In this moment of history, how are we defining blackness?
African Americans and whites alike tackle this question, often in attempts to cancel out each other�s interpretations. There have been documentaries about what it means to be black in America. Movies directed. Songs sung. Countless books written about it. One common recurrence in our ongoing contemplation of what it means to be black, however, is the reflection of the cultural moment at hand.
For past generations of blacks, kernels of racial identity were often embedded in Jim Crow and the struggle to be acknowledged as human.
Here are a few manifestations of blackness from the Black Identity family tree:
�Nigger Black existed during slavery.
�Reconstruction and Turn of the 20th Century Black lived when African American bodies were mercilessly lynched out of desperation to maintain a white supremacist social structure.
�Renaissance Black dominated the late teens up to the 1930s. African American and Afro-Caribbean people retaliated against Jim Crow through writing and music to shape an independent definition of blackness in America.
�Existential black was around in the 1940s and 1950s because authors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin questioned the invisibility of black bodies in a racially prejudiced world.
�Raise your fist in honor of Nationalist Black. He pummeled his way into the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s because activists like
Huey P. Newton, Charles Hamilton (not the rapper), and Stokely Carmichael chopped Jim Crow in the throat. Nationalist Black advocated that being Black in a White America that sees us as inferior can kick rocks.
Now that those visible obstacles of racial prejudice are dissolving, how do we as African Americans gauge an authentic black experience?