In 1960, Amiri Baraka (then still known as LeRoi Jones) wrote an essay called “Jazz And The White Critic.” His argument was that critics of the time were fundamentally misunderstanding jazz because they were attempting to interpret it as music alone, instead of thinking about it first and foremost as the artistic expression of Black people in America. He wrote, “We take for granted the social and cultural milieu and philosophy that produced Mozart. As Western people, the socio-cultural thinking of eighteenth-century Europe comes to us as a legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the twentieth-century West. The socio-cultural philosophy of the Negro in America (as a continuous historical phenomenon) is no less specific and no less important for any intelligent critical speculation about the music that came out of it.”