FOREWORD

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

 

 

 

There are 40 million black people in this country, and there are 40 million ways to be black. Some might take this claim of radical individuality as somewhat naïve. The Princeton scholar Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. points out that such a formulation runs the risk of being a little too easy (he called similar thinking “pimply faced” in a recent lecture), in that it addresses the lives of black persons, but not of the black people.

When I gesture toward the myriad ways to be black, to act black, to feel black, I do not mean to suggest that we are all of us in our own separate boxes, that one black life bears no relation to another. Of course not. We are not a monolith, but we are a community. And the members of a community talk to each other—and talk about each other.

This book that Rebecca Walker has so creatively put together, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, is a compelling and sustained conversation about the multiple meanings of blackness in the United States today. In this brilliantly conceived and edited volume, we see a multiplicity of ways in which blackness is both definitive and interpretive, confining and liberating, imposed and embraced, perceived and, even at times, ignored. The essays in this volume encourage us to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in our minds at once: On the one hand, blacks as a group share culture, language, and experience that join us inextricably together, but as individuals, we may well act in our own self-interest, without regard to the needs of “the community.”

In other words, it is a simple fact that sometimes we define ourselves in terms of each other, and sometimes we do not. The seminal essays in this volume show us, in careful and thoughtful detail, that it remains necessary and productive for African Americans to have a continuing conversation about this simple fact. This is a superbly edited collection, and constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of what we might think of as the fundamental problem for African Americans in the twenty-first century: how class differentials within “the race” compound individual experiences of anti-black racism, and ever more profoundly shape what it means to be “black” itself.