Post-Modern Blackness in Theory and Practice
My previous blogging series explored Critical Race Theory founder Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies and its connections to current events and the Obama administration’s public policies.
Bell was born in 1930, and his generation would go on to lead the ’60s campus revolts and the various components of the New Left. (See Ron Radosh’s memoir Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left for the stories of Bell’s radical peers.) By the early 1970s this Silent Generation cohort produced not only their pivotal works (Bell’s Race, Racism and American Law came in 1973) but also the children who would some day gain the name Generation X.
Touré was born in 1971, and now 40 years later you can read how his generation of writer-activists has updated Bell’s political theology.
My motives for reading Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness remain as selfish as for Afrolantica Legacies: I want to know “what it means to be black now.” Or rather: who counts as black today? Do those with one African-American and one Caucasian parent count as black? What about one grandparent?
What do those in multi-racial families need to know in order to raise the next generation of mixed race children? How do you explain “blackness” and “whiteness” to a child who falls into neither category?
Call me when he remembers his last name.
If “blackness can mean whatever one wants,” even according to lefty black “spokespeople,” how come conservative blacks are excoriated as “inauthentic,” “sellouts,” “Uncle Toms,” etc., by these same lefty black spokespeople? And how come the thug life and its accoutrements are held up as being more “authentic” than other lifestyles?
You’re going to hurt yourself cogitating on questions like that. It may lead to the insane assylum (or even Hahvud), given the available evidence.
Thanks, Dave. Touré is an idiot. Unfortunately, his idiocy is also dangerous idiocy that needs to be thorougly deconstructed. I am glad to are doing it.
The 10 Commandments of Post-Modern Blackness?
Can’t wait. Laying in popcorm.
“There’s 40 million
waysexcuses”.Using that brilliant theory and living in their heritage homeland of Africa, that phrase would become, “There’s 40 million dead“.
Over in Africa, they don’t “cotton (is that racist?) to” idiocy. Particularly the Muslim kind of African.
If we were to look back thru everyone’s heritage would we not find that everyone has a little “Blackness” in them ? Those that make up the Black Community are no longer the “Minority today, there once was a time that was true but is no longer….infact you could argue that White America is the “Minority” today. Or you could argue that American Indians are the minority today where no blackness is apart of there lineage. Should we use the formula we use to determine by today’s standards to determine whose American Indian where a person to be considered Black would need to have a certain amount of blood lines back to Africa though I don’t know the exact formula to determine ones status but maybe it ought to apply to determine ones “Blackness”…?