Cultural critic, journalist, and novelist Touré came to Baltimore Monday to discuss his widely-acclaimed recent book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now.

He was featured in the newspaper and made the rounds of several local radio talk shows, in advance of his talk at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. A largely African-American, standing-room-only crowd – so large that the Pratt opened up its Edgar Allan Poe Room to accommodate them – turned out for this latest installment in the much-lauded “Talking About Race” series, co-sponsored by Open Society Institute-Baltimore.

I was there among them, hoping for a discourse on race that moved beyond previous interpretations and introduced a powerful new critique on the complicated contours of race in America.

Here he was in my hometown, a majority black city that is more segregated, poor and unemployed than almost any city in America. Through this lens, I, like many others, was curious as to what Touré’s vision of a post-black world looks like. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to incorporate any of the cultural and economic inequities facing the many African-Americans who are, in effect, segregated from it.

As a questioner poignantly pointed out, to applause from the audience, much of what he defines as “post-blackness” is about access, economics and opportunity. Touré condescendingly dismissed her critique. His response, that in a post-black era, “the freedom that you can take, is as far as you can take it,” ignores the restrictions placed upon the underprivileged faction of the black community.

Touré’s Take

“Post-blackness” is not a new concept. As Michael Eric Dyson, the famed black intellectual and Georgetown University professor (and Touré’s onstage compatriot this evening) explained, Touré is really translating, for a broader, more popular audience territory that has been previously excavated by notable black academicians like Cornel West and Dyson himself.

Recognizing that there is no universally accepted definition of “blackness,” the clearest we can be about “post-blackness” is to say it means blackness in the post-civil-rights era.

“Post-blackness” is not to be confused with “post-racialism,” Touré and Dyson hasten to say. They both dismiss the idea of “post-racialism” and Touré goes as far as to say it “doesn’t mean anything.” We have not “moved beyond race,” the two say, but we have instead arrived at more nuanced and subtle definitions, perceptions and preconceptions of race.

After all, we are living the age of Obama.

When asked by a young questioner what the future of blackness looks like, Touré gleefully responded that the boy will grow up knowing that it is within the realm of possibility that an African-American can ascend to the presidency – it happened during this young man’s lifetime, during his formative years – and that this knowledge will inform his notion of what a black person can and cannot achieve.

Dyson acknowledges that, despite Obama’s status as the most powerful man in the world, he is still limited by white supremacy. Dyson and Touré caution that “race” and “blackness” persist, they must, because racism and white supremacy stubbornly persist.

To Be Young, Black – and Out-Of-It?

But while these two readily articulate the “blackness” problem Obama faces on a symbolic level, they seem blind to the magnitude of it in the everyday lives of black people in a place like Baltimore.

Instead, Touré summons his inner music critic and presents a narrative that is overly reliant on pop cultural references and superficial spin. He spends considerable intellectual muscle explaining that some black people skydive, recounting all the insights he had when he went skydiving, and observing that “post-blackness” means everyone, blacks and whites alike, needs to simply get past the idea that there are some things black people just don’t do.

Well sure, but if that observation were delivered a few blocks outside the Pratt’s doors in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, it would quickly become apparent how hollow it is.

Touré isn’t the first to explore the middle-class and transcendent black experience and his book isn’t even the first publication this year to devote itself to the topic; Ellis Cose’s The End of Anger mines the very same terrain.

To me, this narrative has been recycled ad nauseaum. Touré, sadly, failed to add much to the discourse and had little to offer his more penetrating questioners. I give him credit for leaving himself open to a critical audience – including one speaker who accused him of being a tool of white oppression and a Zionist sympathizer.

But even phrased with less venom, the point remains: Touré does his audience a great disservice by not exploring beyond the middle-class.

What is it like to be young, black, and under-class in contemporary America? A more exhaustive exploration of “post-blackness” would include this group – referred to as “the abandoned” by journalist Eugene Robinson in his excellent book Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America.

Here in Baltimore, where there are so many communities devoid of access to opportunity, what does “post-blackness” mean?

I waited to hear an answer to this question throughout the course of the evening. Touré and Dyson never answered it and, indeed, seemed at ease deflecting it.

“The abandoned,” Robinson estimates, constitute nearly 30 percent of the African-American community in America – a too-large minority for Touré to dismiss. While he never really talked about them, we should – it’s the conversation Baltimore must have.

Rodney Foxworth, a Brew contributor, is a Baltimore-born writer. Follow him @rdfoxworth.