Who's afraid of post-blackness? : what it means to be Black now

by Tour

Paper Book, 2011

Status

Available

Call number

305.896/073

Genres

Publication

New York : Free Press, 2011.

Description

In the age of Obama, racial attitudes have become more complicated and nuanced than ever before. Inspired by a president who is unlike any Black man ever seen on our national stage, we are searching for new ways of understanding Blackness. In this book, the author, a commentator and journalist tackles what it means to be Black in America today. He begins by examining the concept of "Post-Blackness," a term that defines artists who are proud to be Black but don't want to be limited by identity politics and boxed in by race. He soon discovers that the desire to be rooted in but not constrained by Blackness is everywhere. In this book he argues that Blackness is infinite, that any identity imaginable is Black, and that all expressions of Blackness are legitimate. Here, he divulges intimate, funny, and painful stories of how race and racial expectations have shaped his life and explores how the concept of Post-Blackness functions in politics, society, psychology, art, culture, and more. He knew he could not tackle this topic all on his own so he turned to 105 of the most important luminaries of our time for frank and thought-provoking opinions, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris-Perry, Harold Ford Jr., Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Glenn Ligon, Paul Mooney, New York Governor David Paterson, Greg Tate, Aaron McGruder, Soledad O'Brien, Kamala Harris, Chuck D, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and many others. By engaging this eclectic group, and employing his insight, courage, and wit, the author delivers a clarion call on race in America and how we can change our perceptions for a better future. Destroying the notion that there is a correct way of being Black, this book changes how we perceive race.… (more)

Media reviews

New York Times

Much has been written on the benefits that accrued to the generation of African-Americans reaping the rewards of the civil rights revolution. But we have heard surprisingly little from those in the post-civil-rights age about what these benefits have meant to them, and especially how they view

themselves as black people in an America now led by a black president. In his new book, Touré’s aim is to provide an account of this “post-black” condition, one that emerged only in the 1980s but by the ’90s had become the “new black.” One of his goals, Touré writes in “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now,” is “to attack and destroy the idea that there is a correct or legitimate way of doing blackness.” Post-blackness has no patience with “self-appointed identity cops” and their “cultural bullying.” For all its occasional contradictions (why the put-down of the comedian Byron Allen for his Middle American cultural fluency?) and omissions (there is no consideration of the ways immigrant blacks and mixed-race people are contributing to post-black heterogeneity), this is one of the most acutely observed accounts of what it is like to be young, black and middle-class in contemporary America. Touré inventively draws on a range of evidence — autobiography, music, art, interviews, comedy and popular social analysis — for a performance carried through with unsparing honesty, in a distinctive voice that is often humorous, occasionally wary and defensive, but always intensely engaging.

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— 1 more

Washington Post

Two new books take radically different approaches to these questions of race introspection — one academic, the other anecdotal. Both are mature and serious works that seek to get us past our laziest assumptions about race. Each managed to expand my notion of what it means to be black in America,

and why it matters. The more readable and entertaining of the two is pop-culture journalist Touré’s “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?” With liberal doses of personal experience, Touré demolishes the notion that there is only one way to be racially authentic. He is, after all, a black man who went to prep school, jumps out of planes, interviews rock stars, raises biracial children and pretty much sets out to explode a new black-male stereotype every day. He is well aware of what it means to see someone cross the street as he approaches after sunset, but he resists editors at music magazines who believe he is equipped only to write about rap. “Why’s Blackness validated by a trip to jail,” he writes, “and challenged by a stint at Yale?” Touré very specifically rejects the notion that America is now post-racial. Instead he makes an argument for what he calls post-blackness. America is not (and should not necessarily be) past race, he writes. But black people need to expand their notion of what it means to be black to include a new generation that embraces the “racial ambidexterity” defined by entertainers like Dave Chappelle and politicians like President Obama. “To me it seemed in my generation racial matters were going to be far more nuanced and slippery than they’d been for my parents,” he writes. “For me racism was not always a matter of clearly defined lambs and wolves, but was more of a double-sided gun.” Relying on more than 100 interviews with authors, artists, journalists and academics, Touréis funny, hip and current — imagining at one point what would happen to an angry black man who banged his wingtip shoe on an Oval Office desk. Wonder whom he means?

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Physical description

300 p.; 24 inches

ISBN

1439177554 / 9781439177556

Amazon.comLibraryThing

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Who's afraid of post-blackness? : what it means to be Black now

by Tour

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