Gates gathers the magazine profiles he wrote across the 1990s into a single inquiry into how prominent Black men have made, negotiated, and sometimes evaded American ideas of Black masculinity. The central portraits — writer James Baldwin, entertainer and activist Harry Belafonte, choreographer Bill T. Jones, general and statesman Colin Powell, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, critic Albert Murray, and Anatole Broyard, the critic who lived as white — are widened by conversations and counterpoints involving figures such as Ralph Ellison, Romare Bearden, Jesse Jackson, and Sidney Poitier, and by a title essay sorting Black responses to the O. J. Simpson trial. Gates treats each life as a "narrative of ascent" from modest beginnings, then presses past celebration: the profiles argue over authenticity, the "burden of representation," Black wariness toward white judgment, and what passing, respectability, rage, or artistry cost the men who chose them. The result is less a gallery of heroes than a staged debate, conducted in Gates's own engaged, essayistic voice, about whether any single way of being a Black man in America exists at all.
Author: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. · Original publisher: Random House (New York), 1997
