October 15, 2018
The latest book from activist Powell (The Education of Kevin Powell), who has written about the experiences of African-American men in books and at Vibe magazine, compiles 13 previously published essays on hip-hop, sports, politics, and culture that chronicle his growth as a cultural critic. “To be a Black man in America,” he writes, “is to be under a constant state of enormous pressure, stress, and danger, from outside, from within”; his penetrating profiles of celebrities, such as doomed rapper-actor Tupac Shakur and charismatic quarterback Cam Newton, typify the perils faced by and promise of black America. Other essays discuss, for example, Powell’s awakening to misogyny in public and private life, and the contradictions of the hit musical Hamilton, whose casting foregrounds marginalized Americans but whose subject matter reinforces white-centric mainstream views of history. The collection’s title essay is a three-point treatise on Powell’s complicated relationship with his chronically ill single mom, her experiences growing up black in the deep South, Obama’s legacy as the first black president, and the racist backlash that led to the election of Donald Trump. Admirers of Greg Tate’s postsoul aesthetic and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 21st-century urban realism will find much to savor in Powell’s urgent and eloquent prose.