What's truly shocking as you go through the essays, some full of jazz-like riffs and others more baldly academic, is how little cultural criticism I've read over the years was written with a proudly Black voice (in one essay, he criticizes an Afro-centric art book for assiduously excluding white influences: "Black art historians shouldn't just talk about how the massive mandalas of a painter like the Africobra school's James Phillips draw on Coltrane's modal solos and African textile patterns, but how he proposes fresh uses for African-inspired geometry in painting when Cubism and Constructivism were thought to have exhausted them.") Though this may explain why I had never run into the work of Greg Tate before he died last year. It's hard to explain how this realization makes me feel. Kind of like I've been duped. Like I've been had. At one point he laments the lack of a cohesive Black artistic community because white corporate America is offering them enough money to work as a Creative Director and buy a suburban home. Probably an oversimplification. Then again, no mainstream outlet would ever, EVER, publish great, insightful, perspective-shifting stuff like this. Unfortunately, white people got the money. And they prefer their edges smooth. Three stars.