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ix Preface Waiting for Leroy The germ of the idea that became Looking for Leroy goes back nearly a decade. As initially conceived, many of the interventions that I attempt in this book were intended for a volume that also included many of the interventions I made in New Black Man (2005). Somewhere in late 2003, Looking for Leroy asserted itself in ways that would become familiar to me throughout this process, and demanded that it be allowed to breathe in its own space. Like suspicious, competitive, yet loving fraternal twins, the two books went their own ways. As such, Looking for Leroy was the first of my projects to dictate to me how it was going to live in the world: it seemed to anticipate the broadband and digital revolutions without which the project could not exist. Looking for Leroy implored me to go back to the lab—a lab that wasn’t even built yet—and it kept me honest by keeping my critical observations tethered to the career arc of Shawn Corey Carter (Jay-Z), who announced his retirement with the release of The Black Album in 2003. A half-dozen recordings later, with the summer 2011 release of the Jay-Z and Kanye West collaboration Watch the Throne, Looking for Leroy finally announced that it was in fact time to, as Miles Davis once urged John Coltrane, take the horn out of my mouth. But there were also times that Looking for Leroy had to wait on me—and it did so lovingly, as it allowed me to bury my parents, who departed this earth eighteen months apart in 2008 and 2009. Looking for Leroy allowed me to parent two demanding, assertive , brilliant, and mercurial daughters (and to sit for hundreds of hours at swim meets), daughters who have not only made me a better parent, but a better person and a better thinker. That my x Preface oldest daughter listens to Jay-Z’s Pandora channel and my youngest watches episodes of Fame on my iPad is some small indication of how closely they shared in the creating of this book. Looking for Leroy allowed me to exhale, and celebrate twenty years of marriage, on a journey that my partner often reminds me that she didn’t “sign up for.” Looking for Leroy allowed me to first doubt and then rediscover my voice—and my passion for this work. ...

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