Still Invisible

From a New York Times Book review by Toure, writing about the latest Colson Whitehead novel, Sag Harbor, and the concept of "post-blackness."

Substitute "black" with "brown," or, to get even more specific, with "Chicano," and a better description of post-ethnic life can't be found since the writings of my man Greg Tate

Unfortunately, for us post-Chicanos, we find ourselves not reveling in a wonderfully complex and nuanced world making our art, but instead waste our time telling gringos that "no, the last immigrant in my family was, like, in 1926," and "no, I couldn't tell you which part of Mexico but I can tell you that the bean and cheese at Taco Cabana is delicious."

Now that we’ve got a post-black president, all the rest of the post-blacks can be unapologetic as we reshape the iconography of blackness. For so long, the definition of blackness was dominated by the ’60s street-fighting militancy of the Jesses and the irreverent one-foot-out-the-ghetto angry brilliance of the Pryors and the nihilistic, unrepentantly ghetto, new-age thuggishness of the 50 Cents. A decade ago they called post-blacks Oreos because we didn’t think blackness equaled ghetto, didn’t mind having white influencers, didn’t seem full of anger about the past. We were comfortable employing blackness as a grace note rather than as our primary sound. Post-blackness sees blackness not as a dogmatic code worshiping at the altar of the hood and the struggle but as an open-source document, a trope with infinite uses.

The term began in the art world with a class of black artists who were adamant about not being labeled black artists even as their work redefined notions of blackness. Now the meme is slowly expanding into the wider consciousness. For so long we were stamped inauthentic and bullied into an inferiority complex by the harder brothers and sisters, but now it’s our turn to take center stage. Now Kanye, Questlove, Santigold, Zadie Smith and Colson Whitehead can do blackness their way without fear of being branded pseudo or incognegro.

Comments

[Caro]

I kinda have a pet peeve with the "post-" term since it always implies we are "past" something. Which is not really true.

With one of the big points, of course, being that some of us have *always* defined black/brown-ness outside a very narrow identity path.

Underneath Touré's lazy shorthand there are some good points, but can we get a different term?

[Bracho]

Doesn't post signify since/after in this context? My main problem with the Toure piece, and I hated it, was his complete lack of historical reckoning with the black novel, in specific the many that take middle class life as their subject matter (The Color Purple, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Sarah Phillips; much of Walter Mosley, Marita Bonner, ad infinitum). Denise Chavez, some of Ana Castillo have charted the chicana/o middle class but not in ways that could be defined as post anything.