Post-blackness as a term was coined by Thelma Golden, director of Studio Museum in Harlem, and conceptual artist Glenn Ligon to describe, as Touré writes, “the liberating value in tossing off the immense burden of race-wide representation, the idea that everything they do must speak to or for or about the entire race.”[1] In the catalogue for "Freestyle", a show curated by Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem, she defined post-black art as that which includes artists who are “adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.” [2] In his book Who's Afraid of Post Blackness?
According to Touré it is nowadays difficult to find a clear definition of what is black in terms of African-American culture.
(21) The attempt to define it results most often in the mixing up of definitions to find an identity in culture or in biological terms.
[4] Duke Literature and African-American Studies Professor Wahneema Lubiano defines post-black as the time when “you are no longer caught by your own trauma about racism and the history of Black people in the United States”.
[5] UC Santa Cruz professor Derek Conrad Murray claims that there was a “dogmatic transference of trauma”.
Since the election of President Barack Obama, Darryl Pinckney claims, it has become apparent that being black middle-class is not as elitist as it used to be.
Sexual orientation, regional variety, geographical diversity, class location or religion can be a reason for exclusion from a particular black group and their beliefs.
Authenticity in hip-hop music refers to whether or not artists exhibits exemplary identification with blackness as it pertains to historical struggle.
[13] However, du Bois and other important writers in the black emancipatory tradition resist racism on the basis of their own acceptance of the concept of race.
“ They argue that their educational, moral, social, legal, and economic deficits in comparison to whites are not physically inherited or necessarily acquired.
But there is no sustained objection to ordinary racial designations within the tradition of black emancipation.”[14] The Kinship Schema can also be witnessed in popular culture.
Therefore, Grier was both an object of the gaze and a subject of narrative action in films, promoting the image of African American Women.
Then the Abandoned, or the underclass: blacks who are trapped by low income in neighborhoods and schools where it is impossible to project a decent future.
But Robinson's expectations contradict his own evidence: blacks do not feel race solidarity the way they did at one time.
Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey are prime examples for that, switching between different roles of Black identity.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls the recognition scene, when the young boy realizes that he is different, Trayvon Martin's moment of instruction.
[4] In her book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander writes about how the War on Drugs is today's extension of America's overseer-style management of black men.
He adds that Stephen L. Carter wrote in Confessions of an Affirmative Action Baby that "loving our people and loving our culture does not require any restriction on what black people can think or say or do or be ... " When Touré refers to “our commonality” it is thus not clear what he means; if all can be black, then it is open what exactly this commonality includes.
This statement combined with the lack of “ordinary people” in his interviews makes Ali conclude that Touré ´s lack of perspective from “ordinary” black folks in this work” raises the question of whether the author is pandering to the white gaze by showing an über-sophisticated list of interview subjects, and not black people in our diversity”.
Persons like Touré or Henry Louis Gates are struggling with their own identities, “constantly plugging our ears with the, ‘we are black too!’”.
There are also some ideas not about how the borders of blackness blur, but that the borders of all races start to blur in a way in which post-blackness would not be an issue anymore: Melissa Harris-Perry, a political science professor at Tulane University, deals with the unique experiences of African American women.
Black women have been constrained throughout history by three stereotypes: the nurturing mammy, the lascivious Jezebel and the stiff-necked, unyielding matriarch.
In her opinion it is not only white people responsible for this; a lot of responsibility lies in the black community itself, through black liberation theology's silence on gender or the gender inequality in Christian churches in general; women's achievements in the civil rights movement have not been acknowledged enough or sometimes not at all.
The season of extreme black rhetoric may have coincided with the doubling of the size of white middle class, because of new laws mandating equal employment.
Still in order to be considered middle class, black families needed two incomes compared to whites with one.