Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now - Main Discussion

[Carly]

As a staunch believer in the power of the individual, I really like the main theory Toure posits here, and it rings true from my (non-black) point of view. We are in an age now where "blackness" is not as clear-cut as it once was, not so directly and compactly organized around overt, de jure oppression, and therefore is not easily definable internally or externally. I see this theory and this book as part of a larger discussion on the making of identity in our modern age.

There are some very important and perhaps unanswerable questions here, and I'm melding two quotes from pages 41 and 42 here: "We have to get past this notion that Black culture is separate and apart from America... that only Black people can understand it and white people have no relationship to it... much of the world feels Black culture is available to them. So what impact does that have on Black culture and its producers? How does that transform Black culture and, with it, Black identity?"

For me, the center of all this is the age-old imperative to define oneself with nicely delineated boundaries that fit an accepted social construct. It's a Sisyphean task, quite impossible, but perhaps even more so because of America's insistence on being perfect and successful and setting one narrow goal and working as hard as you can toward it, forever. So many of us in this American landscape feel, for perhaps a rich variety of reasons, the need to define ourselves quite narrowly, and perhaps because a rather narrow view of Blackness was one of the only definitions allowed for a time, that definition felt necessary and good and communal. But now that we have so many possible definitions, how does one go about choosing one? Does that threaten the notion of 'communal'? I don't envy anyone having to traverse the complexity of identity in our modern age, when we are aware of so much, but especially those having to do so on the short end of such a stiff yet malleable construct as race, and STILL in the face of racism. I think Toure does an excellent job of laying out these complexities.

Even so, I balk at his continual invoking of Fortune 500 CEOs and presidents as the peak of success in whichever definition of blackness one may choose, especially at the end of the book as he's preparing to leave the reader with perhaps his defining idea; he has just wrapped up a discussion of how black people should access power from within instead of 'throwing rocks' and essentially infiltrate white power structures to succeed, and his last sentence is: "You can fight the power, but I want us to be the power."

But what does power, in the American sense, really do? Are powerful people in America happy? Are they satisfied? Are they more fully human? If he's talking about personal empowerment, great, but I'm not sure he is because he so often references the ultimate goal of positions of power and influence. In any case, the pressure in this country of being "successful" and "fulfilling your potential" at all costs is so great, even if it did work for most people, I'm just not sure it's the savior that Toure and many others would imply.

I'm interested to hear your thoughts about this book. The idea of post-blackness is certainly a fascinating one and a necessary one to wrestle with. Do you agree with Toure? If not, why? Is there anything that struck you that you'd never thought of before?