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