We wanted to be black and proud, as the song went, but we wanted none of the nationalist narrative of the generation that came before us. What, then, were we to do?

Into this mix came Beatty, and his novel "The White Boy Shuffle," which in London very quickly became a kind of guide for how to approach this new blackness: a blackness that allowed us to read Heidegger, to argue that we liked Wallace Stevens better than Langston Hughes, to love action films in spite of their often-racist subtexts.

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