Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What it Means to Be Black Now

by Touré

“The platinum-level authentic Negro,” Martin said, “is you grew up in public housing, crime, drugs, poverty. The gold level is you grew up in a middle-class Black neighborhood and you went to public schools and maybe to a Black college so you got a pretty good Black experience. Silver is you lived in a neighborhood that was really diverse where you had a mix of educated African-Americans and whites and you may have gone to a Black church but it wasn’t a Black Baptist church, it probably was Episcopalian or something on those lines. You might be in Jack and Jill, a whole different kind of Black thing. And then there’s bronze. You grew up in the suburbs and you didn’t really see many of us. You went to a prep school and an all-white college and your experience of Blackness is really third person, something you heard and read about versus what you know and experienced.”