FALL 2011/WINTER 2012

REVIEWS

Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: What It Means to Be Black Now. Free Press. 2011. 251 pp.

Reviewed by Houston A. Baker, Jr.

To a society that had been taught to venerate whiteness for over three hundred years, this announcement was rather staggering. What was the world coming to, if the blacks were whiter than the whites? Many people in the upper class began to look askance at their very pale complexions. If it were true that extreme whiteness was evidence of the possession of Negro blood, of having once been a member of a pariah class, then surely it were well not to be so white!

George S. Schuyler, Black No More

Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: What It means to Be Black Now is an arresting account of a racial generational shift.  No longer bound by what commentator Michael Eric Dyson in his foreword describes as “racial patriotism, racial fundamentalism, and racial policing,” a vigorous and talented cadre of Black men and women are determined to free themselves from the old order.  That old order is charged by Touré and his cohort with dictatorially insisting that “Blackness” was monolithic, sacred, and militaristic -- a site of mandated “group struggle” against white enemy combatants.  One’s skin color, therefore, was a racial draft board. Whether you were comfortable with it or not, you were dragooned into the narrow spaces of Civil Rights, Black Nationalism, “NAACPISM,” Ebonics, Rhythm and Blues, and myriad other markers of black “authenticity.”  If you enjoyed Ludwig Beethoven more than John Coltrane, or suggested you would rather read Aristotle than The Autobiography of Malcolm X, you were likely to create a huge family furor. “Post-Blackness” is an unflinching foe of the old order. 

The word and concept “Post-Black” are not original with Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness.  As Touré explains:       

The concept of post-Blackness originated in the art world, articulated in the late nineties by [Glenn] Ligon and his close friend Thelma Golden, the curator of the studio Museum of Harlem. They felt a new chapter in Black visual arts had been entered, a generational shift had occurred, but didn’t know what to call it. Golden told me … “It seemed to us that what was a set of somewhat simple but incredibly freighted choices in the past were now sort of broken up in so many different ways. And for us that became a way to define things as being post-Black art. And the truth is, it was wildly misunderstood.”  

Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness – while barrowing from Golden and Ligon -- fails persuasively to clarify matters of definition and content.  In fact, based on the multiple markers, examples, and definitions Touré and his interviewees provide, it seems “Post-Black” can be a significant and bracing posture in the world of social intercourse, or, it can simply be a wild, exhibitionist sandbox of manic adventurism. For example, Touré’s skydiving from a rickety aircraft at fourteen thousand feet (an act in which he professes to have found God) is “Post-Black.”  But, so too, according to Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness, is a university professor’s claim that the therapeutic way to rid oneself of trauma (and, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome would surely constitute such trauma) is to “wear it.”  Such fashionista bravado reprises Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy.” The wise know, of course, what Public Enemy made of McFerrin’s sentiments: “Damn if I say it you can slap me right here.” Post-Black seems less a researched and rigorously proved set of practices than a trendy valorization of arbitrarily designated preferences and styles.  Kara Walker’s cutting and mounting of gothic silhouettes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin is deemed “Post-Black” in the same catalogue that nominates Chris Rock for “Post-Black” props based on his real estate investment in Alpine, New Jersey.  Examples of such random attributions of “Post-Black” could be multiplied. They are legion in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness.

What is more to the point here is Touré’s method of arriving at his declaration of a substantive entity or practice called “Post-Blackness.” He writes: “I decided to interview 105 prominent Black people about various aspects of contemporary blackness.” Considering the Census Report that there are forty-one million Blacks resident in the United States, 105 prominent Black people seems a scandalously small research sample to predicate supposedly verifiable truths about what it means to be Black (or anything else) now. What, then, is Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? Is it publishing installation art? Is it a parody of scientific opinion surveys? Or, is it simply a send-up of social scientific polls? 

The book’s foreword by Michael Eric Dyson is set at a fundraiser for Barack Obama. The locale is Oprah Winfrey’s posh estate in Santa Barbara, California. Dyson is called upon by Oprah to repeat a quip he has made about Obama. He does so, saying that Barack Obama is “rooted in, but not restricted by, his Blackness.”  Later in Touré’s text, Henry Louis Gates is quoted as saying there is a “core” to Blackness, but beyond the core there are “forty million ways to be black.”  Touré and others stress that “Post-Black” does not signify “Post-Racial,” a term that “posits that race does not exist or that we’re somehow beyond race and suggests colorblindness.”  What is going on here?  “Rooted,” “core,” “race” as extant essentialisms?  It would seem that the “misunderstanding” occasioned by the phrase “Post-Black” is clearly a Rinehart ruse. 

Of course, Rinehart is the chameleon Confidence Man vividly portrayed in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.  Rinehart is all things to all people.  He is a performer, equipped with a mask for every occasion: preacher, professor, and pimp. He is street hipster and savvy businessman by turn.  Ellison knows and would have his readers understand, however, that without the “heart” there would be no Rine the Runner. For Ellison, the “heart,” is a complex admixture of myriad cultural streams and allegiances that constitute “blackness.” As in a prismatic combination of all colors. Blackness is, and has always, in Ellison’s view, been the variegated, Ur-form of American identity.

That identity, which Ellison denotes as the “Black Mask of Humanity,” hinges upon notions of consensus and en masse determinations to satisfy the requisites of The Little Man at Chehaw Station. The “little man” is the indomitable vernacular in its protean knowledge of multiple cultural traditions and enduring resilience in the face of what can only be called the American “racial disaster.” A grasp of what the “little man” knows and represents is vastly more significant for human well being and national interests than anyone’s individualistic desire to do precisely as she pleases in the offices of class advantage and self-advancement. 

An astute graduate student recently said to me: “Those who strive to be ‘post-black’ put themselves in a definitional muddle. They should with intellectual rigor come up with an original, coherent, and persuasive term or their own.” The point is well taken. “Post” has been a favored swerve of the academy in recent years. For example, “Post-Colonial” has been deployed as a descriptor of the supposed liberated state of a polity following its subjugation.  However, in today’s Neo-Liberal episteme where “all are involved, all are consumed” by the dread fiscal colonization of Globalization, “Post-Colonial” is a kind of linguistic null set. There may, as Achille Mbembe makes cogently clear, be a “Post-Colony,” but scarcely a whiff of  “authentic” “Post-Colonialism” on the planet.  “Post-Modern” churns in the same gyre. Deployed as a characterization of anything other than a very finite and class-specific set of prospects for human well being, it is a ridiculous misnomer. Mike Davis demonstrates persuasively in Planet of Slums that much of the today’s world is marked by landscapes of destitution; there are countless millions who have never enjoyed ripe fruits of the “modern,” and are unlikely to do so in the future.  “Post” as a prefix to “modern,” therefore, is a sop that dominant powers dexterously dispense to bamboozle the unwary into a conviction that salubrious changes have already occurred.   Thus “Post-Black” – which by authorial admission is predicated upon the testimony of a meager 105 prominent black interviewees -- is intended to signify that a new and liberating day has arrived for the race tout court.

Surely there are reasons to rejoice in the expanded conditions of possibility for Black America provided by Civil Rights, Black Nationalist, and Affirmative Action gains of recent decades.  But to extrapolate from such gains that if one is “Black” in America, one can now be unfettered from social responsibility to bring one’s best creative energies to the abatement of economic discrepancies and life hurdles that find Black Wealth at $5,500 dollars per household, while white wealth weighs in at more than $100,000 dollars per household is nonsense. There seems nothing “post” – either modern or black – about such an abysmal state of fiscal affairs.  At a philosophical, historical, empirical, numerical, and statistical level there seems little evidence or cause to credit or celebrate the neologism “Post-Black.” 

Much of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness consists of anecdotes reminiscent of Ellis Cose’s The Rage of a Privileged Class.  But with this difference: Touré’s interlocutors are all held to be powerfully capable of turning scenes of racial humiliation into “scenes of instruction.” They are fiercely individualistic and rhetorically brilliant. They undauntedly occupy earned positions of esteem. They have forged their own Teflon shields against insult; self fashioned their trauma into haute couture; steeled themselves against microaggression. Their EQ’s are off the charts! Such self-assurance and Achilles-like fitness for the racial battle are heartening for the sop-addicted.  Even so, there is strange dissonance. It is constituted by Touré’s extended autobiographical chapter in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?

The author lays out the details of his birth and progress in the world.  By most standards, his natal home and childhood neighborhood are secure habitations blessed by abundant resources. His prep-school education is well suited to success. His sorties into a Black tennis club equip him (linguistically and athletically) to join those who are not confined to, say, Coney Island asphalt “hoopsterism.” The “Club” offers instructions in “register shifting.” Touré does well at Morehouse and moves on to an enviable writing career. It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, that most of the villains in Touré’s autobiography are, well, Black. The fellow black classmate – described as a hulk of a “linebacker” – shouts in hurtful ways:“ Shut up, Touré, you ain’t black.”  His fellow blacks in a writing class at Columbia University do not back him when he complains about the absence of black writers on the syllabus. (William Styron’s daughter, however, who is a fellow classmate, does support his protest.) He is nearly undone by terror at the time of the Atlanta Child Murders, whose villain, of course, was problematically convicted as a single Black man. Touré draws strength and support in his Demolition Derby outing to Ku Klux Klan territory in Indiana from a young white woman who shares a Ku Klux Klan genealogy.  Finally, the author comes to deem the Black Gaze as oppressive as the White Gaze.  Which is pretty bizarre if you claim expertise in a “core” black culture and yet conform yourself in a way that makes the Black Gaze threatening! Somehow, a phrase shared with me by one of my academic friends seems most apt for the autobiographical misfortunes of Touré: "problems de riche.” 

It is true that Touré has provided lively and interesting accounts of some individual Black artists and performers. Finally, though, one is forced to note the ironies of all mechanisms for transmogrifying the finest consensual, unifying, and cultural dynamics of a self-defining group into a neologistic sop. (To wit, can one imagine a treatise or popular publication issued by a respected press, titled Who’s Afraid of Post-Jewishness, a tract that proscribed abandonment of the ardor and ends of consensual Jewish struggles of the historical past?)   

George S. Schuyler’s scintillating parody of transmogrifying machinations of race titled Black No More should form an object of study for “Post-Blackness” everywhere. Touré’s troping Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is, at best, risky business.  The award-winning drama takes its title from Disney’s “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”  Martha, one of Albee’s lead characters, has the final line of the drama when she answers the question of who is fearful of the kind of bickering, redundant, under-researched, petulant articulations that constitute the body of the play (and, one might add, many threads of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?).  She responds: “I am.”