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poor folk's child
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Chicago
Posts: 12,178
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Authenticity Blues
From the New Criterion web page. I have no Idea what kind of page that is and stumbled on it though a reference in The Daily Arts & letters site.
Peace.
Authenticity blues
by Stefan Beck
Stanley Crouch’s essays on race, masculinity, authenticity, and the arts are generally sober and robust. They are also shot through with jarring colloquialisms and demotic imagery. On page one of his collection The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity, we are told that some of Crouch’s subjects will be “spanked.” Of novelists guilty of lazy or platitudinous treatment of race, he says that they are “[w]alking beneath a flag of white underwear stained fully yellow by liquefied fear.” Crouch’s engagement of low, folk, and pop culture is heralded by titles like “Baby Boy Blues,” “Segregated Fiction Blues,” and “Blues for the Artificial White Man.”
That alone will raise the hackles of some readers. And though Crouch does not consistently convince us of his offbeat positions, his fusion of “low” subject matter with high intelligence achieves a kind of exhilarating effect. Reading his essays is like having a cant-free conversation with a clever, passionate, albeit frustrating, friend. Given Crouch’s overarching themes, it is the right sort of talk with just the right sort of mind.
Little in Crouch’s writing marks him as a “conservative” in the usual sense. Few conservatives could stomach, much less write, a seventy-page paean to the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s radical racial vision (“Blues in More Than One Color”). Yet Crouch places himself in the ranks of black conservatives, like John McWhorter, who denounce the cancer of barbarism growing in black popular culture. He is vocally disgusted by hip-hop music’s “neo-Sambo … mugging or scowling” with “gold teeth, drop-down pants, and tasteless jewelry.” He bravely chastises producers and “artists” who peddle the same “bullying, hedonistic buffoons” D. W. Griffith portrayed in Birth of a Nation.
The spark and originality of Crouch’s criticism—what will make it impossible to ignore him—is that he takes the customary disgust of conservative critics and goes it one better. He derides the purveyors of crudity because they are, after all, guilty, but he sees the real danger in a wider cultural trend, one more to do with “authenticity anxiety” than race. That trend is the belief, slipped into circulation by the liberal intellectual elite, that what is most “real” is what is most base, most closely allied to the loutish ways of the lower orders.
In his title essay, “Blues for the Artificial White Man,” Crouch lifts up a rock of intellectual legitimacy to show us the damp creep of ugly, predatory neuroses beneath it. What he inspects, with equal parts revulsion and fascination, is David Shields’s Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season. Shields, a white suburbanite who teaches writing at the University of Washington, is infatuated with Gary Payton, a black basketball player (star of the Seattle SuperSonics when the book was written) known both for his athletic skill and nasty “trash talk.” For Shields, Payton is a rebel against Shield’s “social frame … a supposedly vacuous geniality that the writer battles by being as rude and obnoxious in public as he can, making the teenage subtext of his own life clear.” Shields practically deifies Payton for his very worst attributes.
Crouch is appalled by this “immaturity … the result of a willful adolescence, not the helpless hell-raising of a person so poorly educated or underdeveloped that experience is never assessed beyond the perspectives of a teenage boy.” In simpler terms: Grow up! You of all people ought to know better. Unfortunately, many intelligent people seem not to know better, and so negative attitudes are reinforced, to wildly destructive effect—while the “intellectuals” play-act, like Marie Antoinette at Rambouillet, at being underclass types.
Anthony Daniels has said that, thanks to the elite’s rejection of middle-class respectability, “the poor have been deprived of any useful model to emulate.” Crouch would agree. Crouch would also agree that he, McWhorter, Thomas Sowell, et al. have no influence on the young people (and, sadly, even adults) who emulate the thug model—chances are, these unfortunate souls read little cultural commentary. So—if one may ask an awkward question—who are they writing for? Who do they hope or expect to change?
In the case of Crouch’s essays, the answers are clear. For one, he writes to reassure us that however destructive the authenticity crisis has been—both to behavior patterns and to ideas about race—it is being quietly but forcefully addressed in various quarters. For another, he writes to put the so-called intellectuals on notice: he is tired of condescension, of casual, unconscious racism, of worn-out P.C. pieties. Since his is an almost uncomfortably direct approach—“naming names” with fearless abandon—he has a very real hope of changing the terms of the battle.
We might cringe to read Crouch’s glowing endorsement of John Singleton’s Baby Boy, a film about ghetto life that—if it has not been forgotten, or supplanted by other, exploitative works—might easily be mistaken for a glorification of that experience. So be it. The hard fact is that young men and women heretofore lost to that world will see that film, whereas they will not scrawl marginalia in The Artificial White Man and adjust their activities or aspirations accordingly. Crouch’s celebration of Baby Boy—which handily demonstrates the degrading futility of “thug life”—is a dart directed at complacency of any color. And it is a reminder that lives are deeply affected by pop cultural influences, for better or for worse—while, well out of sight, conservatives squawk and liberals crow.
Crouch’s essays on literature (“Segregated Fiction Blues”) and popular film (“Blues in More Than One Color”) show most vividly the sway that pop culture holds over our conversations about race and authenticity. It may be difficult to swallow, but Quentin Tarantino’s savage movies do more to change and reinforce popular ideas about race relations than do any ten John McWhorters:
We have the perpetual theme of miscegenation and partnerships that cross ethnic and sexual lines, cultures and traditions… . [Tarantino] is a major force in American art because of how well he understands the interplay between human themes that are as old as the species and the omnivorous strength and weakness of a popular culture that defines itself by borrowing, by appropriating, by defiling. Above all, no one understands better than he the many miscegenations that make our modern world the unprecedented thing that it is.
Whether this is true (“no one understands better” is certainly pushing it), it gives us a good idea of what Crouch demands from the culture: an acknowledgment that none of us is purely this or that, white or black, high or low. Therein lies our authenticity—not, as too many believe, in familiarity, in easy, tired badges of group affiliation. For Crouch, “miscegenation” is about combination, creation, originality—but not race, really. Thus, when discussing the failures of modern fiction, he tells us:
In essence, Hemingway’s dictum of writing about what you know has become an excuse for avoiding risks. Since Hemingway wrote about a wide mix of people, some American, some not, it’s clear the great writer wasn’t advising those who took up his craft to isolate themselves from the world… . What you know might be something you took the time and went somewhere to discover.
Spot on. This should be read, too, as an invitation to “know” something other than what the self-appointed dictators of the “appropriate,” “sensitive,” or “socially useful” have allowed us. All one need do is follow Crouch’s example—be honest, risk a great deal of scorn, and prepare to be genuinely startled by what reality reveals.
Stefan Beck is the assistant editor of The New Criterion.
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