Book review: “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?” and “Sister Citizen”

I am just old enough to remember when having someone call you black, rather than Negro, was considered a serious slur. Still, when it did occur, my parents taught me, even then, to say “thank you” in response. This turned out to be a highly effective way to disarm the insult and the insulter. In this way, I learned the power of not letting others decide how I would be defined. I did not need James Brown to tell me to be black and proud. Decades later, Americans are still struggling with racial definitions. Is the president black or biracial? Are we Latino or Hispanic? Is the n-word an insult or an affectionate term? What does it mean to be authentically black? And does any of that matter anymore? Didn’t the 2008 election signal that the country that elected its first black president is now post-racial?

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, Tourédemolishes 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?”

Tourévery 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?

But he skips lightly over the unique experiences of African American women. For that, it’s better to turn to “Sister Citizen,” in which Melissa V. Harris-Perry, a political science professor at Tulane University, applies a social scientist’s rigor, complete with focus groups and regression analysis.