Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation, edited by Gerald Early
Jacoby, Tamar
LURE AND LOATHING: ESSAYS ON RACE, IDENTITY, AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF ASSIMILATION, Gerald Early, editor. Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 1993. 351 pp., $23.50. Most white Americans know about the...
...Can I be both...
...Integration and the rise of the black middle class (it has roughly quadrupled in three decades) are putting more and more blacks at risk for what has been called "assimilation blues...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...it is what makes this volume so powerful...
...As successful a professional as Stephen Carter, the youngest man to make professor at Yale Law School, has to say explicitly (whether to himself or his black readers hardly matters): "[Mud work .. . is not white, male, and Eurocentric...
...The essays in Lure and Loathing offer a rare window on black experience, explaining a good deal that is otherwise bewildering to white people...
...Yet as even the dissenters make clear, it will be generations before we can expect to see the kind of trust that is necessary for real racial harmony...
...Much as they argue for moving beyond blame, they too are still choking on humiliation— and struggling with an anger they cannot quite put behind them...
...Several of the dissenters in this volume wonder if they don't take the American dream more seriously than many whites do...
...About half the essays represent the conventional wisdom on race issues that prevails in the black community and among liberals: that white America is irredeemably racist, that blackness is an allencompassing identity, that black alienation is healthy and all self-esteem is based in racial or ethnic awareness...
...Most are struggling to do just that— struggling to define a black identity that allows some personal freedom...
...The difference between Loury and Asante, between Stanley Crouch and Nikki Giovanni has to do more with the way the two sides handle their common ambivalence...
...Whatever one thinks of his views, Loury's contribution is a towering statement about personal freedom and group identity...
...None of the dissenting writers here choose to be American at the cost of abandoning their blackness...
...No issue could raise graver questions for race relations...
...Can the dissenters make a difference...
...Can they stand to live with their double consciousness—with their blackness and their American citizenship...
...Most assume it is a passing phase, curable, they assume, by better teachers and brighter prospects...
...Not surprisingly, their prose is often airless, filled with cant and borrowed dogma...
...Still, it cannot make for easy lives—or for an easy answer to the nation's race question...
...I]n my experience the need to be affirmed by one's racial peers can take on a pathological dimension...
...Irrational and self-defeating as this syndrome seems, it is not something white Americans can argue with—or do much about...
...There are, certainly, differences among the writers in the volume, differences that will have critical consequences for race relations...
...As fiction writer James McPherson notes, "It has always been black Americans who call attention to the distance between asserted ideals and daily practices...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Their arguments are aggressive, but in the end most of them seem trapped, and their views would be hard to take seriously if they weren't so influential: the theoretical underpinnings of so much contemporary black culture and education...
...Poet Anthony Walton makes the point sharply in his essay: "In the light of the foregoing" —a restrained but powerful description of past and present prejudice— "one can doubt in sincerity whether or not it is possible for a black person to be American...
...Essay after essay tells of the difficult time the contributor had as a child, enduring the taunts of peers who felt that the writer was giving himself airs...
...Yes, we are black . . ." Stephen Carter writes, "but how are we black...
...It shouldn't be too hard to understand why: after nearly four hundred years of white domination, white standards and white values naturally look suspect to many black people...
...FALL • 1993 • 569...
...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Even Glenn Loury, strong-willed and independent as he is, reports how close he came to losing his battle with the undertow of the racial "loyalty test": I now understand how this desire to be regarded as genuinely black, to be seen as a "regular brother," has dramatically altered my life...
...Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American...
...Du Bois about what he called the black man's "double-consciousness...
...Or do they feel they have to choose, trumping one allegiance with the other...
...At the end of his essay, Loury shakes himself and wonders how he could have dreamed of stopping his son from learning a new sport—whether or not it fell within Loury's own horizons...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...10017 (212) 595-3084...
...Louis, traces the ambivalence back a century to a famous passage by W.E.B...
...I am so much more," he writes, "than the one wronged, misunderstood, underestimated, derided or ignored by whites...
...The labels are misleading: liberal and conservative, the "lured" and the "loathers," even integrationist and separatist are too reductive...
...The divide is not between those who feel black and those who feel American...
...The twenty essayists divide roughly into two camps...
...He think he white," one of his attackers said to another...
...It is a history that can cut two ways: can lead to paranoia and avoiding responsibility for one's own life—or, in the best of circumstances, to moral insight...
...The angriest see no improvement—nothing but a little tokenism—and assume as an article of faith that whites are incurably racist...
...Yes, the two camps differ in their views of how much has changed in recent decades...
...Distinguished academics, top-flight poets, the grand old men and women of black letters, liberal and conservative: all the essayists attest to a deep ambivalence about white America and the choices they have made to attain success by mainstream standards...
...On the question of racial loyalty, too, what is striking is how similar the two groups are—though one camp sees only good in solidarity, while the other knows it comes at a cost...
...At its best, these writers suggest, the black identity is to be a voice of conscience in America...
...Chagrined but in a way hopeful, he watches the boy watch a group of white hockey players and contemplates a future he knows he can't even imagine...
...Still, even writers like Carter and Loury believe that black is more than a skin color—and they too cling, however unsurely, to a separate perspective on America...
...It narrowed the range of my earliest intellectual pursuits, distorted my relationships with other people, censored my political thought and expres568 • DISSENT Books sion, informed the way I dressed and spoke, and shaped my cultural interests...
...But in fact, as this volume shows, blacks have always had mixed feelings about making it in white America...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...For many, the search is plainly uncomfortable...
...But in the end, the white reader can only look on ruefully, cheering from a distance for the poignant struggles of these and other blacks determined to grapple with the demons they've inherited...
...As we all know," Loury writes, "hockey . . . is a white man's game...
...More than anything, they remind one of old communists, clinging to the certainties of their faith rather than face a complex reality...
...None have entirely put aside their fears or anger at white America...
...And so they chose for Africa—and boosterism—at the expense of all else and all subtlety...
...The pitfalls of that role are obvious enough, here perfectly captured by Loury...
...In contrast to the orthodox, who feel their racial identity is monolithic and alldetermining, dissenters wonder aloud exactly what it consists in...
...But at the end of Lure and Loathing, a reader comes away feeling that its best writers do have something to teach all Americans, black and white...
...Yeah, he think he something...
...Can they carve a path, for themselves and others, around the impossible choice between being black and being American...
...You don't have to be paranoid to feel that the civil-rights revolution is too recent to count on: that thirty years of relative good will is nothing next to four centuries of oppression...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...Ironically, then, though the volume is a showcase for black "dissenters," in the end the reader is brought back to what the two camps have in common: the lingering estrangement of all blacks, no matter how hopeful or forgiving...
...Together, this second group of essays gives the lie to the stereotype of the black conservative, so often derided, including in this volume, as inauthentic and self-hating, disloyal to the race and to his or her own past...
...Several writers admit candidly how threatening they found their inherited double consciousness: it made them feel "sick" and "schizoid," "inauthentic" and "off-center...
...This sounds like a standard immigrants' question, but as all twenty essays here make clear, the issue has a special edge for black Americans...
...what is striking is how thin the argument seems here, even in the hands of its best proponents...
...Reginald McKnight recalls being beaten up because of the way he spoke and walked—just a little too rigidly...
...People expect men like Molefi Kete Asante, founding father of Afrocentrist scholarship, to proclaim angrily, "I have always known that my heritage was not the same as that of whites...
...Not all the writers in the other camp would call themselves conservative, although simply by questioning orthodox views they risk incurring that label—even more scorned in the black community than it is among many whites...
...As Lure and Loathing makes clear, profound doubts about "acting white" are part of being black in America today...
...This is the great strength of their writing...
...Gerald Early, a professor at Washington University in St...
...q A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...Dissenters and orthodox alike agree on one thing: what blacks have in common is their history of suffering...
...Bitter, slashing, dogmatic, this camp is driven by a need for FALL • 1993 • 567 Books a stark either/or...
...In this as on many issues, Molefi Kete Asante's view is among the starkest: as a black man in America, he says, you either "identify with the 'masters' [or] with the `slaves.' " This sounds reasonable enough, but for Asante and others, it rules out integration...
...It is also the logic behind the disastrous choice not to "act white": given the "masters' " hold on schools and jobs, for many blacks, mainstream success means betrayal of one's brothers and sisters...
...None have forgotten the suffering of their people...
...The essays in Lure and Loathing all take off from this classic paragraph, and each makes plain its basic sympathy for Du Bois's uneasy feelings about his identity...
...Former Village Voice writer Stanley Crouch, poet Anthony Walton, Yale law professor Stephen Carter, and novelist Reginald McKnight also rise here to the highest standards of the essay form...
...Perhaps not coincidentally, this camp boasts the better writers — indeed, some of the best essayists in the business...
...The more hopeful group believes that we have already seen a sea change, that blacks must recognize this and begin to take responsibility for what's wrong in their lives...
...Not even the most optimistic, integrationist blacks can—or want to—forget the horrors of history...
...It is no accident that these concerns are coming to the surface now...
...No Negro," Early's introduction states, "who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these crossroads, has failed to ask himself at some time: what, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...But what are we to think when a prominent neoconservative like Glenn Loury describes his discomfort with his son's interest in ice hockey...
...Lure and Loathing is filled with wrenching personal descriptions of this downward tug...
...Not all agree in all particulars, but they share a common reluctance to take refuge in an easy either/or worldview —whether the racial chauvinism of black orthodoxy or a contrasting denial of racial identity...
...I am more than the one who has struggled against this oppresson and indifference...
...The outlook is familiar enough...
...Candid at all costs, probing, willing to be wrong, mindful of the past but intent on freeing themselves from self-imposed blinders and shackles, they hold up a moral way of thinking with applications well beyond racial issues...
...As stunning as the depth of the alienation in these pages is the way it crosses ideological lines, nagging at so-called "conservative" blacks as insistently as it fires militants...
...Most white Americans know about the scorn many ghetto youths feel for "acting white" —for studying, for doing well in school, for playing by white rules and meeting the white man's standards...
...The twenty essays by black intellectuals collected in Lure and Loathing will disabuse white readers of that hopeful assumption...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
