The title of Gates and West’s book evokes nineteenth and early twentieth-century works: Martin Delayn’s Past, Present and Future of the Negro Race (1854), William Hannibal Thomas’s The American Negro:What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become (1901)…….. Within all these titles lie two assumptions no longer so openly embraced: that it is possible to speak of African-Americans in the singular—as what used to be called “the Negro” and …showed first 75 words of 1589 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1589 total…to men like Gates and West. Du Bois died before the growth of the largest African American middle class in history. He also died long before the invention of black women’s studies, whose tenor often varies from what black men have to say. As someone who finds opportunity as well as apprehension in contemporary America, I suspect that the difference between my hopeful hope and Gate’s and West’s unhopeful hope is gendered.