Family Affair: What It Means to be African American Today [Paperback]

Gil L. Robertson IV (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 2009

It’s no secret that the African American community is in crisis. From health disparities and political injustice to crime statistics and a variety of social ills, it is a community teetering on the edge. Through personal stories and essays, Family Affair addresses this imbalance, offering insight on issues and topics that the majority of African Americans only talk about in secret. The goal: to stimulate dialogue that supports reflection, healing, and understanding. Family Affair comprises five sections representing the key features that influence the African American identity: History, Politics, Behavior, Beliefs, and Self-evaluation. The book showcases a wide cross-section of contributors representing various elements of the black community. Each section features at least one religious leader and one institutional leader, as well as many celebrities from the worlds of music and broadcasting, along with ordinary people with extraordinary stories.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This thoughtful collection of short essays, addressing a wide range of issues and emotions facing African Americans, should become a well-thumbed nightstand fixture. Organized into five themes (family, culture, relationships, community and self), contributors range from celebrities like Isaiah Washington and supermodel Beverly Johnson to education administration authority Ontario S. Wooden and self-described "Black Male Teen in America" Bernard Harrison, a 16-year-old from Queens, N.Y. In the "relationship" section, actress Hattie Marie Winston pens a loving letter to her husband Harold, while documentary filmmaker Muta'Ali Muhammad confesses his ambivalence toward "modern black women." Another essay, by young writer Denise L. McIver, conveys her shock at being told to "go back to Africa!" ("My mouth dropped... I had never set foot in Africa"), while a few pages away Tracy Pierre delivers the strident poem, "I Am ... African / (No Hyphen! No Hype!)" Other essays lament the distance among modern African Americans ("We just don't seem to care as much about each other"), but this community-minded collection provides inspiration and reason for hope. Readers should resist the urge to read through these essays all at once; concise and thought-provoking, they deserve to be savored.

Review

"This thoughtful collection of short essays, addressing a wide range of issues and emotions facing African Americans, should become a well-thumbed nightstand fixture. ...concise and thought-provoking, they deserve to be savored." —starred review, Publishers Weekly

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Agate Bolden; Original edition (March 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932841350
• ISBN-13: 978-1932841350
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,164,717 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Book Review by Kam Williams, April 10, 2009

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Contributor - See all my reviews

This review is from: Family Affair: What It Means to be African American Today (Paperback)

¡§Who am I? It¡¦s a fundamental question for everyone, of course, but for African-Americans, it has particular resonance. Since our history in America is filled with grand contradictions, marginalization, and grotesque lies, African-Americans have largely been left alone in the dark to grapple with the issue of who we are.

Our shared experience as people of African-American descent have been marked by an endless wave of mixed messages, leaving questions that lack finite answers. How do we declare our humanity? How do we begin to construct healthy environments for our lives, families, and communities in the face of chaos and confusion?

Compiling this book was important to me because the black community is clearly in need of healing¡K Family Affair is intended to facilitate conversations, spark dialogue, revive dreams, and free our individual minds. The African-American community has been mentally and spiritually fractured for much too long, and it¡¦s in need of revival and honest reflection. The voices included in this book take some steps in that direction.¡¨
Þ
E Excerpted from the Preface (pages xiii-xv)

Attorney General Eric Holder took a lot of flak recently when he referred to
America as a ¡§nation of cowards¡¨ because we ¡§simply do not talk enough with each other about race.¡¨ The backlash emanated from the feeling of many that the election of Obama proves that we have finally achieved that post-racial society envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King where people would be judged solely by the content of their character. The dilemma reminds me of the old joke where, finding themselves surrounded by hostile Indians, the Lone Ranger asks his trusted, native scout ¡§What do you think we should do?¡¨ and Tonto responds, ¡§What do you mean ¡¥we¡¦ white man?¡¨

Gil Robertson, author of Family Affair, recognized that, although Obama has generated considerable ¡§hope for change,¡¨ the fact remains that most African-American communities still exist ¡§in a state of almost perpetual crisis... in terms of a health disparities, political injustices, crime statistics, and a plethora of social ills.¡¨ So, he naturally started wondering how could the country have its first African-American President while the masses of blacks continue to struggle with so many of the same issues the Civil Rights Movement had attempted to address a half-century ago?

Rather than attempt to answer that question himself, the veteran journalist opted to pose it to a host of prominent African-Americans leaders from all walks of life. And their revealing responses, in the form of 76 enlightening, introspective essays, provide the sum and substance of Family Affair: What It Means to Be African-American Today.

Among the individuals contributing to the diversity of perspectives shared in this literary equivalent of a black group therapy session are TV-One¡¦s Cathy Hughes, Actress Tasha Smith, NAACP Hollywood Bureau Chief Vicangelo Bullock, Oscar-nominee actress Ruby Dee, Hollywood publicist/film director Ava DuVernay, actor Laz Alonso, first black supermodel Beverly Johnson, Congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick, Hip-Hop Doc Rani Whitfield, MD, lesbian activist Jasmyne Cannick, Professor Anthony Asadullah Samad and the late Isaac Hayes.

The touching reflections range from Mr. Bullock¡¦s heartfelt recounting of the angst involved in growing up biracial to Leslie Bardo¡¦s equally-evocative memoir of a four-year stint in Japan where her family found itself subjected to discrimination because of fear generated by stereotypical images of blacks disseminated by movies and rap videos. Congrats to Gil Robertson for not only figuring a way to take the collective pulse of African-Americana but for distilling the essence of his research into an informative and eloquent cultural tapestry destined to stand the test of time.