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If hip-hop had done nothing but put more money in the hands of Black artists and business managers than ever before it would mark a milestone in American financial history. What that wealth has not been able to transform however is the social reality of substandard housing, medical care and education that afflicts over half of all African American children and that accounts for one out of four African American males being under the control of the criminal justice system. Nor has it dismantled the prevalent, delimiting mythologies about Black intelligence, morality and hierarchical place in America.

The instruction given to all of the Burden's writers was to tackle the all-American fascination with Blackness in the realms of music, literature, sports, fashion and beauty, music, comedy, political activism, modern art, science fiction cinema, hero-worship, machismo. Some approached the assignment through an iconic figure whose life and work seemed to embody the network the history of shame, blame, idolatry, denial, stalwart bravery, tomfoolishness and misapprehension that marks the subject. It is a history that mocks us all as we attempt to reduce the world's possibilities to its racial inequities.

Warning: a specific emphasis has been placed on key figures and movements whose lives and work have inadvertently made race in America a subject as demanding of complex reasoning and ethical inquiry as genetically modified organisms. In "The New White" Negro Carl Hancock Rux takes on the Eminem phenomenon, hitting it right between the eyes and finding a self-made cipher wrapped in a hard nigga dreamcoat.

In "Melvin Gibbs Black God and Thugs" the long history of criminalizing and mythifying Black culture is detailed from ancient India to the Wu-Tang Clan, finally resting on a powerful reading of white American Taliban follower John Lind Walker's search for a way out of America's spiritual darkness through the dark spirituality of hip-hop, and fundamentalist Islam.

Robin Kelley presents the bizarro world of white activists who seek to overcome the race problem by browbeating African American militants about their fixation on race and Black radicals who struggle to get white-run lefty organizations to understand that the race problem deserves more than a footnote in the war on capitalism In my dialogue with Vernon Reid we present the ways Steely Dan ran away with Black cool and disguised it in their own critique of the American dream. In Beth Coleman's "Pimp Autonomy" we are made to see the pimp figure as an appropriator of the master-slave dynamic that has programmed the psyches of black and white American men for centuries. The excerpt from Jonthan Lethem's next novel explores the minority status of a lower middle class white youth in Brooklyn in the hip-hop era. With Mike Ladds poem ''The New Mythology Started Without Me '' we get the buying and selling of the Black American dream rendered as a nightmare. The two scenes from Eisa Davis' play "Umkovu," use dark wit to make light of a white businessman and a Japanese deejay who live to reduce Black culture to its most marketable clichés. From Hilton Als comes a study of the career of Richard Pryor who more than any other American performer of the past century exemplified the promise and the compromises expected of angry Black performers who long for white love and mainstream success. Further expanding our vista of Black America's impact on the world we offer Manthia Diawara's account of how James Brown fomented a social and stylistic rebellion on young people in the 60s and 70s Mali, and Meri Danquah's account of hair-straightening and skin-bleaching a la Michael Jackson style run amok in Ghana.

In Latasha Natasha Diggs "Black Asianphile in Me" we are given a near parodic view of the fetishism that fetishism begat: her exotification of Asian penises and fighting techniques offering an inverted Afrocentric image of white appropriation at its worst. In Tony Green's personal writing on larger than life subjects Muhammad Ali, Norman Mailer and George Foreman one is allowed to see how ineptly the Black Superman model favored by Black mythifiers like Mailer fit on an average Joe like Green's younger athletic self. Professional fashion and beauty stylist Michaela Angela Davis delves even deeper under the skin to point up how the country's obsession with Hollywood and Conde Nast's proscriptions of beauty has wounded young black women unaware that their style-innovations feed the beauty industry that denies them affirmation. Cassandra Lane's "Skinned" opens up an even deeper vein of woundedness in depicting the whyfores of her anxieties about imaginary white women showing up as sexual threats in her marriage bed.

The essays of Danzy Senna, Renee Green and Arthur Jafa form an Afro-futurist troika: Senna looks back on ghetocentricity from 2037 in her parody of Harvard-trained literary anthropology, Green delves into space, race and injustice as they have been conjoined in Hollywood potboilers and the work of Octavia Butler, while Jafa provides a reading of Kubrick's 2001 that would even startle Sun Ra. Jafa also takes on Picasso, Duchamp, Pollock and Kubrick, whose visual critiques of whiteness through Africanist myths he sees as having led them to formal breakthroughs and conceptual cul de sacs.

Taken in total these essays present the myriad ways African Americans grapple with feelings of cultural inferiority, creative superiority and ironic distance in a market-driven world where we find continue to find ourselves being sold as hunted outsiders and privileged insiders in the same breath. In a world where we're seen as both the most loathed and the most alluring of creatures we are still the most co-optable and the most erasable of beings too. It is the singular, historic power of this chilling, maddening, schizophrenia-inducing paradox that it has always called some of the country's most exceptional, daring and fecund literary minds to order - Twain, Douglass, Melville, Crane, Faulkner Du Bois, Robeson, Hughes, Hurston, Baldwin, Morrison, West all come to mind. It is the deepest wish of this editor that this anthology honors and serves this quintessentially American theme as well as its predecessors have.

Copyright © 2003 by Edited by Greg Tate.

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About the Author

A cultural critic for The Village Voice, GREG TATE is also the author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk and contributes regularly to national publications such as Rolling Stone, VIBE, and the New York Times. In addition, he helped found the Black Rock Coalition, produced two albums on his own label, and composed a libretto that was performed at the Apollo Theater. He lives in New York City.