Critical race theory: Debra Dickerson argues it's time blacks stop worrying about what whites think of them.

• Author: Coates, Ta-Nehisi
• Position: The End of Blackness - Book Review

The End of Blackness By Debra J. Dickerson Pantheon; $24.00 In the run up to the war with Iraq, Harry Belafonte entertainer and potentate of the old black left, criticized Colin Powell for his role in the Bush administration war effort. Belafonte implied that Powell was a house slave, President Bush the master, and 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the big house. "In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and [there] were those slaves that lived in the house," said Belafonte. "You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master ... exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him. Colin Powell's committed to come into the house of the master."

The critique was a restatement of an old black-power notion, popularized by Malcolm X. Roughly, it asserts that docile house slaves were foolishly loyal to their masters, while cantankerous field slaves were the real rebels. The analysis is historically specious. Some of slavery's most violent dissidents--Nat Turner, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser--weren't exactly intractable field hands. Vesey was free, in fact. The house slave/field slave dichotomy makes for great mythology but always fell down under the weight of historical analysis.

Belafonte was roundly panned, even by his fallow black leftists, for effectively calling Powell a sellout. But beyond being just a vicious ad hominem attack, Belafonte's critique was woefully simplistic and outdated. Exactly who was Powell selling out and who are the slaves? Black people? Poor people? All Americans? Calling Powell a sell-out, tells us nothing about the complexity of an African American, who is popular among other African Americans, and yet is charged with carrying out the foreign policy of a president most African Americans hate.

Belafonte's analysis suffered from a problem of vocabulary, one that has struck many black thinkers over the past few decades. African Americans have entered into an epoch of history where, for the first time, Bull Conner racisin is the least of our problems. And yet "the problem of the color-line" still lingers. A gaggle of brilliant scholars from Robin Kelley to Cornel West to William Julius Wilson have sought to articulate this new world where race intermingles with all manner of societal problems to wreak havoc on black communities.

But no one has yet coined a language that describes this new reality in the way W.E.B. Du Bois did in The Souls of...