  Continuing such efforts, in a different register, with substantial and innovative contributions is Paul Taylor (who studied with McGary at Rutgers University). His Race: A Philosophical Introduction stands out as an especially clearly-articulated, nuanced, clarifying navigation of many of the complexities of conceptualizations of race firmly situated in reconstructions of historical practices guided by political and other agendas. Yet, it is Taylor’s Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics that is especially noteworthy. It is, perhaps, the first-in-decades book-length “assembling” (Taylor’s own characterization of his effort) of a deliberately philosophical theory of Black aesthetics: that is, a critical theoretical exploration of the roles expressive practices and objects play when taken up by Black folks in the creation and maintenance of their lifeworlds. (The philosopher Alain Leroy Locke, midwife to the New Negroes of the Harlem Renaissance, preceded Taylor by half-a-century in taking seriously Black expressive life, as did W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and numerous others.) Taylor’s efforts are doubly innovative in his endeavor to bridge two discursive communities heretofore not in communication: professional philosophers, and others, concerned with aesthetics who have had little to no concern with aesthetics in Black life; Black artists and critics fully immersed in the productions of and engagements with expressive practices and objects in Black life with little to no engagements with resources drawn from academic, professional Philosophy. As did Alain Locke, Taylor aims to contribute to a new generation of articulate thinkers who are focusing their critical acumen on the expressivity and performativity in productions of self, and of self in relations with others, of those who have been racialized as Black.