It’s not just the younger politicos who want to get past Hilliard’s Jackson-era rhetoric. The old talk doesn’t sit well with younger black professionals and intellectuals, either. Debra J. Dickerson, in her provocatively titled The End of Blackness, argues that it’s time to throw off the crude groupthink that de- fines “real blacks” as disenfranchised victims of white power. “Blackness is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, just as overt racism did,” Dickerson writes. In the same vein, John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute argues in Authentically Black that a conception of identity that dismisses middle-class blacks as inauthentic is fatally limited. After all, both authors agree, it hardly makes sense to imagine a single identity for almost 40 million black Americans living, as they do, in geographically, culturally, and economically diverse circumstances. Certainly more blacks are living in Obama’s America than in Hilliard’s: according to a 2004 Harris poll, 61 percent say that they are “very satisfied with their lives,” more than half indicate that their lives improved last year, and—get this—86 percent are optimistic about the next five years.
It also includes some digs at Jesse Jackson. Can't beat that.
Of course, Hymowtiz doesn't do more than touch on the problems in the black ghetto, but I think this emerging, less race-conscious, black middle class might be the path out. For all his many gifts, which I'm sure Rico will elaborate on, Tupac might not be the best role model for a social group.
*Damn I'm jealous at "Razzia the Roof." I couldn't for the life of me think of pun other than Papa Razzia, a play on one of Benedict's nicknames before he was elected. Somehow I didn't think that quite fit.
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