Searching for Whitney’s Blues

“…This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America — this urge within the race towards whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little negro and as much American as possible.”
— Langston Hughes, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926)

1. Earlier this year, a woman wrote me about my 2012 essay on Whitney Houston, “Whitney: Sister Can’t…