The Black identity is an elusive ideal. Indeed, the troubles Black people have encountered in the search for the Black identity are dwarfed only by those experienced in their troubled and difficult past. To complicate and confound things further, new concepts and notions of Blackness seem to arise with each generation. Whether rooted in activism, rejection of white ideals, or in the more immediate past, these ideals are, more often than not, troubled and complicated in and of themselves. The core conflict of luminary Black author Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” though superficially a simple family dispute over some household items, is in fact a depiction of this central conflict among the Black community.…