What's In a Name?
Gates, Henry Louis Jr.
The question of color takes up much space in these pages, but the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self. —James Baldwin, 1961 . . ....
...Few of us—and I mean very few—wish to be the "only one" in town...
...I'd rather they called me 'nigger,' " my Uncle Raymond would say again and again...
...I want my own children to grow up in the home of intellectuals, but with black middle-class values as common to them as the air they breathe...
...Then the preservation of the material base proved to be more important then the primal xenophobia that we had posited...
...The campus was our sanctuary, where we could be as black as the ace of spades and nobody seemed to mind...
...Sammy Davis, Jr.'s second autobiography has been widely — " "Young man, I have come a long way...
...Ideology, paradoxically, was impoverished when we needed it most, during the civil rights movement of the early 1960s...
...It is one of the few treatments of slavery that escapes the pitfalls of kitsch...
...He used to make jokes frequently about a union official who moonlighted...
...They seem FALL • 1989 • 493 intent, paradoxically, in escaping the very banality of blackness that we encountered in so much Black Arts poetry, by assuming it as a legitimate grounds for the creation of art...
...He calls all colored people George...
...James Baldwin, 1961 . . . blood, darky, Tar Baby, Kaffir, shine .. . moor, blackamoor, Jim Crow, spook . . . quadroon, meriney, red bone, high yellow . . . Mammy, porch monkey, home, homeboy, George . . . spearchucker, schwarze, Leroy, Smokey .. . mouli, buck, Ethiopian, brother, sistah...
...Black studies, where it has survived—and it has survived only at those campuses where someone believed enough in its academic integrity to insist upon a sound academic foundation—is entering its third decade...
...that it can exist outside and independent of its representation...
...I stopped licking my ice cream cone, and asked my Dad in a loud voice why Mr...
...Ellis sees creative artists such as Spike Lee, Wynton Marsalis, Anthony Davis, August Wilson, Warrington Hudlin, Joan Armatrading, and Lisa and Kelly Jones as representatives of a new generation who, commencing with the publication in 1978 of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (for Ellis a founding gesture) "no longer need to deny or suppress any part of our complicated and sometimes contradictory 490 • DISSENT cultural baggage to please either white people or black...
...My father and I were walking home at dusk from his second job...
...Then I stood up and told the guy not to say those words ever again...
...There was enough in our public name to make a whole generation of Negroes rail against our efforts to legitimize, to naturalize, the word "black...
...Even then, that early, I knew when I was in the presence of "one of those things," one of those things that provided a glimpse, through a rent curtain, at another world that we could not affect but that affected us...
...It was "one of those things," as my Mom would put it...
...Where the memory of the smile under her chin might have been and was not, a latch latched and lichen attached its apple-green bloom to the metal...
...Do not trifle with the Weary Traveler...
...Ignore it, boy...
...Craig Werner, "James Baldwin: Politics and the Gospel Impulse," New Politics [Winter 19891...
...Why not...
...he wanted the entire mountain range...
...In the face of Anthony Appiah's and my own critique of what we might think of as "black essentialism," Houston Baker demands that we remember what we might characterize as the "taxi fallacy...
...and Lisa Jones' character Clean Mama King who is available for both sit-ins and film walk-ons...
...Ellis dates the beginning of this cultural movement with the publication of Song of Solomon in 1978...
...To be a man implied responsibilities no colored man in Clayton City could meet, so the best way to deal with the contradiction was to deny it...
...Martin Luther King's birthday is a federal holiday, and a black man you did not know won several Democratic presidential primaries last year...
...I see and understand the non- or anti-Western point of view...
...Now everyone does (December 22, 1988...
...There isn't any other to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness...
...Remembering seemed unwise...
...To open the "Personal Statement" for my Yale admission application in 1968, I had settled upon the following: "My grandfather was colored, my father is Negro, and I am black...
...It never occurred to Wright, apparently, that the sublime gains in intellection in the Enlightenment took place simultaneously with the slave trade in African human beings, which generated an unprecedented degree of wealth and an unprecedentedly large leisure and intellectual class...
...The following day, the only black member of the staff cornered me and said that the kitchen staff had a bet, and that I was the only person who could resolve it...
...Their goal seems to be to create a fiction beyond the colorline, one that takes the blackness of the culture for granted, as a springboard to write about those human emotions that we share with everyone else, and that we have always shared with each other, when no white people are around...
...When Shirley Graham and I set sail for Ghana, I pronounced all hope for our patient people doomed...
...so much for Cambridge...
...If only that's all it was...
...As it turns out, it was vastly easier to dismantle the petty forms of apartheid in this country (housing, marriage, hotels, and restaurants) than anyone could have possibly believed it would be, without affecting the larger patterns of inequality...
...They forgot her like a bad dream...
...How many of our own...
...Nor can I help but feel some humiliation as I try to put a white person at ease in a dark place on campus at night, coming from nowhere, confronting that certain look of panic in their eyes, trying to think grand thoughts like Du Bois but—for the life of me—looking to them like Wille Horton...
...Black women novelists adorn the New York Times Best Seller lists, and the number one television show in the country is a situation comedy concerning the lives and times of a refined Afro-American obstetrician and his lovely wife, who is a senior partner in a Wall Street law firm...
...Perhaps, by that time, the most radical act of naming will be a return to "colored...
...West told Drake how Snead was, yes, a solid race man, how he loved the tradition, and wrote about it, but that his real goal was to redefine American studies from the vantage point of African-American concepts and principles...
...Playing the dozens, Tait reasoned, was an effort to prepare one to be able to "take it...
...we are just a bit more fortunate, in some ways, the accident of birth enabling us to teach at "white" research institutions, when two generations before we would have been teaching at black schools, overworked and underfunded...
...Shoot, I said...
...A new middle class defined itself, a talented tenth, the cultured few, who, somehow, slipped through the cracks...
...One day my wife and father came to lunch at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, where I'm currently a fellow...
...my wife is white...
...I could not have been more than five or six, and we had stopped off at the Cut-Rate Drug Store (where no black person in town but my father could sit down to eat, and eat off real plates with real silverware) so that I could buy some caramel ice cream, two scoops in a wafer cone, please, which I was busy licking when Mr...
...The range of representations of the meanings of blackness among the post-Song of Solomon (1978) era of black writing can be characterized —for the sake of convenience—by the works of C. Eric Lincoln (The Avenue, Clayton City), Trey Ellis's manifesto, "The New Black Aesthetic," and Toni Morrison's Beloved, in many ways the ur-text of the African-American experience...
...I knew that there was power in our name, enough power that the prospect frightened my maternal uncles...
...And Ellis is right: something quite new is afoot in AfricanAmerican letters...
...Old aunt Nelly...
...Actually, this "essay" amounted to some six hundred pages, and the appendices were written in German...
...We both burst into laughter...
...Wright claimed that he was "split": "I'm black...
...In fact, the ranks of the black underclass have never been larger...
...What made her think her fingernails could open locks the rain rained on...
...No," I said, "it's the other way around...
...If that doesn't grab them, I thought, then nothing will...
...Surely it required the grossest level of depravity to indulge in such willful vulgarity...
...494 • DISSENT Part of this effort to achieve a sense of community is understanding that our generation of scholars is just an extension of other generations, of "many thousands gone...
...No one could exempt himself from the cultural vulgarity of black debasement, no matter how offensive it might be...
...But there, in the middle of an extended italicized list of the by-names of "the race" ("the race" or "our people" being the terms my parents used in polite or reverential discourse, "jigaboo" or "nigger" more commonly used in anger, jest, or pure disgust) it was: "George...
...The meanings of blackness are vastly more complex, I suspect, than they ever have been before in our American past...
...The gospel impulse—its refusal to accept oppositional thought...
...Once a white coed even felt it necessary to spring from an elevator that I was about to enter, in the very building where my department was housed...
...You could have cut the silence in our section of that auditorium with a knife...
...The New Black Aesthetic," Before Columbus Review, May 14, 1989...
...But when those black men and women were one's fathers, mothers, and sisters, how could one approaching manhood accept that deprecation and live with it...
...Don't we have anything better to do...
...FALL • 1989 • 495...
...Did you hear what he said...
...It was not a story to pass on...
...And I have to confess that I have never really cared too much about what we called ourselves publicly, except when my generation was fighting the elders for the legitimacy of the word "black" as our common, public name...
...I wonder if my daughters, nine years hence, will adapt the line, identifying themselves as "I am an African American...
...Tell him your name, Daddy...
...We am in de Souf...
...We are no smarter than they...
...Indeed, the novel is an allegorical representation of this very unspeakability...
...NBA artists aren't afraid to publicly flout the official, positivist black party line...
...Reid, the Carolina center, "rubber lips...
...Despite the audacity of this claim, however, Wright saw himself as chosen "in some way to inject into the American consciousness" a cognizance of "other people's mores or national habits" ("I Choose Exile," unpublished essay...
...Snead was a remarkable man...
...Now, I myself happen to like African American, especially because I am, as a scholar, an Africanist as well as an African-Americanist...
...It wasn't just any game...
...Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody knew her name...
...And their first name, African, conveys a pride in cultural heritage that all Americans cherish...
...But I loved the names that we gave ourselves when no white people were around...
...The culturally mulatto Cosby girls are equally as black as a black teenage welfare mother...
...I never got the joke, but he and his friends thought it was hilarious...
...In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away...
...Your name isn't George...
...This I cannot achieve alone...
...Oh, yeah," he said, after a long pause, looking at me through the eyes of the race when one of us is being "sadiddy," or telling some kind of racial lie...
...Nobody hits better in a clutch than Jackie Robinson...
...Wilsons of their world will call them George...
...Your old friend, Thurgood Marshall, sits like a minotaur as an associate justice on the Supreme Court...
...The "Cosby Show...
...I seek out, eagerly, the company of other AfricanAmerican academics who have paid their dues, who understand the costs, and the pleasures, of achievement, who care about "the race," and who are determined to leave a legacy of self-defense against racism in all of its pernicious forms...
...Their story — and it is a new story—is about elective affinities, unburdened by an ideology of descent...
...Yet for all the gains that have been made, racial tensions on college campuses appear to be on the rise, with a monitoring group finding incidents reported at over one hundred and seventy-five colleges since the 1986-87 academic year (and this is just counting the ones that made the papers...
...To render the dozens in such wonderful detail, of course, is a crucial manner of preserving it in the written cultural memory of African-Americans...
...Clair Drake, merely to list a few names...
...The irony is that we often thought of ourselves as "African" until late into the nineteenth century...
...There is now such a strong and vast body of great black work that the corny or mediocre doesn't need to be coddled...
...Talkin' that talk—that is, disparaging one's loved ones within the in-group—was an obvious expression of self-hatred, but it also undercut the white man's style of black denigration by presupposing it, and to some degree narcotizing the black boys who were on the way to manhood from the pain of their impotence...
...He "moonlighted" as a janitor in the evenings for the telephone company...
...Anyone who refused to play the dozens was unrealistic, for the dozens were a fact of life for every black man...
...I heard it...
...That's right...
...In fact, the economic structure has not changed one jot, in any fundamental sense, except that black adult and teenage unemployment is much higher now than it has been in my lifetime...
...Nowhere is this idea rendered more brilliantly than in his sermon "The Blackness of Blackness," the tradition's classic critique of blackness as an essence: "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the 'Blackness of Blackness.' " And a congregation of voices answered: "That blackness is most black, brother, most black . . ." "In the beginning . . ." "At the very start," they cried...
...Consider the holy male trinity of the black tradition: Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin...
...Ellison, Invisible Man) Ellison parodies the idea that blackness can underwrite a metaphysics or even a negative theology...
...How could he not have recognized it for so long...
...Today the white college campus is a rather different place...
...And, by the way," he would conclude, his dark brown eyes flashing as he looked with utter disgust at my tentative Afro, "when are you going to get that nappy shit cut...
...64 "Hallelujah . . ." "It'll put you, glory, glory, Oh my Lawd, in the WHALE'S BELLY...
...Certainly since 1950, the meanings of blackness, as manifested in the literary tradition, have come full circle...
...I can't, Pop," I replied...
...He had left a little early that evening because I was with him and I had to be in bed early...
...The college campus, then, was a refuge from explicit racism, freeing us to read and write about our "racial" selves, to organize for recruitment of minority students and faculty, and to demand the constitutional rights of the Black Panther party for self-defense—an action that led, at New Haven at least, to a full-fledged strike in April of 1970, two weeks before Nixon and Kissinger invaded Cambodia...
...And the FALL • 1989 • 489 conscious manipulation of our public image, by writers, filmmakers, and artists, which many of us still seem to think will bring freedom, has had very little impact in palliating our structural social problems...
...For a moment I tried to think of who Mr...
...I began to learn about the meanings of blackness—or at least how to give voice to what I had experienced—when I went off to Yale...
...When West met the plane at the airport, he rushed Drake to the hospital, and sat with him through much of the weekend...
...From 1831, if not before, to 1965, an ideology of desegregation, of "civil rights," prevailed among our thinkers...
...All I knew was that my family always ate well, that my brother and I had new clothes to wear, and that all of the white people in Piedmont, West Virginia, treated my parents with an odd mixture of resentment and respect that even we understood at the time had something directly to do with a small but certain measure of financial security...
...There is much about Dr...
...A long silence ensued...
...What can be lonelier than research, except perhaps the terror of the blank page (or computer screen...
...Even I—despite a highly visible presence as a faculty member at Cornell—have found it necessary to cross the street, hum a tune, or smile, when confronting a lone white woman in a campus building or on the Commons late at night...
...Even in the South, though, the intrusion of race into our lives usually takes more benign forms...
...I never again looked Mr...
...Following the depiction of the ritual exchange, the narrator of the novel analyzes its import in the following way: But it was playing the dozens that perplexed and worried Dr...
...I imagine the great man would heave a sigh, as the Spirit of Blackness galloped away...
...After all, they had said it first...
...To which one young black writer, Trey Ellis, responded recently: "When somebody tries to tell me what to call myself in all uses just because they come to some decision at a cocktail party to which I wasn't even invited, my mama raised me to tell them to kiss my black ass" (Village Voice, June 13, 1989, p. 38...
...They never knew where or why she crouched, or whose was the underwater face she needed like that...
...Snead's project, and Ellis's—the project of a new generation of writers and scholars—is about transcending the I-got-mine parochialism of a desperate era...
...my Dad is black...
...Perhaps they'll be Africans by then, or even feisty rapper-dappers...
...Fluent in German, he wrote his Scholar of the House "essay" on the uses of repetition in Thomas Mann and William Faulkner...
...Tait the most of all when he first tuned in on what went on under the streetlight...
...I asked my father, who wears two hearing aids...
...Ellis describes the relation of what he calls "The New Black Aesthetic" (NBA) to the black nationalism of the sixties, engaged as it is in the necessary task of critique and revision: Yet ironically, a telltale sign of the work of the NBA is our parodying of the black nationalist movement: Eddie Murphy, 26, and his old Saturday Night Live character, prison poet Tyrone Green, with his hilariously awful angry black poem, "Cill [sic] My Landlord," ("See his dog Do he bite...
...My father, who recently enjoyed his seventysixth birthday, and I attended a basketball game at Duke this past winter...
...Although she has claim, she is not claimed...
...He had white straight hair, like my Uncle Joe, whom he uncannily resembled, and he carried a black worn metal lunch pail, the kind that Riley carried on the television show...
...Young man," he'd say, "what has happened in my absence...
...Considering the out-of-wedlock birthrate, the high school dropout rate, and the unemployment figures, the "two nations" predicted by the Kerner Commission in 1968 may be upon us...
...Wilson was a very quiet white man, whose stony, brooding, silent manner seemed designed to scare off any overtures of friendship, even from white people...
...FALL • 1989 • 487 New Perspectives "Doesn't he know your name, Daddy...
...Ain't it the truth, Lawd...
...What, finally, is the meaning of blackness for my generation of African-American scholars...
...Blackness, for Baldwin, was a sign, a sign that signified through the salvation of the "gospel impulse," as Craig Werner characterizes it, seen in his refusal "to create demons, to simplify the other in a way that would inevitably force him to simplify himself...
...Grinning, singing, scratching my head, I have felt like Steppin Fetchit with a Ph.D...
...For us, and for the students that we train, the complex meaning of blackness is a vision of America, a refracted image in the American looking-glass...
...Then, loud-talking all the way, I informed the crowd, while ostensibly talking only to my father, that we'd come too far to put up with shit like this, that Martin Luther King didn't die in vain, and we won't tolerate this kind of racism again, etc., etc., etc...
...More black faculty members are tenured than ever before, despite the fact that 488 • DISSENT only eight hundred or so black students took the doctorate in 1986, and fully half of these were in education...
...The first chapter of Eric Lincoln's first novel, The Avenue, Clayton City (1988), 492 • DISSENT 11 contains an extended recreation of the AfricanAmerican ritual of signifying, which is also known as "talking that talk," "the dozens," "nasty talk," and so on...
...The late James Baldwin once lamented, "Nobody knows my name...
...After they made up their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw her that day on the porch quickly and deliberately forgot her...
...If Mr...
...Ellis's amused rejoinder speaks of a very different set of concerns, and made me think of James Baldwin's prediction of the coming of a new generation that would give voice to blackness: While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard...
...Morrison's blend of magical realism and African-American mythology proved compelling: This brilliantly rendered book was an overnight bestseller...
...It took longer for those who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her, to forget, until they realized they couldn't remember or repeat a single thing she said, and began to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn't said anything at all...
...There would be a painful moment of silence, and you would wait for it to give way to a discussion of a black superstar such as Sugar Ray or Jackie Robinson...
...Hello, Mr...
...Recognizing that what had passed for "the human," or "the universal," was in fact white essentialism, we substituted one sort of essentialism (that of "blackness") for another...
...Jackson is right and blacks now prefer to be called African-Americans, it is a sign not just of their maturity but of the nation's success . . . . Blacks may now feel comfortable enough in their standing as citizens to adopt the family surname: American...
...For Snead, taking the black mountaintop was not enough...
...Did Nkrumah and Azikwe send troops...
...Snead that I can understand," Drake told West...
...Still, I value those all too rare, precious moments when someone "slips," in the warmth and comfort of intimacy, and says the dreaded words: "Was he colored...
...I have often imagined encountering the ghost of the great Du Bois, riding on the shoulders of the Spirit of Blackness...
...Why don't you tell him your name...
...Snead graduated valedictorian of his class at Exeter, then summa cum laude at Yale...
...Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name...
...I think that even James Baldwin would have been surprised...
...Wilson," I heard my father say...
...fellow Black Packer Keenan Wayans' upcoming blaxploitation parody Ima Get You Sucka...
...Like many of us in those years, I gravitated to courses in Afro-American studies, at least one per semester, despite the fact that I was premed, like almost all the other black kids at Yale—that is, until the ranks were devastated by organic chemistry...
...You, know, brother," he said to me in a low but pointed whisper, "we black people got ways to tell these things, you know...
...Clair Drake, as Drake lay in bed in a hospital recovering from a mild stroke that he had experienced on a flight from San Francisco to Princeton where Drake was to lecture...
...And it is out of this discursive melee that so much contemporary African-American literature has developed...
...And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation (The Price of the Ticket...
...Then he looked at me to see if I was ready to confess the truth...
...nor were there colored Georges living in the neighboring towns and working at the mill...
...But the truth of the matter was that in spite of his disgust, the twin insights of agony and intellection had eventually paid off, for suddenly not only the language but the logic of the whole streetlight ritual finally became clear to him...
...With the taxis shooting by us as if we did not exist, Anthony and I cry out in perplexity: "But sir, it's only a trope...
...Toni Morrison's genius is that she has found a language by which to thematize this very unspeakability of slavery...
...The law was the most common substitute...
...That's about it, Doctor...
...What he was observing from the safety and the anonymity of his cloistered front porch was nothing less than a teenage rite of passage...
...Trey Ellis, whose first novel, Platitudes, is a satire on contemporary black cultural politics, is an heir of Ishmael Reed, the tradition's great satirist...
...A very critical black rite of passage...
...The class of 1973 was the first at Yale to include a "large" contingent of AfroAmericans, the name we quickly and comfortably seized upon at New Haven...
...He is American, as American as Jack Kerouac or James Baldwin or Allen Ginsberg . . ." I remember a time, not so very long ago, when almost no one would have thought of James Baldwin as typifying the "American...
...But how are we different from them...
...Indeterminacy had come home to greet me...
...What's the most popular television program in South Africa...
...Wilson in the eye...
...Our next move within the academy, our next gesture, is to redefine the whole, simultaneously institutionalizing African-American studies...
...It was not a story to pass on...
...Abolitionists, Reconstructors, neoabolitionists, all shared one common belief: that if we could only use the legislature and the judiciary to create and interpret the laws of desegregation and access, all else would follow...
...It looks beyond that overworked masterplot of victims and victimizers so carefully scripted in the cultural dominant, beyond the paranoid dream of cultural autarky, and beyond the seductive ensolacements of nationalism...
...The ultimate sign of our sheer powerlessness is all of the attention that we have given, in the past few months, to declaring the birth of the AfricanAmerican, and pronouncing the Black Self dead...
...its complex sense of presence...
...A few months ago I heard Cornet West deliver a memorial lecture in honor of James Snead, a brilliant literary critic who died of cancer this past spring at the age of thirty-five...
...So, in the end, they forgot her too...
...I think the reason for this is that many of us wish to be a part of a community, of something "larger" than ourselves, escaping the splendid isolation of our studies...
...No, sir," I would respond...
...In Beloved, Morrison has found a language that gives voice to the unspeakable horror and terror of the black past, our enslavement in the New World...
...This generation, Ellis continues, cares less about what white people think than any other in the history of Africans in this country...
...In a recent New York Times Book Review of Maxine Hong Kingston's new novel, Le Anne Schreiber remarks: "Wittman Ah Singh can't be Chinese even if he wants to be...
...Wright never had clearer insight into himself, although his unrelentingly critical view of Third World cultures will certainly not make him required reading among those of us bent upon decentering the canon...
...His brow is heavy from 300 years of oppression...
...For Richard Wright, "the color curtain"—as he titled a book on the Bandung Conference in 1955 when "the Third World" was born—was something to be rent asunder by something he vaguely called the "Enlightenment...
...But how to explain...
...And this is a story to pass on...
...Most of us define ourselves as extensions of the tradition of scholarship and academic excellence epitomized by figures such as J. Saunders Redding, John Hope Franklin, and St...
...After a long silence, my Dad leaned over and whispered to me, "Nigger, is you crazy...
...There can be no doubt that the successful attempts to "decenter" the canon stem in part from the impact that black studies programs have had upon traditional notions of the "teachable," upon what, properly, constitutes the universe of knowledge that the well-educated should know...
...The dream of the university as a haven of racial equity, as an ultimate realm beyond the veil, has not been realized...
...Houston, Anthony, and I emerge from the splendid isolation of the Schomburg Library, and stand together on the corner of 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard attempting to hail a taxi to return to the Yale Club...
...Only by stepping outside of the limitations of realism and entering a realm of myth could Morrison, a century after its abolition, give a voice to the silence of enslavement...
...playwright George Wolfe, and his parodies of both "A Raisin in the Sun" and "For Colored Girls . . ." in his hit play "The Colored Museum" ("Enter Walter-Lee-BeauWillie-Jones...
...As he says, sometimes African American just won't do...
...So much for Yale...
...Unable to theorize what Cornel West calls "the racial problematic," unwilling (with very few exceptions) to theorize class, and scarcely able even to contemplate the theorizing of the curious compound effect of class-cum-race, we have— since the day after the signing of the Civil Rights act of 1965—utterly lacked any instrumentality of ideological analysis, beyond the attempts of the Black Power and Black Aesthetic movements, to invert the signification of "blackness" itself...
...Her greatest artistic achievement, however, and most controversial, is her most recent novel, Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction...
...To declare that race is a trope, however, is not to deny its palpable force in the life of every African-American who tries to function every day in a still very racist America...
...I would not think of it, sir...
...James Baldwin, who parodied Wright's 1956 speech in Nobody Knows My Name, concluded that "this was, perhaps, a tactless way of phrasing a debatable idea...
...Each of these writers epitomizes the points of a post—Black Aesthetic triangle, made up of the realistic representation of black vernacular culture: the attempt to preserve it for a younger generation (Lincoln), the critique through parody of the essentialism of the Black Aesthetic (Ellis), and the transcendence of the ultimate horror of the black past— slavery — through myth and the supernatural (Morrison...
...But so tame and unthreatening is a politics centered on onomastics that even the New York Times, in a major editorial, declared its support of this movement...
...Have things changed...
...Free your mind," the slogan went, "and your behind will follow...
...At a crucial juncture of the game, one of the overly avid Duke fans bellowing in our section of the auditorium called J.R...
...The gates of segregation fell rather quickly after 1965...
...Amen, brother . . ." "Black will git you . . ." "Yes, it will . . ." ". .. an' black won't .. . "Naw, it won't...
...In this spirit, Ellis has declared the birth of a "New Black Aesthetic" movement, comprising artists and writers who are middle-class, self-confident, and secure with black culture, and not looking over their shoulders at white people, wondering whether or not the Mr...
...I revere you, sir, why, I even—" "How many of them had to die...
...it speaks of blackness without blood...
...I can't stand the way they say the word black...
...in English literature at the University of Cambridge...
...Nobody...
...Blackness, if it would be anything, stood as the saving grace of both white and black America...
...Wright was hardly sentimental about Black Africa and the Third World—he actually told the first Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956 that colonialism had been "liberating, since it smashed old traditions and destroyed old gods, freeing Africans from the 'rot' of their past," their "irrational past" (James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name...
...I'm a man of the West...
...He was Irish, as was one-third of our village (another third being Italian), the more affluent among whom sent their children to "Catholic School" across the bridge in Maryland...
...This important impulse to preserve (by recording) the vernacular links Lincoln's work directly to that of Zora Neale Hurston...
...The public deprecation of black men and women was, of course, taken for granted in Clayton City, and everywhere else within the experience of the Flame Gang...
...Ralph Ellison, ever the trickster, felt it incumbent upon him to show that blackness was a metaphor of the human condition, and yet to do so through a faithful adherence to its particularity...
...He was also a jazz pianist and composer and worked as an investment banker in West Germany, after he took the Ph.D...
...Black will make you . . ." "Black .. . 1/ . or black will unmake you...
...Once we were black, I thought, we would be free, inside at least, and maybe from inside we would project a freedom outside of ourselves...
...Certainly the cultural continuities among African, Caribbean, and Black American cultures cannot be denied...
...The New Black Aesthetic says you just have to be natural, you don't necessarily have to wear one...
...They were implicit in the very structure of black-white relations, and if one didn't "play," he could "pat his foot" while the play went on, over and around him...
...But it led the way to a gestural politics captivated by fetishes and feel-bad rhetoric...
...Wilson had called him "George...
...filmmaker Reginald Hudlin, 25, and his sacrilegious Reggie's World of Soul with its fake commercial for a back scratcher, spatula and toilet bowl brush all with black clenched fists for their handle ends...
...its belief in salvation—sounds in Baldwin's voice no matter what his particular vocabulary at a particular moment...
...It has taken white administrators far too long to realize that the recruitment of black faculty members is vastly easier at those institutions with the strongest black studies departments, or at least with the strongest representation of other black faculty...
...The idea that African-American culture was exclusively a thing apart, separate from the whole, having no influence on the shape and shaping of American culture, is a racialist fiction...
...He had thought at fust that Guts Gallimore's appraisal of talking that talk as "nasty" was too generous to be useful...
...He knows my name, boy," my father said after a long pause...
...Did a nuclear holocaust bring them to their senses...
...West, near the end of his memorial lecture, told his audience that he had been discussing Snead's life and times with St...
...Bloody . . ." "I said black is . FALL • 1989 • 491 "Preach it, brother . . ." ". .. an' black ain't . . ." "Red, Lawd, red: He said it's red...
...That, we learned quickly enough, was just not enough...
...Racism on our college campuses has become a palpable, ugly thing...
...Hello, George...
...But regular Negroes still catch hell...
...The bet is that your Daddy is Mediterranean—Greek or Eyetalian, and your wife is High Yellow...
...But, Wright confesses, "when I look out upon the vast stretches of this earth inhabited by brown, black and yellow men . . . my reactions and attitudes are those of the West" (White Man, Listen...
...it was "the" game with North Carolina, the ultimate rivalry in American basketball competition...
...Well, sir," I'd respond, "your alma mater, Fair Harvard, has a black studies department, a Du Bois Research Center, and even a Du Bois Professor of History...
...My father always spoke to him, and for reasons that we never did understand, he always spoke to my father...
...I think that many of us are trying to work, rather self-consciously, within the tradition...
...Preach it, dear brother .. ." . .. an' make you tempt . . ." 66 "Good God a-mighty...
...Now the events of that very brief exchange return to mind so vividly that I wonder why I had forgotten it...
...But we didn't have any Georges among the colored people in Piedmont...
...Wilson was mixing Pop up with...
...For these writers, in their various ways, the challenge of the black creative intelligence is no longer to posit blackness, as it was in the Black Arts movement of the sixties, but to render it...
...But then again," he concluded, "there is something about his enterprise that is quite unlike ours...
...Trey Ellis, 1989 had forgotten the incident completely, until I read Trey Ellis's essay, "Remember My Name," in a recent issue of the Village Voice (June 13, 1989...
...there was blackness . . "Preach it .. ." . and the sun .. ." "The sun, Lawd . . ." it . was bloody red . . ." "Red . . ." "Now black is . . ." the preacher shouted...
...It do .. ." "It do, Lawd .. ." . .. an' it don't...
...The death of the African was declared by the Park school of sociology in the first quarter of this century, which thought that the hyphenated ethnicity of the Negro American would prove to be ultimately liberating...
...Okay," he said...
...Every day but Saturday, he would come home at 3:30 from his regular job at the paper mill, wash up, eat supper, then at 4:30 head downtown to his second job...
...Wilson walked by...
Vol. 36 • September 1989 • No. 4
