Black Genius: African-American Solutions to African-American Problems

These essays are taken from a symposium held in New York University's Africana Studies Program, whose participants included gifted writers and thinkers from the upper echelon of Afro-American achievement. The organizer, novelist Walter Mosley, writes, "The intent of Black Genius was to assemble a group of black intellectuals, artists, political activists, economists who have broken the visor and seen beyond the fallacies of race.... We wanted to present the stories of women and men who had made it in spite of the system." Farai Chideya delivers an on-point analysis of the media's misrepresentation of blacks and offers a blueprint for more up-front and behind-the-scenes representation in the newsroom. Critic Stanley Crouch body-slams the negroidal nihilism and black "gansta" mentality in rap music, while Angela Davis delivers a nightmarish assessment of the growing African American prison population. Others--including Julianne Malveaux, Randall Robinson, Spike Lee, and Anna Deveare Smith--take aim at health, the film industry, Wall Street, and the state of African-descended people around the world. --Eugene Holley Jr.