Touré: "Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?"

From The Dallas Morning News: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20120217-point-person-our-qa-with-author-toure.ec

February 19, 2012

In his new book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, social commentator Touré explores the question of what it means to be black in America in the aftermath of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Touré recently shared his observations about post-blackness and the nuances of growing up without many of the traditional constraints of earlier generations.

So what is post-blackness?

I’m talking about a concept of being rooted in, but not constrained by, blackness. So if you are black and come from the black community, there is an air about black traditions. But that doesn’t constrain who we are. You have the freedom to do anything you want, especially those things that are not considered normative blackness. There is no reason you can’t do yoga or eat sushi or be a Republican.

A key example of how this works I mention in the book. I went skydiving, and on my way there I’m told my people don’t do that. The one thing that I got from parachuting down was this sense that there must be a God and what a small part of the world I am. If I had not done that, I would have missed out on an opportunity to grow as a human being.

You make a distinction between post-racial and post-blackness. What do you mean?

Post-blackness is about a freedom to view in all complexity what it means to be black. Post-racial is a very weird, amorphous, undefined term that generally when I hear it, I find that people mean a time when race doesn’t matter or racism doesn’t exist. None of those things are true. I hear white people using it seriously and black people using it ironically, but we certainly know that there is not a post-racial America. It’s a ridiculous concept.

What has happened is that we had a ’60s period of active battle for de facto and de jure rights and equality. When you get to the ’70s, most of those battles are completed. For those of us who arrived in the ’80s into the schools and job force, we are dealing with a period where there are not legal constraints holding us back from what we want to do and there is affirmative action pushing some of us forward. Now there are so many black people who are doing things that previously were considered outlying behavior that it is absurd to call it outlier. The fact that my generation comes up not having to fight in the way our parents did really changes black America’s relationship with the rest of America.

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