“Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: What it Means to Be Black Now” by Touré. Simon & Schuster. 251 pages. $25.
The meaning of blackness in America is slippery. The definition has been debated over centuries from legal restrictions circumscribing societal place created by white men to the ever-evolving definitions created within the community, both in reaction to and in exception of those created by America at large. Who makes the cut as black? Who has the right to the mantle of true blackness, or does such a mantle exist? These are the questions Touré asks in his latest exploratory work, “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness.”
Writer, pundit, critic, media propagator and social connector, Touré has a great deal of experience confronting large issues, and it is with this experience that he embarks upon his latest expansive quest. He arms himself with interviews with 105 notable blacks — those he admires and those to whom he has access. They hail from politics, activism, corporate America, entertainment, sports and, in the most represented cases, from the arts or academic arenas.
This sample, drawing from some of those considered the most successful today, represents a community in which Touré travels. It is not truly representative of all Americans who fall within the wide spectrum of socioeconomic success and educational attainment that would be found in a broader sampling of interviewees.
To each of his subjects, he poses a relatively uniform set of questions about the black experience and the meaning of color in America. He then uses the interviews in a multifaceted quilt of ideas that forms the proof to his arguments. He unfortunately does not provide full access to the depth and breadth of these notables’ responses, some of which can only be found in a series of “outtakes” published in the book’s appendix. In this way, we do lose some of the narrative richness found in other similar interview projects like “The Black List.”