This month has seen the publication of two major books by leading black British intellectuals, Paul Gilroy's polemic Between Camps and Caryl Phillips's reflective travelogue, The Atlantic Sound. The books, like their authors, are very different but Gilroy and Phillips have at least one thing in common: prestigious professorial posts at American universities - Gilroy at Yale, since quitting as a professor at Goldsmith's College in London last year, and Phillips at Columbia.

They are not alone: other key black or Asian scholars and artists with teaching posts in the US include the academics Homi Bhabha and Kobena Mercer, the writers Fred D'Aguiar and Merle Collins, the filmmaker Isaac Julien and the artist Winston Branch. This might be a success story: Britain's brightest and most creative wooed by a superpower with whose wealth and resources we cannot compete. But many don't see it that way.

Phillips, who insists he has "never left" his primary source of creativity thanks to air miles, says: "Tertiary education in Britain doesn't value the people who work in it, so there's a leakage to the US." He doesn't see this as a particularly black problem; white writers and academics are drawn west just as strongly, he says.

But Professor Lola Young of Middlesex University, who wrote recently in this newspaper that "black intellectuals . . . often have a hard time getting their work taken seriously", believes the lack of recognition has another dimension. "Britain is still in thrall to America," she says. "The media are more likely to seek African-American feminists, say, as cultural commmentators than black British intellectuals."

While the word "intellectual" is often accompanied by a sneer, some claim that turns to open scorn for those who theorise about race. Gilroy, who claims many in Britain see the term "black intellectual" as "oxymoronic", says: "Even to be interested in race, let alone to assert its centrality to British nationalism, is to sacrifice the right to be taken seriously."

Edward Said, in his 1992 Reith lectures, saw one task of the intellectual as "to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to human thought and communication". While academic writing can be abstruse, its ideas have a way of filtering into society; the current film of Mansfield Park would be impossible without Said's thought on Jane Austen's links to Caribbean slavery. Yet how are debates on, say, political asylum or institutional racism to be raised above the level of tabloid journalism if those doing rigorous, long-term thinking on such issues are derided?

Heidi Safia Mirza, professor of racial equality studies at Middlesex, says: "There's no critical capacity to talk about race issues here; we have no such intellectual tradition. We talk in very regressive ways; 19th-century ideas about genes and blood are at the heart of a lot of 'commonsense' thinking, which is not challenged in schools."

The result, says Gilroy, is that "political and policy debate gets jammed". He accuses the government of unleashing a lethal xenophobia partly by paying no heed to historical links between race, nationalism and immigration.

Few would see US race politics as more healthy, but the ubiquity of African-American thinkers such as Skip Gates, Cornell West and Patricia Williams as media pundits is in marked contrast to Britain, where, as Gilroy says: "It's incredible that Sivanandan and Stuart Hall have had to wait till now to be admitted to the magic circle of media commentators."

The writer Ferdinand Dennis, who has coedited a new anthology of three generations of black and Asian writers and intellectuals, says: "It's easier to get attention if we're victims and beaten up by racist thugs, when they can pour liberal sympathy on us, than if we're reflecting on our own experience here."

Kobena Mercer at Cornell University, who works in diaspora studies, says there is a longer tradition of debating race issues in the US. "Universities reflect the history of race relations in the two countries; because the US was a segregated society, official institutions have had to deal with race in a way they haven't in Britain.

It's hard for me to find an institutional niche home in Britain, partly because my work cuts across disciplines, and I've found an audience here. But the tradeoff is that while America recognises work like mine as a legitimate area of study, the culture is still dealing with a legacy of segregation."

Julien, who teaches a semester a year at Harvard, agrees: "London's wonderful on a cultural and social level; there's a certain fluidity, mobility, ease. And for people of colour, there's no question that Britain is the best place in Europe. But institutionally, especially in London, there's a real resistance. A retrospective show is opening at the Bard museum in New York, and in Sydney and Sweden, but it can't find a place at the Tate or the Hayward. On the one hand you have artistic recognition of Chris Ofili and Steve McQueen [who won the Turner prize in successive years], and on the other there's still institutional disrespect."

There is an unwritten code, Julien suggests, of not drawing attention to race: "Assimilation is about repudiating one's racial status, proving yourself beyond it. In a way the US is race obsessed - but at least they recognise there's a problem."

Yet the very friction of institutional battles can sustain some. David Dabydeen, professor of Caribbean studies at Warwick University, who has taught in Virginia, says: "It's much more challenging and energising to be in Britain than America. I didn't feel there was anything to kick against there; the fights in the 60s - for intellectual parity and seeing African culture and history as worthy of the academy - were largely won. In England, they still have to be."

But while Gilroy intends to return to Britain he warns of a knock-on effect for future generations: "If you want to make younger black people interested in education and the arts, you need black folks visibly successful outside music and sport, instead of saying you have to go somewhere else to succeed."

• Between Camps is published by Allen Lane, £22.50. The Atlantic Sound is published by Faber and Faber, £16.99.