything he now was.” Mozart belongs to Green every bit as much as James Brown does—more, in fact, because it’s the music of “Don Giovanni” that saves him as a man and makes him an artist.

Moody’s piece is symptomatic of a theme of our moment, one that’s become both commonplace and under-examined—such that Moody’s condescension got past the editors of the Times Book Review. The theme is that race is destiny—in this case, aesthetic destiny. It’s not a new theme. It keeps reappearing in American culture. And it doesn’t always show up in the darkest times. More often, it arrives in periods of heightened awareness, openness, and expectation.

To take a key example, the theme emerged in the early nineteen-sixties, at the height of the movement for black freedom and racial integration. In the summer of 1963, the poet LeRoi Jones (who later renamed himself Amiri Baraka) published an essay called “Jazz and the White Critic,” collected shortly after in his book “Blues People.” Jones took issue with white writers for appreciating blues and jazz as musical forms, rather than understanding them as “a collection of attitudes.” “The blues and jazz aesthetic, to be fully understood, must be seen in as nearly its complete human context as possible,” Jones wrote. “People made bebop; the question the critic must ask first is why?” The white critic too easily failed to hear in jazz a philosophy of social revolt. (Interestingly, Jones praised white musicians for making jazz their own—his argument was with the music writers.) Is there a difference between Moody’s blunt racial aesthetics and Jones’s more sophisticated analysis? Yes, in this sense: Jones was arguing that white critics, so far, had shown the limitations of their cultural experience. He wasn’t (yet) insisting on the essentialism that equates color with judgment. (This was the early Jones, still a member of the Village beat scene, before his life as Baraka took a turn into cultural nationalism, anti-Semitism, and forgettable writing.)

Ralph Ellison, no fan of Jones, and, later, even less of Baraka, reviewed “Blues People” respectfully in an issue of the just-launched New York Review of Books. But he found Jones’s ideas about black music flawed by ideological heavy-handedness: “Much has been made of the fact that Blues People is one of the few books by a Negro to treat the subject. Unfortunately for those who expect that Negroes would have a special insight into this mysterious art, this is not enough. Here too the critical intelligence must perform the difficult task which only it can perform.” In a few words, Ellison rejected the whole notion of racial privilege in aesthetic judgment. If anyone had the authority to do so, it was this onetime trumpet player, thoroughly versed in the culture of blues and jazz, who had also written one of the half-dozen or so greatest American novels, “Invisible Man.”

In the same pivotal year, 1963, Ellison found himself ensnared in another controversy about race and art. That fall, the critic Irving Howe published an essay in the magazine he edited, Dissent, called “Black Boys and Native Sons.” An homage to Richard Wright, the piece took some critical jabs at James Baldwin, who, years before, had committed an act of literary patricide by writing two essays—“Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Many Thousands Gone”—that directed a fusillade of analytical fire at novels of political melodrama, in particular at Wright’s “Native Son.” In doing so, the young Baldwin was announcing his own aesthetic freedom: he would create works of art, not of protest.