Generation next, or the future of bad hair: text for a film by Greg Tate and Arthur Jafa.

Mama Tate says there are fifty black people in the world who know how to read and write, and they all know one another. Granddaddy Henry Grinner said no matter where you go in the world and no matter what you see, somewhere up in there you will find a negro.

As we saunter into the millennium the question arises, just whose black culture is it anyway? Who will define the terms of blackness for the next century? Our educated and privileged elites or our toiling masses and grassroots politicians? Our Fortune 500 companies or our hiphop nation? (If they aren't one and the same by the time you read this.)

Let's talk about Black, Inc. Who owns it, who controls it, who's making the big bucks by keeping it real?

In the late 20th century the question arose, Are you now or have you ever been a member of the hiphop nation?

You answered: I claim affiliation, but I ain't sweating Tommy Hilfigger.

The question arose: Are you black or are you a brand name junkie?

You answered: I am an endangered person of African descent seeking political asylum and consumer protection.

You know we have always wanted it all, man. The color of money and the communion of funk. The approval of white people and the remote distance of nigger heaven. Two souls warring in one body said W. E. B. Du Bois at the dawn of the 20th century, one African and one American.

All praises due to the prophet Berry Gordy. He forged our modern-day synthesis of black entrepreneurship and black pleasure. I mean, this is the man who taught the Civil Rights Movement how to dance on Wall Street.

Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, and the Black Panther Party. They're the ones who vilified the black middle class and deified the black revolutionary--armed, dangerous, and straight out of some ghetto mentality. Then came Blaxpoitation. The Bloods and The Crips. Crossover Dreams.

Time marches on and Ice Cube a.k.a. architectural drafting school graduate and two-parent-family-reared O'Shea Jackson invents Gangsta rap on NWA's debut album Straight Outta Compton. Thereby upholding a tradition Ralph Ellison commented on in Invisible Man of discontented, crafty, and charismatic middle-class black boys inciting the lumpen proletariat for existential fun and profit.

It might be unfair to say someone had to pay for Ice Cube's sins, but it turned out to be Tupac Amaru Shakur, who may also hold the dubious honor of being the last martyr of the 1960s.

In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Harold Cruse proposed to answer why all mass black political movements fail. Cruse thought they failed because none conceived of strategies which a la Berry Gordy synthesized cultural, political, and economic agendas. A simpler answer might be that, more often than not, self-interest prevails over group solidarity.

Black unity is a dream package that would have us believe police informers. Molotov tossing anarchists, lesbian literati, and Jesus freaks can co-exist on the same race platform. They might reside within the black body more comfortably than the black body politic.

We may easily agree about the need to combat injustice and inequality, but watch your back when the conversation turns to issues of style, sexuality, free speech, and class.

Looking to our extreme right we see an African-American Community haunted by the spectre of police brutality, indiscriminate of class, caste, or cash. Looking to our extreme left we see a cynical and now corporate-controlled hiphop music industry that commands us to keep it real--exonerating criminality and fratricide as long as it stuffs legal tender in a brother's purse.

Fortunately, as this century moves into the next, other voices demand to be heard around this question of Black American-ness, not so much from the middle as from the margins.

Don't call them nobody's generation x unless you mean Malcolm X or generation next. They claim mutant status like those comic book super heroes The X-Men: strange creatures with strange powers and miraculous origins bonded together to rudely prepare humanity for the next stage in human evolution.

Perhaps they are just another bunch of black bohemians demanding broad cultural space for their peculiarities. The latest in a long line of romantic lemmings steeped in African studies, scurrying to slide down, or leap over, the edge of that stagnant bowl known as America's racial soup. But among them are some who have nobly embraced the task of insuring, per James Baldwin's directive, that our story is told again and again.

What binds them together? A collective sense that the race codes they've inherited cannot contain their chaos, contradictions, or complexity.

What could they possibly have to say to us that has not been said before? Maybe it's too early to tell and too soon to know. Maybe that's the wrong question. Why does a dancer dance--because history approves of her movements? Homey don't think so. Or as Mile's Davis once put it, You don't play what the critics tell you to play, you play what your body tells you to play.

Generation next does not labor under the burden of being brand new or even Brand Nubians. "We are not selling bleach here," they might say. Like poets everywhere they go the way their blood flows. Yes, they know how to bring the pain and the profanity but also the prophecy, the redemption, and the light. They bear witness to what Amiri Baraka once identified as The Changing Same of the African continuum.

The question arises: Are we an African people or are we a rainbow people? Either/or or neither/nor?

This line of questioning reminds me of my mama. Anytime mama meets a new friend she pulls me aside and asks, Son, who are her people? I say: Girlfriend's mother is Egyptian and her father is from Tuscany. I say: Her pops hails from Libya but lives in the Dominican Republic and her mother was Polish. I say: She was born in Berlin, grew up in Anacostia, chills on Sunset Boulevard, and is still the funkiest bass player alive. I say: Sista's from Mississippi, was last seen on Broadway in A Midsummer's Night Dream waving at the Caribbean Day parade from her window high above Eastern Parkway. Or I say: Mama, meet Odwalla; she's from the star system Sirius B. And mama says, Boy, why you so Dogon crazy?

Greg Tate writes regularly about culture for The Village Voice.