The news was confirmed by a spokesperson at Duke University Press, his publisher.
Starting in 1987, Tate was a longtime staff writer for The Village Voice, where he documented all facets of Black culture for the storied alt-weekly.
Black writers couldn’t not be aware of the irony; writing as radically black as you wanted for a press organ that was perceived as very white and gay in the hood.
In 1992, Tate published his first book, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America.
As a stylist, Tate was assertive, artful, funny and expressive.
I’m talking about like lobotomy by jackhammer, like a whirlpool bath in a cement mixer, like orthodontic surgery by Black & Decker, like making love to a buzzsaw, baby.
Like any good critic, Tate went in on the things he hated with just as much flair as he did the things he loved.
power structure, they should be intelligent enough to realize that dehumanizing gays, women, and Jews isn’t going to set black people free.
He also founded Burnt Sugar, a sprawling avant-garde orchestra that melded elements of free jazz and fusion, R&B, funk and contemporary classical music through conduction, a system of real-time arranging pioneered by improvising conductor Butch Morris.
“James Baldwin said, ‘To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time,'” wrote Tate.