Author Description

"The history of the American Negro is the history of strife... The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." W.E.B. Du Bois, perhaps one of the greatest intellectuals in American history, wrote this famous passage nearly a century ago in his classic book, The Souls of Black Folk. It still remains the most timely, the most quoted, and, in some ways, the most misunderstood appraisal ever written of the tenuous psychological position of the black in America. Have we really come to understand what Du Bois was talking about? Was Du Bois himself clear in what he meant? What does he mean true self-consciousness? What are the gender implications that seem to identify the dilemma of the Negro with that of the oppressed male only? In short, how does self-consciousness relate to ethnicity and race? Now twenty leading African-American intellectuals address those words by Du Bois and reconsider their complex implications in the chill light of the 1990s in what promises to be a landmark volume in the literature of race and ethnicity. The contributors to Lure and Loathing represent a cross-section of African-American thought: here are Nikki Giovanni and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winner James McPherson and Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter; here are the distinguished journalist Itabari Njeri and the playwright, poet and essayist, Stanley Crouch; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's professor of Rhetoric and the History of Science, Kenneth R. Manning, and the novelist and short story writer, Toni Cade Bambara. These and many others are here, writing with vast originality and candor about the "lure and loathing" that characterize the experience of black people in white America. Together, they have produced a book that will galvanize, stimulate - and sometimes discomfort - readers both black and white, now and for years to come.