Shades

So it looks like Kanye won the contest, outselling 50 Cent with 718,000 to 603,000 so far.

What this all says about the black male identity is what makes it really interesting, aside from 50 getting his ass kicked in the only arena (SoundScan) that seems to mean anything to him. Black men in America are conditioned to feel as though the musclebound hard-attitude persona is what makes a black man a black man, and to fall outside that mold is to be… nerdy or oreo or just soft. What Kanye’s success could say is that society is opening up its conceptions of what constitutes a black man. Just maybe.

We (us black men) have been saying all along that we’re not just Stagger Lee and John Henry, but also Duke Ellington, Colin Powell, Prince, James Baldwin, Bob Marley, Bill T. Jones, etc. Whut?