I am a brown-skinned descendant of enslaved Africans, holocausted Chero­kees, and invisible Europeans, and I am despised and feared and envied the world over.

While Coltrane and Professor Griff and Marian Anderson and N.W.A and Sojourner Truth and George Schuyler and Angela Davis and Michael Jackson, Bigger Thomas and Clarence Thomas are all African American, they may not all be “black.”

“Just look at all the T-shirts, the buttons, the photographs, the records, the film and video appearances. Malcolm is to­day's black hero, a black ideal for turbulent times: the steely mirror image we want our­selves to see.”

“Growing up in New Orleans,” you told me later, “it would be impossible to see race as anything but socially constructed. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”