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 now most often appears as “the black community”—and that the authors in question possess authority to speak for the