The Myth of Black Ethnicity: Monophylety, Diversity, and the Dilemma of Identity

In the late 1800s W.E.B. Dubois asked what it really means to be black in America. He raised the spectre of divided loyalties and the blurring of individuality that he called Double Consciousness. This volume offers an insight into this dilemma of identity by asking the seemingly rhetorical question, what does O.J. Simpson have in common with the participants in the Million Man March, the jury that set him free, the people who inexplicably cheered his acquittal, the prosecuting attorney, the black Muslim Louis Farrakhan, or with his own children? Each case involves cross-cutting currents of age, sex, religion, race, ethnicity, class and ideology. But what they share among themselves, and with the rest of the nation, is the firm conviction that they are black.