ABSTRACT
Many of the problems facing black people in the twenty-first century reflect the challenge of postmodern identity politics—the task of reconciling modernity's specificity with postmodernism's intersectionality. This chapter examines how some social theorists conceptualize, operationalize, and otherwise analyze black identities in the US since the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. It discusses how some theorists in the fields of black feminism, (bi)sexuality studies, and Latino studies have formulated the problems of identity construction processes utilizing postmodern ideology. During the examination of black identity construction, the chapter analyses the aspects of class, occupational status, and sex in the US since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The intersection of sexuality and race (blackness) is often complicated by notions of power in society. The intersections of blackness and Latinidad must incorporate an understanding of what Michael Omi and Howard Winant call "racial formations," a concept that attempts to account for the contextual nature of both identity and culture.
