# Looking beyond in the present moment: defining blackness through Afrofuturism  
While many conservative intellectuals and politicians in the West have seized upon the term 'post-blackness' to claim that we are living in a 'post-racial era' (that is, in a time where racism and racial discrimination no longer exist in any meaningful way, or only exist in the paranoid minds of minorities), the earliest and most famous use of the term, by American art curator and art historian Thelma Golden, had quite different connotations. In the exhibition catalogue for the show Freestyle hosted by Golden's Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001, Golden argued that the black artists exhibiting wanted to be understood first and foremost as artists who worked in and through black paradigms. Honing this definition further, in Post Black: How a New Generation is Redefining African American Identity (2010), American journalist Ytasha Womack argues that twenty-first-century African Americans have expanded their cultural expressions and politics 'beyond' those of the previous generation and, contrary to conservative claims that post-blackness means the end of race and racism, are not seeking to eliminate previous definitions of blackness, but instead to expand on them.