Touré's highly anticipated Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? just hit the shelves (and the cover of the New York Times Book Review). We catch up with the journalist, talk show host, and Twitter provocateur to get the story behind the book.
Give me a pithy definition of post-blackness.
First of all, being post-black is not being post-racial. Post-blackness is the concept that you can be black any way you want. That black identity is infinite—if there are 40 million black people, there are 40 million ways of being black. It's beyond the narrow idea that blackness is Jay-Z, Jim Brown, Jesse Jackson, Pam Grier. That the blackness is the totality of one's identity; it's all you think and care about. And if it isn't—you're out of the tent. You're Condoleezza Rice. You're Clarence Thomas. You're Colin Powell. You're Touré. You're out. Post-blackness says every definition of blackness is legitimate and acceptable, that you're rooted in but not restricted by blackness. You're rooted in the community and those traditions, you know—"It don't mean a thing, if it don't have that swing." Whatever it is, it's got to be funky. You can honor that and go to yoga and go skydiving and go to Paris. When I was in my early 20s, I went to Paris for a vacation and Sweet Honey in the Rock did a show. I went and ended up backstage. One of the sisters told me, "If I had a week off, I'd go to Jamaica." Well, I'd been to Jamaica. And I wanted to come to Paris. And I'm not any less black for doing so. (Not to mention that Paris has an incredible history of welcoming black expatriates.)
The tension between individual and communal definitions of racial identity is an old one (cf. James Baldwin vs. Richard Wright). Why is this moment any different?
This book began when I was watching Obama ascend in the summer before the primary. I looked at the candidates and said, "He's the one. He's going to win." (Hillary was ahead at the time, but the early leader never ever wins. It's a marathon.) The only thing that could hold Obama back was: would people vote for a black guy? When it became clear that he was going to win, that white people were ready for a black president, I began to wonder: how did we miss when the zeitgeist changed? Tones and tastes had changed. I began to wonder what else did I need to rearrange in my mind about how race is now. My thoughts about this—and about how Obama was a different kind of black person than had ever been on the national stage—became this book.
Did you have a personal moment when you realized that conceptions of blackness were changing?
The journey really began in this moment in college when a fellow black student told me that I wasn't black. I had to find a language to repudiate it, to defend the idea that I define blackness for myself. How am I not black? Am I not black because I'm not doing it the way you want me to do it? Or the way other people do it? Blackness is portable, it travels with me when I go to the ballet or to eat sushi. It's not lost because I'm in a room full of white people. At the point I was a black studies major, living in a black dorm, dating a black med student, attending all the step shows. I was paying homage to blackness in every possible way and knew more about black history than most and still I was criticized for not being black enough.
You nest your investigations of post-blackness in interviews with black artists, performers, politicians, and historians. How did you arrive at this structure?
Post-blackness was originally an art world concept, I heard about it first from Thelma Golden, and I was excited to take it into the real world. Visual art is always at the forefront of the collective imagination in playing out identity. It's society's laboratory. The idea of post-blackness in this laboratory just fit within the rest of the world. It's funny because I asked Thelma if I could borrow her term and it was as if I were asking her if I could take her car out on the road. She was like, "I wouldn't drive it on the highway, but if you want to, you go ahead."
And? Did it feel risky?
Absolutely. It was definitively risky creating this gigantic pronouncement on what I think blackness is and should be and essentially throwing the tent open to declaring everyone legitimate. And there are specific things that people will be angered by. There's an extensive discussion about skin color that will piss people off. There's a discussion about how black people are quintessential Americans and quintessentially American. I think there's an idea for some black people that we're really from somewhere else, a reluctance to go all in that's born out of slavery. I get it. It hurts me, too. But we are American. We are not going anywhere else.
One thing I found especially interesting was how you examined how while making blackness central to one's identity—and letting a conception of blackness dictate what you will and won't do—might be restrictive now, it was useful at a point. It preserved a culture that the larger society was trying to annihilate. So your book feels less like criticism and more like a love letter to your community—this is what the community needs to do to be happier and freer now.
That's what I want prospective readers to feel. That I love blackness and I love black people. I'm enamored with our style and tradition and heroes. Consider how blackness has been attacked—it's got all these arrows and bullet holes, but it's still moving forward. You can't kill it.
What surprised you during your interviews?
One thing I learned as I was writing, something I felt but didn't know—was this phenomenon of vicarious racism, when racism happens to other people, but you feel it like it's happening to you. You can see this in black people's responses to Hurricane Katrina and the shooting of Sean Bell—it didn't just happen to Sean, it could have just as easily happened to me if I'd been in his place. Some of the questions I ended up asking also surprised me. The question "What's the most racist thing that ever happened to you?" took off. I was 10 or 15 interviews in and stumbled upon it. And responses show racism through time. You go from Paul Mooney in the 1940s to Derrick Conrad Murray, and you see the similarities and differences in the way that racism functions over 50 years. It's kind of similar in that it's always about keeping people in their place and telling them they don't belong. The difference is where it happens. Modern-day black people are shocked when it happens at Yale, at a private school, at church, when they're working at a magazine.
Are you going to return to fiction?
Nonfiction is what I'm really good at, it's what I can—in hockey terms—skate backwards in. I can take an idea to a higher level faster, know when it's done, and know when it's good. Fiction is harder. It takes you out of your world—and you really have to read the entire thing to enter the conversation. In nonfiction, you can read a chapter—or even a paragraph from my book, say—and enter the discussion. Of course, only fiction can mine the deepest parts of the soul, but still, fiction is a bit like my calling you up at midnight and saying, "Come over to my house, I'm going to have a weird party." And you say, "I'm in my pajamas." And I say, "You have to come. It's going be weird!" Nonfiction is I go to your house at a reasonable hour and tell you stuff about your life that's interesting and illuminating to you.
