Why Do Black People Define Blackness & Black Progress So Narrowly? - Kehinde Andrews & Sean Goode

Sean Goode is a writer and cultural thinker whose work interrogates Black identity, power, and the political meaning embedded in popular culture.

Kehinde Andrews is a scholar of Black studies and author whose work challenges liberal myths of progress and exposes the structural realities of racism and capitalism.

What unfolds in this conversation is not a debate so much as a reckoning. Kehinde Andrews and Sean Goode circle Malcolm X not as a frozen icon, but as a living diagnostic tool—one that exposes how narrowly Blackness has been defined, weaponized, and sold back to Black people themselves. The discussion moves between autobiography and political theory, between gangsta rap and Garveyism, between capitalism’s seductive promises and its blood-soaked balance sheet. At its core is a shared unease: that America—and the West more broadly—is not failing to live up to its ideals, but rather succeeding at exactly what it was designed to do. Malcolm’s enduring relevance, they argue, lies in his refusal to confuse proximity to power with freedom, or survival with liberation. Whether through hip-hop’s unacknowledged intellectual labor, the false comfort of “house negro” mentalities, or the illusion that capitalism can be redeemed through intention alone, the conversation insists on a harder truth: freedom requires collective political imagination, not better branding. The tension remains unresolved—and that is precisely the point. Malcolm’s gift was never closure, but clarity.

This episode is part of the ongoing conversations hosted by Baldwin & Co., a Black-owned bookstore, café, and cultural institution based in New Orleans. Baldwin & Co. exists at the intersection of literature, ideas, and community—creating space for rigorous dialogue, storytelling, and intellectual exchange.

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