When Henry Louis Gates Jr. Told Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police, "You don't know who you're messing with," he was speaking truth to power, albeit in a manner more akin to arrogance than erudition. The big shock here, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson, is not that a Harvard professor misused the subjective case ("who" for "whom") and inelegantly ended a sentence with a preposition; it is, rather, that Gates belongs to an elite enclave beyond the sergeant's experience or imagination. Gates's life as an academic superstar places him among a select group of black Americans aptly labeled "Transcendent" by Robinson. Think of Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, Kobe Bryant, Vernon Jordan and Richard Parsons, the retired chief executive of Time Warner.

These Transcendent men and women, Robinson tells us at the outset, live and work in a privileged world of wealth and power. Despite the color of their skin, they do not belong to the black community.

Fair enough, but Robinson does not stop there. Over the next 200 pages, he demonstrates rather convincingly that no one belongs to the black community anymore. The race-based community that was a fixture of American life for generations — the traditional locus of racial experience and solidarity, the idealized entity that many of us still refer to, indeed still cling to, as an institutional and social reality — no longer exists. That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of this slim but powerful book.