Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness

This collection of essays about what it means to be "cool," particularly in relation to Blackness, packs a punch. Essayists explore how coolness can be commodity for white people to latch on to, can be a response to generational—and immediate—trauma, is inevitably gendered, how cultural expectations summed up in the word cool can be limiting and/or liberating. This book busts monolithic ideas of race and identity wide open and is an amazing introduction to US culture as it's been informed by the African Diaspora. Includes work by bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Dayo Olopade, Staceyann Chin and many others, and a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.