Discourses on the African American Experience in the Early 21st Century

These essays albeit temporal, are full of nerve and represent a wide range in a diversity of moods, voices, and deportments. It is nothing less than a political, otherworldly, and intensely atypical record of America's unrestrained modern age, as experienced and observed by Stephen's as historian, actor, scientist and sideline observer, that are both intimate and important to a world that continues to fester in the racial dogma and infection of identity politics that divide by skin color. His essays move from personal experience to larger connotation without disuniting the connection between speaker and audience while simultaneously fitting it all into a mosaic documenting from the present to tenable speculation regarding the future of not only African Americans, but America and the world. This collection embodies an outstanding intellectual history of insight and is a criticism imbued and presented with the reason, lenience and skepticism that define and inform any reader. Stephens projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any essayist in modern American letters. His knowledge is formidable and reading him, following his logic of his thought and clear diagnosis of the experience of the global nature of all events and the singular African American as part of three communities (Racial/ethnic, American and globally), remind us of how a one writer and thinker can advocate for a unified America.