“A mighty wind of fresh air. His pitiless self-examination—and his equally honest exploration of the racial, sexual, cultural, and class fault lines that thread our psychic and social landscape—is not only brave but necessary if our nation is to survive.”

—Michael Eric Dyson

“Kevin Powell is pushing to bring, as he has so brilliantly done before, the voices of his generation: the concerns, the cares, the fears, and the fearlessness.”

—Nikki Giovanni

In three mind-jolting essays by one of the most passionate and eloquent voices of his generation, Who’s Gonna Take the Weight? by Kevin Powell leads us to the heart of the searing issues facing us today, from manhood, violence, and gender oppression to celebrity culture and hip-hop. Using compelling personal stories as the connecting thread, he examines what this nation has become since the monumental upheavals of the 1960s and where it might be headed if we’re not careful.

Written one hundred years after W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk and forty years after James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time , Who’s Gonna Take the Weight? is an impassioned witness to the burning problems that have accompanied us on our journey through the twenty-first century.