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l am not black, so unlike Touré and others, I have never been in a position to have my blackness questioned. But I taught at a largely-black middle-class high school, chock full of kids who didn't fit the mold of what black is. (Many of my students were skaters, listened to punk, etc.) So, the message of this book - and the book itself - are quite amazing. Touré's message could do a lot of good to a lot of people.
What is this message? Touré believes that we need to redefine - really, expand - what it means to be black. Illustration: the book starts off with Touré's recount of his preparation to skydive (for a tv show). One of his friends casually suggested that he'd never jump out of an airplane because... that's not something black people do. What Touré is NOT saying is that we need to get to a post-racial ethos, where there is NOTHING (of significance) it means to be black... only that the concept needs to become a lot more elastic than it is.
The book is Touré's quest to find out what being black means to people, and to find out, he interviewed a large number of black scholars, artists and public figures. And his answer: there are as many ways to be black as there are black people, and we risk unjustly stigmatizing if we police what blackness must mean.
But honestly, while I loved the book, the message, and the writing, Touré didn't deal with what I thought was an obvious and potentially damning objection: for a category to mean something, it has to have borders, and expanding the borders too much takes the meaning away from the category. In some sense, "there are as many ways to be black as there are black people" is a tautology, for how would you know who black people are if there is nothing particular it means to be black. If it is just a skin color, then there is no point in talking about cultural blackness at all (which I doubt is Touré's intent). But if there is something it culturally (or spiritually) it means to be black, then there HAVE to be borders to the concept of blackness that are something beyond "it all comes down to skin pigment."
I want to stress that I enjoyed reading the book, and Touré writes about everything from his own "You're not black!" experience to the diversity of black art, to the existence of things like stereotype threat and microaggressions. And this is why I am giving the book four stars despite what I see as Touré's failure to address a point that needs to be at the core of his argument.
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