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January 29, 2004
Must I?
"Black people need to...."
This is how to turn me off in four words. It's also how to make a buck if you're cute, black and have an advanced degree. Ladies and gentlemen I introduce to you the next African-American who is not a sociologist or political scientist who gets to bloviate about sociology and politics: Debra Dickerson.
Sooner or later, I'm going to have to read her new book 'The End of Blackness' if only because I have been writing essays similarly title on a regular basis every five years or so since 1983. Of course I was never so presumtuous in my claims. Instead I wrote 'The End of My Blackness', which is probably what Dickerson should have called her book.
One of the things that makes blackness a permanent part of America is precisely the slight of hand that Dickerson and her publishers are pulling off. It is not much different than the trickery that produces cameramen and pressfolk whenever Jesse Jackson clears his throat. If you can get a controversial Negro to spill the beans on race in any way that translates to the mainstream, and audience will materialize. There must be admonition for the masses of blackfolk, some fundamental basic thing they have wrong that the author has learned through the hard knock life of crossing racial boundaries. You know the formula. I await the 20 minutes she gets on Bill Maher's show when she faces off with John McWhorter. Somebody get me access to the gods of the TV Guide so I can set my VCR. That way I don't have to read the book.
Can you feel the hateration in my verbs, the jealousy? It's all anybody black wants to do - set the record straight for the nons who don't get it. And yet it is a self-perpetuating trap. The more you talk to blackfolks and whitefolks separately, the more need there are for explanation books.
What annoys me most about this uppercrusty chitlin circuit is that there are good black writers who own their corner and don't try to behave as if the contradictions of their life stories is an indictment of America's blacks or whites. It's not that they transcend race or any such hippie fantasy, they simply accept themselves, their lives and their little shard of the black monolith. We seem to be stuck with a nest of Negroes who make best-sellers out of their racial grief and that is supposed to be a perscription on what 'black people need to...'
I submit to you four such good authors:
Colored People - Skip Gates
Parallel Time - Brent Staples
High Cotton - Darryl Pinckney
The White Boy Shuffle - Paul Beatty
Pinckney especially resonates with me, and everyone who ever read Paul Beatty said they felt the need to call me on the phone because they thought they were reading my own biography. Or something like that, both were written several years back. What is my point?
My point is simply that it's nice to be in the pundit business. Lots of us want it, otherwise we wouldn't blog. But autobiography is not social science nor political science. I hope 'The End of Blackness' is not trying to be.
All that said, I genuinely anticipate the arrival of commentary on the Dickerson book. You can never have too many black authors.
Posted by mbowen at January 29, 2004 04:21 PM
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I could not agree more with Dickerson's reported assertion that white America should not be held up as a norm, or worse yet, a role model. (However, it seems to me that black conservatives are more likely to do that... [Read More]
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Comments
Awesome post, fully honest, what blogging is all about.
My own petty jealousies span political faultlines, but rarely cultural ones; my own autobiography, were I to write it, would be rife with incidents of conservatives dishing bigotry at inopportune times, dishing at people I would never dish at, saying things that shouldn't have been said, turning my liberal stomach.
I resent the people who have gone on to "other things" only because I have shut my mouth and played along, out of fealty to--what?--their proximity? Their whiteness? Maybe; and maybe that's my own tragedy.
My own autobio is all I really have. We ultimately can't say what others should do, only what we should do ourselves; we can be heroes to ourselves if to nobody else, and our autobio is the story of that. All the best with whatever demons you subsume in order to get through a particular book, or even a particular day, but your autobio is right here, man, and those who read love you for putting it out there.
You can never have too many authors, black or otherwise.
Posted by: joseph at January 30, 2004 01:01 PM
Ok, so does it ever end? Is there ever to be a time when Americans who happen to be black sit back, take in the view and say "hey, we're here"?
As a white person, I cannot really get at the life of a black person...but as a man, I can't get at the life of a woman...and as a heterosexual, I can't get at the life of a homosexual; but I feel entirely comfortable discussing thigns about women and homosexuals, yet always like I'm missing some ultra-important point in discussions about black people. I can relate to the experiences of just about any type of person - except black people.
Whats the missing piece? Do I ever get it - and, now that I think about it, is there a piece to white people that black people don't quite get?
Posted by: Mark Noonan at January 31, 2004 04:05 PM