Two things about Vibe magazine's end: One, it's another death that's tied to Quincy Jones. Two, my dead friend Joe Wood.

Who is Joe Wood?

Last summer's Unity Conference for Journalists of Color took Joseph L. Wood, Jr. to Seattle. He disappeared on July 8, 1999, while birdwatching on nearby Mt. Rainier. He is presumed dead at this point...

One of the most frustrating things about Joe's death at the age of 34 is the loss of all that he was going to be as well as all that he was. He had already edited one stellar anthology, Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, and in his work as an editor at The New Press (one of only two black male editors working at a major New York publishing house), he had acquired and edited such important works as The Race to Incarcerate, about America's crazed prison system. He'd also written reams of dazzling essays and reportage for publications like The Village Voice, The New York Times Magazine, Vibe and Transition.

I believe the first article Joe Wood wrote for Vibe magazine was about Seattle—indeed, the article might have been in the inaugural issue of that magazine. Joe Wood spent the summer of 93 in Seattle, returned to New York City, and wrote the piece. Admittedly, the article was not very good. Admittedly, I hated it. Admittedly, I never told him this in his face because I was ambitious and did not want to lose a powerful ally in NY's literary world.

My problem with the article? It pretty much stated that Seattle was not, as a big American city, black enough because (and this got my goat) it didn't have any projects (or projects at the scale of, say, Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes). What bothered me about this assertion had nothing to do with city pride but the fact that it associated blackness (a racial designation) with the projects (a spacial designation). This was a dangerous way of thinking. Any link between the projects and blackness is arbitrary and not, as Wood seemed to argue, essential. (Similarly, Henry Louis Gates once believed that a link existed between a way of speaking and being black—this link was instantly broken when he heard the English of black Brits.) Blackness and its social and cultural productions or situations are not natural; they all result from accidents—the accident of place, language, climate, birth, so on and so forth.

Joe Wood died a decade ago; Vibe died today. It would, however, be much better if Wood and Vibe were alive, and the only dead thing was that way of thinking about the projects and blackness.