Salmagundi Magazine, Spring/Summer 2020

Salmagundi Magazine BLACK AMERICA: THE STATE OF THE CULTURE Thomas Chatterton Williams Margo Jefferson John McWhorter Darryl Pinckney Orlando Patterson

PLUS Modigliani & The Poets Jeffrey Meyers Jam Songs Mark Edmundson London Letter: Boris Johnson David Herman Romare Bearden Kevin Brown Sontag & Rieff David Mikics SPRING

- SUMMER 2020

NUMBER 206 - 207

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Salmagundi Magazine #206-207

1 A Quarterly SPRING - SUMMER 2020

COLUMNS Guest Column: Jam Songs / Mark Edmundson — 3 Letter from London: The 2019 General Election David Herman —12 Art & Culture: Sontag & Rieff / David Mikics — 23 Force Fields: On The Spectrum: Conspiracy Theories & Explanations / Martin Jay — 34 ESSAYS the eniGma of ConstanCy: the resilienCe of trump’s Base / toDD GItLIN — 45 ConJure Women: romare Bearden and the stories Great Grandmother told / kevIN browN — 60 liGhter than air / JeNNIfer Stock — 76 MEMOIR mark strand GoinG fast / SpeNcer reeCe — 85 POEMS three poems / ADrIe kUSSerow — 91 the Valley of the shadoW / bArry GoLDeNSohN — 97 What she sees in the diorama / JAN c. GroSSMAN — 98 ediCt / SADAf hALAI — 100 ESSAY modiGliani and the poets / Jeffrey MeyerS — 101

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A SALMAGUNDI SYMPOSIUM: THE BLACK INTELLECTUAL & THE CONDITION OF THE CULTURE Session One: The Racial Delusion Opening remarks by Thomas Chatterton Williams — 126 Session Two: Exile & Return Opening remarks by Darryl Pinckney — 175 Session Three: Prescriptions & Prejudices Opening remarks by Margo Jefferson — 202 Session Four: Wokeness, Atonement & Change Opening remarks by John McWhorter — 228 Session Five: Culture & Class Opening remarks by Orlando Patterson — 253

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Death In Naples

We Mourn The Passing Of Our Dear Friend And Frequent Salmagundi Contributor

GEORGE STEINER (1929-2020) NOTE:

The Fall 2020 issue of Salmagundi will contain a series of memoiristic essays on George Steiner.

“Years ago my brilliant, polymathic teacher leaned toward me and whispered with some urgency that I should always carry two passports. That teacher was George Steiner. At home everywhere and nowhere, at once the possessor of European culture and possessed by it, Steiner is one of the great, restless wanderers of modern criticism…His astonishing intellectual career was a moving, emblematic refusal in the wake of Auschwitz to settle down to cultural business as usual.” —Stephen Greenblatt “A late, late, late Renaissance man…a European metaphysician with an instinct for the driving ideas of our time.” —A.S. Byatt “A colossus of impassioned thought and critical vision.” —Simon Schama “He told us not to be cowed by insularity or hidebound by small minds, but to look beyond the border.” —John Banville “An extraordinary example of how to live a life of beautiful trouble.”

—Tom Healy “His mind, truly on its way to Borges, passed through Sophocles and stopped for a moment to take in the view at Heidegger…. ‘Pretentious,’ though a word journalists sometimes used to describe him, was the last thing he ever was. He was never pretending. He was a humanities faculty in himself, an academy of one.”

—Adam Gopnik in the February 2020 New Yorker

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Jam Songs

Guest Column Jam Songs

BY MARK EDMUNDSON When it was time for my oldest son to apply to college ten years or so ago, our family went into overdrive. We persuaded him—maybe actually we bribed him—to take an SAT preparation class. And so, we wrote a significant check to Mr. Kaplan and his minions. We also retained a private college counselor, to whom I issued more than a few payments.

The Kaplan people enhanced my son’s vocabulary, which was already substantial, and honed his test taking skills. The college counselor read and re-read my son’s personal statement and also drew up a wall chart that let us know what was due for each application and when. These services helped to maintain peace in our family. They also, no doubt, helped my son get into college.

Looking back on this simple and now common process gives me some clues about the current state of education in America—and also about our politics. Multiply this college admissions tale by a few million—and millions are doing much as we did—and, odd as it may sound, you can see some of the roots of our currently raging social and political discord.

I was ambivalent about the admissions process as it unfolded. I knew that I was affording my son advantages that other kids didn’t have. It wasn’t easy to write those checks to Mr. Kaplan and Ms. College Advisor, but it was in our financial range. For many of my son’s contemporaries these services would have been too pricey. It was unfair, and I knew it. My son now had something a little like the edge that the kids at Andover and Exeter

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Academy had over me, a half century ago, when I was a student at raucous Medford High School, twenty or so miles and a world away from them.

Yet my son had superior academic talent—he had excellent aptitude in the humanities as I did when I was a boy, but he had promise in science and math, which I’d never possessed. He didn’t care for the academic side of his high school, and the more I learned about it the more I saw his point. So why shouldn’t he have his shot? Why shouldn’t he make it into college? And besides, dammit, he was my son and as a father I was bound to do all I could to help him thrive. He went off to college and he did brilliantly, more than brilliantly, really. And yet I was left with a feeling of unease. Do the right thing! We tell ourselves that, but it’s not always so easy.

My unease about my son’s college admissions process would have been better defined if I’d had access to Richard Reeves’s book, The Dream Hoarders, which wasn’t published until last year. The book focuses on wealthy Americans—but not the top one percent, generally the target of political hostility. Reeves’s focus is on the top twenty percent, the college educated members of the upper middle class. Reeves argues, quite rightly, I think, that they are becoming more and more adept at passing on their status to their children. They do it through education.

They do it by using their wealth to pay taxes that maintain top-flight public schools. Or they send their kids off to private academies. They live in gated retreats to make sure their children face fewer dangers than other kids. They drive their kids from one resumé building activity to the next.

They make sure that the members of their brood don’t need after-school jobs to keep them in pocket-money, so they have the time to play sports and join clubs and study. They supervise their kids to keep them out of trouble and make sure the homework gets done. Over the summer, they help their kids to take on internships that make them alluring to college admissions officers. And when college application time comes, they pay for private tutoring and for college advisors. They do what I did, and often more of it.

Does one have to add that this kind of activity not only enhances opportunities for the top twenty percent but also reduces them for those who have less dough? You can’t be on the tennis team, or be hyper-active in student government if you have to work afternoons and weekends. If

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your mom and dad don’t monitor you most days and most nights, the chances of you getting into future-disabling trouble rise. And no summer internships for you. If you work very hard and have real gifts, you’re still probably not going to look as good to the admissions board as the kids who come replete with all the bells and whistles applied and soldered into place by bourgeois child-rearing.

College admissions offices often say that they engage in need-blind admission. But then, they go and look for qualities and accomplishments that only the more prosperous kids are likely to have—all those clubs, the sports teams, the cool internships. Funny how the best qualified students are also the ones in the best position to pay the tuition bill. And admissions offices also give serious credence to the SATs. Now we know what almost no one knew in the past (those kids at Andover and Exeter in 1970 excepted): test scores can be enhanced markedly through preparation—usually paid-for preparation.

I’m not saying that the upper middle-class kids who go off to top-rate colleges didn’t work hard, nor that their parents didn’t sacrifice to get them where they are. I am saying that the college game is at least part-way rigged. The upper middle class has hit on the ultimate means to maintain what Marx would call its hegemony. Its members have fixed the college admissions system. And right now, nothing predicts your level of future prosperity better than your level of education. When you hold the keys to the best education, the possibilities for you and your children grow. Your kids have a genuine chance to flourish. The kids on the other side of the tracks do not. I’ll put it crudely: your kids (and mine) took that chance away from them.

I think that every one of us in the top twenty percent feels this truth and it does not make anyone happy. For what do human beings want? To modify Lewis Carroll, I think that we virtually all want jam today and jam tomorrow. We want prosperity. We want to be secure. We want jam, and all that goes with it, for ourselves and also for our kids.

Some socio-biologists tell us that the desire for our progeny to thrive is deep enough to be called instinctive, and maybe they are right.

We want prosperity today and tomorrow, but we apparently want something else, too. We want to eat our tasty meals and live beneath our non-leaking roof with a clean conscience. To have this, we need to have

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some stories to tell about why we deserve the jam and why those who do not possess it in acceptable-sized servings do not. We need those stories to be persuasive and comprehensive, because we want (darn it) to eat our victuals in peace. Marxists of course call these stories manifestations of ideology.

And that brings us to the broadly troubling part of my tale. Now we come to politics.

As Thomas Byrne Edsall has shown, a shift in the disposition of wealth has recently taken place in America. To put it in basic terms: the rich people, the college educated people, are no longer mainly republicans.

Now they are democrats. As he says, “The well-educated leadership of the left is thriving under the status quo.” The economic gains for those with college degrees, most of whom are democrats, are significant. “From 1988 to 2012, the inflation adjusted income of college graduates increased by 16 percent and those with advanced degrees by 42 percent.” In other words, the so-called progressives got a lot richer.

Now the people who want to think of themselves as progressive have more dough and almost all the cultural capital. They’re in charge of what right-wingers call the mainstream culture and the mainstream media. And they are often richer than the conservatives. That puts them in a complex position: they want to keep what they have, sure; but they also want to feel good about having it. On some level, I suspect they all know what became so evident to me ten years ago: it looks unfair for our group to have the keys to the middle-class kingdom while other people languish at the gates—or don’t even quite know where the gates are to be found.

This perception is potentially so uncomfortable that it has to be replaced by some other perceptions, some other stories. And here, troubles arise.

To be a good person, you have to be an egalitarian. You have to care about the poor and the disadvantaged. You have to care about all those people who can’t go to college, or can’t go to a decent college because you (well) rigged the game on them.

When the rich were preponderantly republicans, the question of ideology was not all that complex. You simply said that wealth and position were a matter of merit. You said that life was hard and competitive. You had competed and won. Good for you. In your pocket, you had an invisible scroll whereon was written no end of tales about people who, through hard

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work and competitive urgency, had risen to the top. Horatio Alger was your author of choice. When people said it was harder for blacks, harder for women, harder for those whose dads had neglected to go to Harvard and whose moms unaccountably skipped Barnard, you pulled out the scroll and began to read. You went to bed full of steak, potatoes and wine, and woke up the next morning with a marching band playing in your heart.

The rich progressive doesn’t have it so easy. His song is harder to compose. For to qualify as a progressive you have to care about other people and about the poor in particular. Or if you do not, you have to have a good reason why. How do you claim to be a progressive and not feel strong obligation to the others: the others who have not gone to college, who can no longer find a union job, who are committing suicide in unprecedented numbers, who are succumbing to opiate addiction, and who are often depressed and hopeless beyond measure?

Marxists define ideology as the stories that the top tier people tell to justify their positions in the endless class struggle. Members of the dominant class like to buy books and see movies and watch shows on TV and, perhaps most of all, like to read newspapers and watch news broadcasts that justify their positions in the world. You need an ideology.

You need a jam song. And when the contradictions are pronounced—a progressive who turns away from solidarity with the downtrodden: that’s quite a contradiction—your song had best be a rousing one.

Well, here’s a rousing song for you: the white, non-college educated people who feel themselves slipping and slipping down, and are slipping and slipping down, do not deserve our help or our sympathy for very good reasons. They are not our sort of people at all. They are crude, unenlightened: a vast tribe of Morlocks.

They are sexists. They are racists. They are homophobes. Transphobes, too. That’s who and what they are. That’s why they voted for Trump. That’s why they are evil or close to being so. That’s why we can hold them in contempt--and do nothing for or with them.

But hold it. Isn’t it true? Isn’t it the case that white, non-college educated people who voted for Trump tend to be all those bad things?

The answer to that question is simple. The answer is, I don’t know. The answer is, I don’t know and neither do you.

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You can measure what is susceptible to being measured, as Thomas Byrne Edsal does. You can say authoritatively that a class is making less money, is looking at fewer prospects, is sending fewer of its kids to college and arranging for them to stay there. You can say that the unions are fading and the factory jobs are disappearing. You can say that small cities all through America are falling apart. Those are external matters.

You can perceive and even measure them. And you can say that Trump spoke to those issues in a way that Clinton did not. That too is a fact.

But you cannot tell, and I cannot tell, what attitudes on race and gender and the rest abide in the hearts of our fellow citizens unless they declare themselves. And even then, certainty is elusive. If someone says, a la David Duke: “Me? Racist all the way,” then matters become clear. But when they do not, when they adduce other reasons for voting for Trump, then maybe you better listen to them and take them seriously. For there are no surveys, no tests, no diagnostic techniques that can, with anything like certainty, affirm that anyone is a racist, a sexist, or what have you. When a survey claims to do so, some of my liberal buddies clap their hands with delight—they can’t hear enough of it. But as I see it, no survey known to humanity reaches the depths of the human soul.

Racism amok in America? Maybe. One certainly has one’s concerns. The avidity with which the Trump gang chants about building that wall to lock out Mexicans and Central Americans is disconcerting. Their seeming eagerness to see Mexicans as drug dealers and killers is depressing. Their enthusiasm for Trump’s long-maintained notion that Obama was not born in America, worrying. Their doubts about the challenges inherent in being black or brown in America don’t inspire confidence in their judgment. But racists? Maybe, maybe. I don’t know.

Certain signs suggest something rather different. Mixed race marriages are radically on the rise. Families of different races are combining with each other regularly. When you turn on TV, you see people in racially mixed couples appearing in ads, selling stuff. Advertisers have profits at stake—would they risk bankruptcy by affronting existing racial taboos?

But there is nothing at all clinching about such perceptions. They may be suggestive, but ultimately, they don’t really resolve anything, any more than pointing to “build the wall” chants does. Human character is tough to penetrate.

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A novelist I know put it this way. Hamlet is surely one of the most complex characters in all literature. Generations of learned critics have tried to get to the depths of his psyche. Coleridge tried, Johnson tried, Hazlitt and Bradley and Bloom had at it. And they have made some progress. But understanding Hamlet is simplicity itself when you compare it to the task of comprehending the guy who works at the local gas station, or the gal who gases up there, or the brother and sister who own the place. People are not transparent. They are not amenable to quick construction.

We make them so to serve our ends. We make them so for ideological purposes.

Does the right wing have its songs of self-justification? I think so, yes. But they tend to be reactive. Call them, if you like, counter-ideological, for their function is to poke holes in the narratives of the materially dominant class. So: professors are frauds; high-priced doctors are quacks; lawyers are shysters. Global warming is bunk. Putin is our friend. Hillary belongs in jail. I’m not sure how many right-wingers believe these things out and out. The idea, I think, is to deploy them loudly and stubbornly until the rich progressives lose their tempers and reveal the angry contempt that they nurse for non-college-educated whites. In the face of, say, claims that global warming is a hoax, progressives are inclined to drop their composed manners and fume.

Progressives generally have little compassion to spare for what was once the white working class and is now the white unemployment, suicide and opium class. “They are toast,” one generally quite sensitive liberal acquaintance said to me rather gleefully once. He was looking forward to the multi-ethnic, multicultural American paradise that was, he thought, on the horizon. His compassion for poor whites may have been non-existent, but his compassion—or rather his professed compassion--for African Americans flourished constantly. He thought of himself as a defender, an ally, a protector. Perhaps he was. And maybe all of his fellow liberals who have concerned themselves with African American prospects are comparably virtuous. But one sometimes wonders if their commitment goes far beyond avoiding the dreaded “n-word”; fulminating against Confederate statues; and insisting that more “people of color” receive high-profile cultural awards. In exchange for such mild commitments, they may reap an outsized sense of their own virtue.

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Malcolm X said once that there were two kinds of whites who busied themselves extensively with the affairs of black people. There were the racist reactionaries, whom Malcolm called wolves. They were obvious in their hatred for blacks and rather easily dealt with. At any rate, you knew where you stood with them. But then there were the liberals, whom Malcom called foxes. What did they want? They always wanted something—something for themselves in exchange for their purported assistance--and they were not so easy to contend with, not at all.

This need for self-justification among progressives, and the corresponding need to blast it apart, is creating fiery conflict between Americans. Red Americans and Blue now hate each other. Hate. They have no wish to see one another with sympathy and kindliness, or even with subtlety. They want to define themselves and justify themselves by turning against their brothers and sisters in democracy. For the pleasure of having a calm conscience, they are creating furious division and maybe, sometime down the line, remote though it may now be, the prospect of civil war.

It’s possible to believe that we humans are equipped with two identities. One is the identity that we associate with Darwin’s thought.

The Darwinian individual wants to live and thrive and if possible dominate others. He cares mostly for himself and for his family. He cares for others to the degree that he needs to in order to assure public peace, so he can go about his business. He is self-interested, and his self-interest is circumscribed only by the law and social customs. He’s in it for himself, t hough from time to time, he needs stories to tell himself and the world that it’s not so. That side seems to be ascendant all through American culture at present.

But there’s another self, too, I think. It’s the self that Buddha and Jesus uncovered and encouraged and that Walt Whitman wrote his greatest poems to celebrate. This is the self that strives to love his neighbor as he loves himself. He puts kindness and compassion above the other virtues. He wants to live in a community, not be a mere member of what Coleridge called the “poor loveless ever-anxious crowd.” He wants peace and plenty, not just for himself, but for all.

Right now, that second self seems to be in abeyance, at least among the educated classes. They have constructed stories to evade the

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pressures of compassion and solidarity. But the fact that those stories need to be constructed at all tells us something. It tells us that buried beneath the current regime of selfishness and self-interest there is another way of being. That way—the way of the Gospels and of “Song of Myself”—is a quiet and modest way, but it will continue to exert its pressures until it once more gains a hearing.

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Guest Column Letter from London: The 2019 General Election

BY DAVID HERMAN There have been four great General Elections in Britain since the Second World War. Each marked a dramatic turning-point in British politics. First, 1945. It was the first time a Labour government was elected in Britain by a landslide, winning 393 seats, almost 200 more than Churchill’s Conservative Party, with almost half the national vote. Both the previous Labour governments, in the 1920s, were short-lived and the second, in particular, was a disaster, blown away by the Depression. Attlee’s 1945 government not only founded the modern welfare state and the National Health Service, it established Britain as a two-party democracy. Labour were to be in government for thirty of the next sixty-five years.

The second great General Election was in 1979. Margaret Thatcher remained Prime Minister for more than a decade, winning three elections, and decisively challenged the previous political and economic consensus.

After Thatcher, no British Prime Minister set out to roll back her emphasis on the Free Market and privatization or her attack on the British trade union movement.

In 1997, Tony Blair won the first of his three General Election victories. Labour had been in the wilderness for almost twenty years, but now under Blair, Labour ruled for more than a decade. He moved Labour to the centre-ground of British politics and the Conservatives came to realise that the only way to defeat Labour was to stop being “the nasty party”, in Theresa May’s words, and to move to the centre ground themselves.

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Boris Johnson’s victory in December was of the same kind of historic importance. First, it confirmed that after three years of often angry debate, Britain was going to leave the EU. Second, the scale of the victory was enormous, not because the Conservative vote had risen much but because the Labour vote fell by almost 8%. This barely captures the scale of Labour’s defeat. It was their worst Election defeat since 1935.

The only comparable humiliation was in 1983, but then Labour was still the leading party in Scotland and retained its heartlands in industrial Britain: Wales, the Midlands and the North. What was so spectacular about Labour’s defeat in December was that they were driven from Scotland and Wales, and were defeated in their industrial strongholds. They lost seats which barely twenty years ago had majorities of more than 20,000, including Tony Blair’s old seat Sedgefield, in the North-East of England.

Sedgefield had been a Labour seat since 1935. It is now Conservative.

The same story was told throughout working-class Britain. The day after the Election, Johnson went to speak in Sedgefield. The symbolism was clear.

The statistics are astonishing. 12% of those who voted Labour in the North East in 2015 left Labour. In Yorkshire the figure was 10%.

In the East Midlands it was 8%. Industrial Britain abandoned the Labour Party in unprecedented numbers.

Thirdly, Boris Johnson looks set to change British politics for a generation. He has been widely misunderstood as ferociously right-wing and a deceitful opportunist, a British Trump. It is more likely that he will be a one-nation Conservative, who will set out to win over working-class voters who had voted Labour for generations. Almost a decade of austerity will end. Public spending, especially on health, will rise. For the first time in years, money will be spent in declining industrial areas: on roads and railways, schools and hospitals, Broadband and restoring high streets in the centre of countless towns. The 2019 election will be a landmark in modern British history.

Why didn’t political commentators predict the scale of the Conservative victory? Primarily because so many misunderstood the 2017 election. The 2017 election was close but not because Corbyn’s Labour Party were popular or had won over middle Britain. It was close because the Conservatives fought the worst electoral campaign in modern

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British times. Theresa May fought a truly disastrous campaign. She failed to rethink austerity, the huge cuts in public spending that began under Cameron and Osborne in 2010. She had failed to deliver Brexit, had no exciting new vision of Britain and was an uninspiring leader, lacking in warmth or emotional literacy. Her Chancellor, Philip Hammond, was just as low-key and had to be hidden away for most of the campaign. And the third central figure, the Chairman of the Conservative Party, was feeble and uninspiring. Finally, the cabinet was worn out after seven years in power. Few British (or American) governments look in good shape after seven years. They are tired out by battling with events, economic crises and long days and nights poring over dense legislation. May’s cabinet were burnt-out and had no exciting new policies to offer.

The situation was very different two years later. Johnson was 55, but he had only been Prime Minister for less than five months and before then had only served as Foreign Secretary for two years. He was fifteen years younger than Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Perhaps more important, he was livelier, funnier, even appealing to working-class voters.

The key figures of Johnson’s government were younger still. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid was 49; Home Secretary, Priti Patel, 47; Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, 45; Matt Hancock, in charge of Health, 41. Michael Gove, a key figure with a curiously unimportant post, was barely over fifty. They were young, the most ethnically diverse government in British history and they were committed to ditching austerity.

Above all, they had a clear position on the key issue of the election, Brexit. Johnson and his government were committed to leaving the EU. “No ifs, no buts”, in his famous phrase. He had driven out the pro-Remain rebels during the Autumn. They weren’t just forced out of the government. Many were expelled from the Conservative Party and most of them lost their seats in the December election.

Once it was announced that there was going to be an election, it was clear that it was going to be a Brexit Election. The British media, the intelligentsia and political class understood this, but misunderstood one major implication, just as they had misunderstood the EU Referendum in 2016. Because they were pro-Remain and thought the British electorate were fools for voting to Leave, they failed to realise how many British voters were still passionately opposed to the EU. Look at BBC news

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programmes, broadsheet op-ed articles and the views of countless liberal academics from the past few months, and you will see that they all overrated the strength of pro-Remain sentiment and underrated the scale of pro-Leave opinion. The Conservatives entered the 2019 election as the only major party completely committed to Brexit.

Britain’s intelligentsia expected a close election because they live in a bubble, an echo chamber where they constantly hear and reflect each other’s opinions. Crucially, they are massively concentrated in London and the South-East. In America, California is the centre of digital culture and entertainment; New York is the centre of finance; Washington is the centre of politics; Boston is a major intellectual centre with great universities and hospitals. In Britain, London is the centre of everything.

Britain’s intellectual, cultural and political elite are remarkably separate from the rest of the country, especially the Brexit heartlands: the south-west of England, the east coast, Wales, the Midlands and the North.

They might as well be from a different country.

Future historians will marvel about the failure of anti-Brexit politicians to play what seemed like a winning hand. They had Johnson tied up in a corner. He was completely powerless, the head of a minority government who couldn’t defeat the Labour, Scottish Nationalist and Lib Dem coalition gathered against him. He couldn’t pass a single piece of legislation without their say-so just as his predecessor, Theresa May, had not been able to pass any of her Brexit legislation. If the other parties had agreed amongst themselves they could have passed a second referendum which would have reversed the first. They could have killed Brexit.

However, they couldn’t agree amongst themselves; and second, some genuinely thought they would do well in another General Election. The SNP thought (correctly) they would sweep Scotland and establish, beyond doubt, their claim for a second Scottish Independence referendum. The Lib Dems, under a bright, young leader, Jo Swinson, thought (disastrously) they would do as well as they had in the European and local government elections in the summer. Labour were totally divided over Brexit, between the left-wing London MPs who wanted to stay in the EU and the MPs from the working-class heartland of the North, Midlands and Wales, who knew their voters were opposed to Brexit. Out-voted by the SNP and the Lib Dems, Labour were sucked into a General Election which they were

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never going to win. With one leap, Johnson was free, allowed to hold a Brexit Election he and his advisers knew he could win.

They were right. According to one survey, the Conservatives had a 73% to 15% lead over Labour among Leave voters, representing an 8.5% swing to Boris Johnson’s party since 2017. Among Remain voters, just under half (48%) voted Labour, 21% Liberal Democrats, and 20% the Conservatives. The Leave vote went Conservative; the Remain vote was split. It was Labour’s worst nightmare come true.

Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, the most inept leader in its history, thought they could win if they turned the Election into a vote not on Brexit but on Conservative austerity. So why didn’t they? Corbyn was the most left-wing leader in Labour’s history. He has learned nothing since the 1970s. Corbyn and all the key figures in the Parliamentary Labour Party – John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler, Emily Thornberry, Sir Keir Starmer and Barry Gardiner – all represent ethnically diverse constituencies in poor, inner London. Most were pro-Remain. Most were from the Far Left. The dominant figures were formed in the 1970s New Left: working for the trade unions, they were pro-Irish unification, anti-Zionist, anti-war, anti-Thatcher (and later anti-Blair).

There is a key fact in the history of the Labour Party since 1974.

Only one Labour leader, Tony Blair, has won a General Election in 45 years.

He did so because he moved from the Left to the mainstream of British politics. Corbyn, McDonnell and the others from the London Left had no intention of moving to the centre. They had never been near the political centre in their lives, they had never had positions of power in their entire careers and they put together the most radical party manifesto in Labour history: nationalise key utilities, increase public spending to huge levels, tax the rich to pay for it, and refuse to acknowledge the certainty of capital flight, meaning that many companies and individuals would simply leave Britain rather than pay huge taxes. No one outside the Left believed this economic programme. Crucially, even traditional Labour voters didn’t believe the promises.

The 1983 Labour manifesto was described by one Labour politician as “the longest suicide note in history”. The manifesto in December 2019 was much, much worse. The Labour vote fell by almost 8%, more than two and a half million votes. Boris Johnson received almost 14 million votes,

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the highest Conservative vote since 1992. There was another significant statistic. From its low-point in 2001, when the Conservatives received barely 8 million votes, their vote has risen, election after election, till Johnson’s landslide in 2019. By 2019 the Conservative vote had almost doubled in twenty years. The Labour vote remained almost entirely static during the same period. In 2001 it was almost 11 million. In 2019 it was half a million less. The only exception was the great anomaly of 2017, when the Labour vote rose significantly against Theresa May to levels only exceeded in the great Blair landslide of 1997. But it was an anomaly.

It wasn’t just Corbyn’s policies and it wasn’t just Brexit. And it certainly wasn’t Labour’s antisemitism, controversial though that was. What lost Labour the 2019 election was that too many Labour voters didn’t believe in their high-tax, high-spend policies, thought too many of their preoccupations (Palestinian rights, South American politics, anti-Zionism) only spoke to college students and old leftists from the 1970s like Corbyn.

And then, above all, there was the Corbyn problem. In an opinion poll published the day after the General Election, people were asked the main reasons they did not vote Labour. 17% said Brexit. 12% said their economic policies. 43% said Corbyn’s leadership.

Corbyn was too humourless. Worse, he was considered unpatriotic, not someone voters could trust with national security. He had been associated with terrorists for decades, especially the IRA. In a TV interview during the 2019 election campaign, Corbyn was asked if he, as a republican, would watch the Queen’s Christmas message, broadcast every year. Yes, he said. In the morning. It has been broadcast at 3 pm ever since it was first broadcast in the 1930s. Corbyn had clearly never watched one of the main TV rituals of the year. In 2015 Corbyn famously did not sing the national anthem at the Battle of Britain memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral, his first ceremonial event since being elected Labour leader. These were significant symbolic moments. They didn’t matter to Corbyn’s left-wing followers but they mattered hugely to middle Britain.

The British working class thought Corbyn was an unpatriotic crank. And they were right.

For decades, the British Left has assumed that working class voters are motivated primarily by material self-interest. This has always been untrue. Inflation and unemployment matter, but so do issues of

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cultural and national identity. Tony Blair knew this. That’s why his most famous slogans were “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime” and “education, education, education”. His most famous speech was his tribute to Princess Diana, the morning she died. Corbyn never understood that patriotism and the monarchy matter, that most British voters are disgusted by terrorism and that a sense of humour matters, being able to laugh at yourself matters. Johnson was more popular among Labour working-class voters than Corbyn was. A key part of his campaign was turning up in Labour towns and baking pies in a bakery, delivering milk, selling fish at a fishmonger’s. A posh Tory, educated at Eton and Oxford, where he was a member of the exclusive Bullingdon Club, and yet he could connect with ordinary people.

Johnson created a unique public persona: a posh likable chump, something out of PG Wodehouse. It was deliberately cultivated. The ruffled hair, the rumpled shirt sticking out of his trousers, the posh vocabulary, full of Latin phrases. Throughout the 2019 campaign his opponents constantly called him a liar, an opportunist, a scoundrel, not someone you could trust with the National Health Service or with complex negotiations over Brexit. He had been fired from so many jobs, he had had so many affairs.

No one seems to know how many children he has. And yet twice he was elected Mayor of London, a hugely pro-Labour city, and in December he received almost fourteen million votes, more than Blair in 1997 and more than Thatcher in 1979. Two million more than Attlee in 1945.

These are the short-term causes of Johnson’s victory in December 2019. What of its long-term significance? Why does it matter?

In the 1970s and ‘80s Britain underwent a series of major social and economic changes. Globalisation, of course. Britain’s industrial society disappeared: steelworks, coal mines, shipyards, factories, the whole landscape of industrial Britain closed down. British industry couldn’t compete with China, Korea, India. This led to huge levels of unemployment in the 1970s and ‘80s, levels unknown since the Thirties. Trade unions and the Labour Party suffered crushing defeats during this period, most famously the great miners’ strike of 1984-5 and Labour’s electoral defeats of 197992.

What passed almost unnoticed were two other huge changes during the same period. First, the transformation of British middle-class

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life. Doctors, teachers, university academics, white collar workers, had to work longer hours, could no longer afford large homes or send their children to private schools. They lived through an earthquake in their life expectations. The public sphere around them became impoverished. Public libraries, hospitals, town centres became less welcoming. Railways were shut down. The ties that bonded communities weakened. People did not serve in the armed forces together, compulsory national service stopped, fewer people went to church or sang in choirs, state grammar schools were shut down and the upper middle class opted for private schools while the middle class had to send their children to comprehensive schools.

If I think of the quality of life my parents’ generation enjoyed in the 1960s it was entirely different from my generation’s experience.

Fathers worked from 9-5. In the Sixties there was high employment.

People who had never been to university sent their children to university.

The public sector exploded. People who had never owned cars, washing machines, indoor toilets, central heating, eaten in foreign restaurants, gone on overseas holidays, began to live lives of unimaginable comfort.

Take the historian EJ Hobsbawm. During the 1950s and ‘60s he and his wife bought their first car, bought a house together with the writers Alan Sillitoe and his wife, Ruth Fainlight, and then bought their own house in Hampstead and a holiday home in Wales. These were golden years.

Then came the Fall. Jobs became more unpredictable. More and more people became freelance, casualised. They worked longer hours.

The generation who came of age in the 1980s could afford good homes and a private education. Their children could not afford either.

One way of making sense of Blair’s victories between 1997 and 2010 is that Labour tried to offer an alternative to Thatcherism, which had rejoiced in these changes and the privatization of public life. But Labour had no answer to globalisation, to the financial crash of 2008-9, to the casualisation of middle-class life and the destruction of working-class communities. A decade of Conservative governments also failed to provide solutions to these long-term problems.

The greatest analyst of this social revolution is the British political philosopher, John Gray. In a series of essays written over the past few years, mostly for The New Statesman, he has written of “the collapse of the postwar British settlement.”

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There was another set of cultural changes during these years.

Immigration, both from the new EU countries of central and east Europe and from outside Europe, reached unprecedented levels during the 1990s.

The most resonant slogan of the 2016 Referendum was “I want my country back”. Important to try at least to understand those words from the perspective of those who embraced it. Those who thought of Britain as white, Christian, a nation of small towns and country villages, no longer recognised the nation around them. John Major, Prime Minister between Thatcher and Blair, famously said, “Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pool fillers, and as George Orwell said – ‘Old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist;’ and if we get our way – Shakespeare still read even in schools.”

It is easy to mock this vision of cultural continuity but Major won more votes than any other Conservative leader since Thatcher. His vision of Shakespeare, Orwell, a green, pastoral, unchanged Britain, white, culturally homogenous, safe, conservative, Christian, still speaks to people whose lives have been subjected to huge social and economic change.

Political leaders who could speak to these anxieties and offer economic optimism, security, safety from crime, a sense of national identity, but could also embrace change, speaking to a new generation of immigrants, new sexual freedoms, new kinds of diversity, would reap huge rewards. The secret was to offer nostalgia and security, on the one hand, and to embrace change (Broadband, diversity) on the other. Blair, Major and Johnson did this.

They seem to have nothing in common. But these three leaders have one crucial thing in common. All three were the only Prime Ministers since Thatcher to come close to the magic number of 14 million votes. 14 million for John Major in 1992, 13.7 million for Blair in 1997, and now almost 14 million for Johnson in 2019. It’s not just a question of numbers.

Winning 14 million votes means you have conquered the middle ground in British politics, you have created a vision of Britain which has won over Middle Britain. Labour has come nowhere near this since Blair in 1997. Johnson is the first Tory leader to come near this figure in almost thirty years.

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The world Corbyn embraced-- ethnically and culturally diverse, young, radical-- was completely different. It was left-wing, committed to high taxes and big spending, championing ethnic and sexual minorities, touting fringe passions from the IRA to Palestinian rights (at the 2019 Labour Party conference delegates waved Palestinian flags). Corbyn had nothing but contempt for Blair or Major and their attempts to win the middle ground or for their nostalgic visions of British culture. He knew nothing about Britain beyond north London. He was the first Labour leader to represent a constituency in London in 1955. Every other leader since represented a constituency in the Labour industrial heartlands.

Again, John Gray has been one of the devastating analysts of Corbynism. In late October he wrote, “Labour has also abandoned any small-c conservative disposition and become a vehicle for anti-Semitism and a version of Marxism that deems working-class values of place and community racist when they are expressed as concern about continuing mass immigration.�

One fascinating set of statistics about the 2019 Election was the generation gap between old working-class voters and the young. If you take thirteen of the northern working-class towns which moved from Labour to Conservative, they all have one thing in common. In all of them the population over 65 had increased from 8.9% to 41.3%. In nine of them the percentage had risen above 27%. In the same towns, the change in the young population, between 18 and 24, had fallen between 7.3% and 28.4%. They had moved to big cities and college towns. Corbyn won the youth vote. Johnson won the old vote and in town after town across northern England there were more older voters. It was exactly the same pattern as the 2016 EU Referendum.

Labour won the big cities: Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Cardiff. They won three quarters of the constituencies in London. But they were wiped out in the small towns.

Other statistics tell the same story. In 2015 the Conservatives won 29% of lower working-class and unemployed voters. In 2019 this had risen to 49%. No Conservative leader has been as effective in winning over the poorest voters.

Only Gray has pointed out the paradox of Thatcherism which has haunted Britain’s Prime Ministers for forty years since Thatcher was elected.

She was a Conservative, but no British institution has the authority it had

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in the 1970s. And it wasn’t just the industrial working class that suffered in the Thatcher years. Gray wrote, “The bourgeois life of the 1950s – an idealized image of which she aimed to re-create: a middle class world of secure livelihoods, dutiful families, and prudent saving for the future – has vanished without trace, along with the working-class communities that underpinned British industry… The free market that Thatcher promoted actually worked to undermine and to dissolve middle-class values.”

Thatcher is just a name we give to the whirlwind which destroyed British working-class communities from Scotland to South Wales, undermined middle-class values and transformed British life over the past forty years.

The paradox is that Thatcher destroyed the Conservatives for a generation. Since Thatcher, no Conservative government has ruled with a significant majority in Parliament. Until now. Boris Johnson has a majority of eighty seats. He is the least likely successor to Thatcher, personally and politically. No commentator thought that Johnson was the right person to change Britain. Many predicted that a coalition of cross-party Moderates was more likely. But the big story in British politics over the past four years has been the complete defeat of Moderates in the two main political parties. Not because they were not decent, but because they never made coalitions and they never understood the anger out there after years of huge social change.

Curiously, it is the opportunist chump, Boris Johnson, and his political advisers, who have a real vision of Britain which attempts to deal with the contradictions and unintended legacies of Thatcherism. It is hard to think of a Prime Minister more reviled by the liberal-Left intelligentsia.

But might it just be that this unlikely coalition of working-class voters and Conservative politicians will start to heal Britain’s wounds?

The lessons for American Democrats would seem clear. Move to the centre ground. Address the grievances generated by globalisation and social and economic change. Talk about issues that matter to city dwellers and minorities, by all means, but also address the concerns of people in small towns and the white working-class voters that supported Trump in 2016. Be relevant. Be mainstream. When I came to see friends on the East Coast just before the 2016 election I told them about the lessons of Brexit. They said these were irrelevant to America. Hillary would win.

The lessons of Brexit in 2016 and Johnson in 2019 are the same. If the Democrats don’t learn them, the Republicans will.

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Column: Art & Culture

Column: Art & Culture Sontag & Rieff

BY DAVID MIKICS There she stands, the fortysomething Susan Sontag, at a rock ‘n’ roll show in a packed New York club, encircled by sweaty kids. “Being the oldest person in a room did not make her self-conscious,” writes Sigrid Nunez in her memoir Sempre Susan. “The idea that she could ever be out of place anywhere because of her age was beyond her—like the idea that she could ever be de trop.” Sontag gave herself a regal, Oscar-Wilde-like permission to be at the center of things. That could be charming, much of the time. Other traits were less appealing. Sontag used to forbid her son David to look out of the window during train trips because, after all, there was nothing interesting about nature. Read a book instead, or, better, talk to me! was her message.

Susan Sontag was a case, all right, as Benjamin Moser’s new biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work makes clear. But she was also interesting in ways that Moser, with his taste for the tawdry and the sensational, is ill-equipped to explore. While he chases after scandalous details, Sontag’s actual writing tends to get lost in the shuffle.

Moser’s book bubbles with gossip. He gives you the scoop on Sontag’s multifarious love life, which included a Rothschild heiress, an Italian countess, and her publisher Roger Straus. We learn that Sontag had sex with 36 people between the ages of 14 and 17; that her companion the photographer Annie Leibovitz wrote her a $15,000 check every week; that she relied heavily on amphetamines and regularly forgot to bathe or brush her teeth. We hear about Sontag’s first orgasm with a woman (the

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playwright Maria Irene Fornés), and then, later on, her first one with a man (Richard Goodwin, JFK’s speechwriter). Moser gives us spectacular coverage of her tantrums. At times a screaming diva, she abused waiters, insulted Leibovitz in front of dinner guests, and dragged her most loyal friends through the dirt. Sontag’s many frenemies, out for revenge, pop up on nearly every page of Moser.

Moser, like Sontag herself, is a celebrity hound. He gushes about the momentous night at Studio 54 when Sontag shared a table with Andy Warhol and Jackie O. Sontag, he breathlessly tells us, slept with both RFK and Warren Beatty, only to be outscored by Leibovitz, who bedded Mick Jagger. All of this star-studded dazzle tends to eclipse Moser’s claim that Sontag was a thinker to be reckoned with, wrestling with the crucial aesthetic and political questions of her time. Moser does discuss Sontag’s thought, but his heart isn’t in it. He comes nowhere close to those who have written brilliantly about Sontag’s life and work, like Phillip Lopate, Terry Castle, Robert Boyers and Nunez.

Sontag married the sociologist Philip Rieff when she was a precocious undergraduate at the University of Chicago. She was only 17, he ten years older. The marriage was an all-consuming whirlwind that after a few years ended in disaster. At first Sontag and Rieff had sex four or five times a day, and always, they conversed about every intellectual matter under the sun. One time they sat in a car all night, too busy talking to notice that the sun had come up. He would even talk to me when I was in the bathroom, Sontag recalled in later years.

Moser’s biggest bombshell is his absurd claim that Sontag is the real author of Rieff’s masterwork Freud: the Mind of the Moralist (1959). We know that she heavily edited the manuscript, and once, in a fury, she told Jacob Taubes that she “wrote every word” of it. But was she the book’s author? If this were true, it would make Sontag the greatest authority on Freud in postwar America. This is far from the case. Sontag devoted only two or three pages to Freud in all her subsequent work, and those pages suggest a crude, sketchy idea of Freud’s thinking, a far cry from Rieff’s elaborate mastery. “Bringing to light…hidden motives must, Freud thought, automatically dispel them,” Sontag wrote in her 1961 review of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, ignoring Freud’s many essays on the hardships of the therapeutic process.

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Moser blithely insists, again and again, that Sontag was the sole author of The Mind of the Moralist. When quoting from the book, he says “Susan described” or “Susan noted,” never giving Rieff any part at all.

In effect, Moser steals the book from its actual author. Except for Janet Malcolm and Joseph Epstein, most reviewers of Moser have neutrally reported or even accepted the idea that Sontag wrote The Mind of the Moralist, but this shows only that they know little about Rieff’s classic book. Biographers have a responsibility to seriously evaluate the claims of their subjects, and reviewers are similarly obligated. With Moser’s biography, the obligation has been brushed aside. The evidence against Moser’s plagiarism notion is overwhelming. The Freud book sounds just like Rieff’s later work, written after the split with Sontag. Its argument and worldview are utterly characteristic of Rieff, and drastically different from Sontag’s own.

The Mind of the Moralist remains Rieff’s book rather than Sontag’s. But it strongly influenced Sontag, in a way that neither she nor Rieff was ever able to admit. Rieff saw Freud as the central modern thinker, but he argued that Freud’s skeptical realism diminished the world, shortchanging art and religion. Freud lumped the religious ascetic and the self-sacrificing artist together with the neurotic, and warned us that the high ideals associated with cultural achievement enact too great a cost.

Instead of modeling ourselves on the great ascetics, Freud counseled, we should get used to ordinary unhappiness, becoming middle managers of our humdrum souls. Rieff’s reservations about Freud must have impressed Sontag, since she gravitated to the ascetic heroes of art and culture that Freud was so wary about. Sontag, who was a Nietzschean striver rather than a Freudian realist, worshipped the self-denying saints of modernity: Beckett, Wittgenstein, Simone Weil.

Rieff argued that the high modernists revered by Sontag were less instructive figures than the cautious Freud. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), his follow-up to The Mind of the Moralist, he remarked with disaffection that writers like Beckett, “with his effort to be an artist working ultimately with a silent mankind, because the ‘silent God’ has been used up–are hailed as most religious because they can find nothing to obey or await.” The actual new religion, he goes on to say, is not dire in Beckett’s manner but quite “reasonable”: “Crowded more and

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more together, we are learning to live more distantly from one another, in strategically varied and numerous contacts, rather than in the oppressive warmth of family and a few friends.” (Rieff, it seems, foresaw Facebook.)

Now that “a sense of well-being” has become the goal of our lives, “rather than a by-product of striving after some superior communal end,” Rieff writes, soon “there will be nothing further to say in terms of the old style of despair and hope.” Beckett’s effort to frame a new style of despair and hope, relying as it does on existentialist melodrama and avant-garde worship of silence, seems to Rieff a merely specialized endeavor. Take that, Godot!

Rieff knew that Freud diminished the human soul’s great passions, and that the kind of self-knowledge he advocated could never have enough high erotic force to replace the old religions. But Rieff also knew something Sontag did not (or maybe just didn’t care about): art cannot provide a model for living. Later on, I’ll suggest that Rieff had Sontag in mind when he wrote about Wilde as the “impossible” spirit of the modern age, the appreciator who knows no taboos and who raises the enjoyment of art to a liberating religion. Wilde’s headlong embrace of art is bound to frustration and failure, Rieff argues, and is therefore no true faith.

Sontag, to my mind, resembles no one so much as Wilde. Her intellectual portraits were sometimes ravishing and persuasive, as in Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), her best book, but at other times she seems merely to be marketing an elevated form of glamor, in the Wilde tradition.

As Adam Kirsch has noted, she ennobles the discerning consumer of art.

The greatness of the art object rubs off onto Sontag, and onto you, the reader. Sontag, who except for her bestseller The Volcano Lover (1992) was never much of a success as a novelist or filmmaker, fell back on Wildean exaltation of the critic as heroic connoisseur: her best early essay, “Notes on Camp,” was dedicated to Wilde. But unlike Wilde, Sontag trusts to high seriousness. We must work out an erotics of art, she says, and learn to take pleasure in a rigorous way, since beauty, after all, is truth.

Sontag never entertains Wilde’s theme that admiring beauty might be dangerous for us, though her favorite writer as a teenager, Thomas Mann, could have taught her that, as Wilde could have too. (Mann had an ironic grasp of the forms of reverence; Sontag did not.) Helplessly in love with the boy Tadzio, Mann’s Aschenbach in Death in Venice is a pathetic

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parody of the aesthete. Aschenbach has spent his whole life escaping from himself into art, but on his trip to Venice sex corrupts artistic appreciation, and he becomes merely his wretched hunger for the perfect, unreachable Tadzio. Like Wilde, he is brought low by his love for boys.

Sontag’s homosexuality haunted her. In this she resembles her idol Mann, who had ample reason to see himself in his Aschenbach. The most gut-wrenching part of Moser’s book is its report of Sontag’s forced self-outing. She had always insisted that her private life was off limits, that who she slept with had nothing to do with her writing. But when she learned in the late ‘90s that biographers were on her trail, she painfully agreed to Joan Acocella’s request that she read a statement about her sex life, to be included in Acocella’s New Yorker profile of Sontag: “That I have had girlfriends as well as boyfriends is what? Something I guess I never thought I was supposed to have to say, since it seems to me the most natural thing in the world.”

Moser implies that Acocella, not Sontag, wrote these words, and when the “absolutely terrified” Sontag read them, it was with the greatest difficulty, in what Acocella calls a “strangulated tone.” What a cruel irony that Sontag has now come under the knife of a biographer who drags her out of closet after closet, ransacking every nook for evidence of his subject’s sexual secrets.

When Sontag advocated an erotics of art, she wanted to rise beyond sex, not plunge back into it, where Moser leaves her. All the grubby behavior she unfairly blamed herself for, the sexual shame and neediness (mostly directed at women rather than men), would be erased by a saintlike devotion to art. In Godard’s Vivre sa Vie, Sontag wrote, “the values of sanctity and martyrdom are transposed to a totally secular plane,” and this turned Sontag on immensely.

For Sontag, art delivers us from our neuroses, transmuting our messy psyches into something clean and unadulterated. The people in a Robert Bresson film are “opaque,” Sontag wrote, and so they represent “the forms of spiritual action…the physics, as it were, rather than the psychology of souls.” Under the spell of art, the more stringent, even excruciating, the better, your emotions will not be about you at all, but will turn into pure soul, just as the Christian loses her personal sorrow and anxiety while gazing on the crucifixion.

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Both Sontag and Rieff were Jewish, but the early Sontag often seems to me a crypto-Christian thinker, drawn to Weil, Bresson and the rigors of Catholic martyrdom. (Wilde too had a martyr complex, though a more high-spirited one.) The saint’s aloneness enraptured her, resembling as it did the purgatorial existence of the great artist (like Saint Jean Genet, a Sontag favorite). The contrast between Sontag’s reverence for the ascetic’s passion and Freud’s dislike of it, emphasized by Rieff, could not be clearer.

Yet Sontag’s taste for asceticism was only one aspect of her; the other, more appealing aspect was the clear-eyed pleasure she took in life. In her brilliant Illness as Metaphor (1978), Sontag attacked the idea that suffering either ennobles someone (like the consumptive beautiful soul) or reveals her inadequacy (like the guilt-ridden cancer victim). In her later work she still sometimes endorsed the artist as suffering hero, not tubercular perhaps, but afflicted in some other way. She stressed Benjamin’s melancholy, Artaud’s madness. But something more healthy and happy came out too, and this side expressed her better. She stressed the implacable wish for more life in figures like Canetti and Barthes, who were devoted to enjoyment, artistic and sexual. Wildly overpraising Paul Goodman, she sees in him “a connoisseur of freedom, joy, pleasure,” and that’s what matters, she implies. Goodman, who didn’t much care for women, rebuffed her in life, but really, she could be his twin.

Rieff was more conservatively Jewish in character than Sontag, with his respect for the communal and law-bound. Rieff argued that ancient Israel brought a new idea into the world: interdictory culture. The Israelites were bound together by what they could not do, and so the community became a therapeutic force, able to heal its members by bringing them back to the truths of existence, which were stable because fenced in by enduring prohibitions. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic Rieff reminded readers that “in the culture preceding our own, the order of therapy was embedded in a consensus of ‘shalt nots’”:

Cultic therapies of commitment never mounted a search for some new opening into experience; on the contrary, new experience was not wanted. Individuals were trained, through ritual action, to express fixed wants, although they could not count thereby upon commensurate gratifications. The limitation of possibilities was the very design of salvation.

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This communal disciplinary matrix has passed away, and with it “the old keys to the great riddles of life.” And so Freud brought “men’s minds around from such simplicities to the complexity of everyday tournaments with existence.”

Rieff does not have Freud’s hope that men and women might be satisfied with merely practicing the delicate balance between purpose and purposelessness in their lives. Turning the neurotic’s grandiose misery into common disappointment, urging a realism and curiosity toward the inner life: we require more than this Freudian prescription. Finding ourselves interesting is not enough; we need new forms of commitment. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic Rieff surveyed the thinkers who rejected Freud’s skeptical individualism and proposed regimes of commitment based on fantasies, sometimes outlandish ones: Jung, Reich, D.H. Lawrence. Rieff recognized that these myth-makers were pointing to a felt need not sufficiently addressed by Freud. But he also knew that their illusory solutions could not substitute for the lost interdictory culture. Illusions have no real future, since individuals choose and discard them freely. The Wildean self, searching for new experience, might try out Jungian archetypes or Reichian orgasms. We imagine we can find real commitment, and as a result salvation, in such forms, but in fact we are only trying them out.

Such experiments cannot heal us.

Rieff’s point about how freedom of choice works against commitment still applies. The homemade mythologies crafted by Jung, Reich and others have been supplemented by the political and cultural loyalties that currently excite us. People now “identify as” rather than feeling identity imposed on them. Communities that we pick and choose in this way cannot have interdictory power. Our claims to identity lack real authority, and so we impose them by force, the only way to get them to stick. According to Rieff, our disappointment that merely invented faiths cannot guide us into true meaning can generate a reckless demonic insistence. The terrorist’s doctrine, shoddily constructed as it is, and scarcely credible to its believers in their saner moments, produces a terrible violence.

Sontag’s path went in the opposite direction from Rieff’s because she insisted that the individual, specifically the heroic artist-intellectual, could develop an interdictory culture for himself. In her first two books of essays, prior to Under the Sign of Saturn, she praises the self-castigating author, ruthless on principle, who is nothing if not critical. (Later, as I’ve

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said, her intellectual avatars tend to be more fond and relaxed.) Celebrating Michel Leiris in Against Interpretation (1966), she says that “for him, life becomes real only when placed under the threat of suicide,” and that “In a view like Leiris’, literature has value only as a means of enhancing virility, or as a means of suicide.”

In sharp contrast to her essay on camp with its Wildean poise, Sontag here lapses into melodrama. There is something adolescent about her gushing over Leiris’ suicidal inclinations. When I read Against Interpretation as a teenager, I ate this stuff up; now I find it hard to take seriously.

Sontag’s high priestess mode has not always worn well. In the Leiris essay she says that “we should acknowledge certain uses of boredom as one of the most creative stylistic features of modern literature”: a sentence ripe for parody by the early Woody Allen.

Sontag could be pretentious about art, but her curiosity and sheer appetite for the new and exciting made up for it. There is no excuse, however, for her paeans to Cuba and North Vietnam. The Vietnamese, she embarrassingly thought, resembled beautiful children. On a guided tour of North Vietnam, she wrote that the people “genuinely love and admire their leaders; and, even more inconceivable to us, the government loves the people.” In Cuba, she shrugged off the fact that Castro was putting gay people in concentration camps because Che and Fidel were her “heroes and cherished models.” There is something adolescent here too, and uncomfortably close to the worst of the New Left. Years later, Sontag was often a voice of mature liberalism, standing up for free speech and human rights. Influenced by her lover Joseph Brodsky and by Herberto Padilla, she labelled Communism “fascism with a human face,” and lambasted Gabriel García Márquez for being friends with Castro. In the 60s and 70s, though, she was a pro-Communist flack, swooning over North Vietnam and Cuba as socialist utopias.

Sontag’s fellow traveler’s naïveté was not just a rapprochement with the New Left but a genuine part of her. Sontag the perpetual kid needed an object of enthusiasm, in politics as everywhere else. Rieff was constantly on guard about such enthusiasm, not that he needed to worry about it himself. He knew that utopian idealism led to moral and political disaster. Rieff’s own sense about Vietnam was that opposition to the war “gave reasons for hope.” He wrote that “there can be no culture without

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guilt; Vietnam rekindled our sense of guilt, not widely or deeply, nevertheless, that indispensable and true sensibility seemed alive again.”

At the end of his career Rieff published little, centering his intellectual life on his teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He came to class in a three piece suit and a bowler hat, banned coffee from the seminar room, and bore down on his key scriptures: Don Giovanni, Hamlet, and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” as well as favorite films like Blow-Up and Being There. Rieff was a charismatic, and his students cathected onto him.

The later Rieff was an anti-public intellectual, the opposite of the celebrity-seeking Sontag, with her high-profile pronouncements. Yet in a strange irony he resembled her too: it’s just that his sweeping prophesies remained in manuscript whereas hers were announced at PEN conferences or in wartime Sarajevo. She sounded the brave humanist alarm, whereas he honed a sour pessimism.

In his final years Rieff turned hectoring and cranky. He was satisfied with nothing on the contemporary scene. In stark contrast to Freud’s equanimity, which he so admired, Rieff’s rancor at times sounded merely reactionary. He denounced homosexuality (perhaps because Sontag had left him for another woman?). His prose became fragmentary, overbearing and inclined toward rant. Yet there are gems among the rubble too. On Scorsese’s Taxi Driver he remarks, astonishingly, “Insanity is the mitigating plea of desire, its final admission that it cannot be satisfied even by running amok. Violence is to desire as prayer is to the soul.”

One of Rieff’s major statements, decades after his marriage to Sontag, took direct aim at Oscar Wilde, the hero of Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” In his superb essay ”The Impossible Culture: Wilde as Modern Prophet,” which appeared in Salmagundi in 1982, Rieff warns against Wilde’s individualist connoisseurship. Lacking Freud’s caution, Wilde prophesies a New Man liberated from the old-fashioned cultural ideals that constrained him. If “character is the restrictive shaping of possibility,” the product of culture’s formative no, then Wilde’s yes–– like Marx’s, Rieff adds––recognizes that the old restrictive culture has disappeared. Wilde and Marx know that the power of community to heal and save people is gone, replaced by a capitalist hubbub where we are brought together only as consumers and self-fashioners.

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Rieff does not merely protest against the superficiality that Wilde celebrates, and that Wilde, like Sontag in “Notes on Camp,” tells us is actually profound. A person who is free to shape herself outside the normative powers of the old culture, Rieff fears, will become a shapeless, tormented demon, not a hero of autonomy. Rieff cites Marx’s dangerous praise of the “revolutionary daring which throws at its adversary the defiant phrase: ‘I am nothing and I should be everything.’” Rieff the antirevolutionary remarks that “culture is a tremendous articulation of compromise between equally intolerable feelings of nothing and everything.” Wilde, who equates the artist and the revolutionary, insists that when we are free to express, and therefore become, everything, inhibitions will wither away. Rieff throws the cold water of analysis on Wildean, and Marxian, hopes when he writes, “The claim of the artist to express everything is subversive in one especially acute sense: the claim to express everything can only exacerbate feelings of being nothing. In such a mood, all limits begin to feel like humiliations. Wilde did not know that he was prophesying a hideous new anger in modern man, one that will render unexcited, peaceable existence even more utopian than before.”

Rieff does not dream that the old moral strictures can suddenly be revived, least of all by him: professors don’t renew a culture, he says.

In the absence of the old law we are left with the inhibition that confronts us in the form of other people, who enrage us because they remind us of ourselves. There is no feasible way out of such misery. Rieff’s frustrated, scrappy late prose is perhaps sparked by the hopeless knot he has diagnosed.

Like Rieff, Sontag frequently looked with a dark eye on the common life, the wasteland she saw all around her. High art was her fortress, and she remained aloof and condescending about American culture. She despised anything kitschy and middlebrow (camp had an ingroup claim to superiority that distinguished it from kitsch). In Against Interpretation she trumpeted the superiority of recondite avant-garde works, while adding from time to time a sprinkle of pop culture hipness, so that Robert Rauschenberg rubbed elbows with the Supremes. Sontag the snob, disdainful about American culture, name checked the Beatles, Patti Smith or the occasional B movie merely to show that she was with it, not a University of Chicago square. Her real interest was those European

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writers who practiced the religion of art.

And yet…was the real Sontag the snob or the fan girl? Sontag the fan saw her favorite films dozens of times, and even enthused happily about pop relics like Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.” In her Rolling Stone interview, she sounds like a teenybopper when she tells Jonathan Cott how much she adored that song. The more ill she became during her long struggle with cancer, the more she needed the pleasures stockpiled in music, books, and movies.

In the end Sontag is a much happier figure than Rieff. He was the sober analyst, she the passionate enthusiast. She loved surrendering to film, literature, dance. This is a surprising side of Sontag, since she was an elitist to the bone, and proud of it. Again like Wilde, she knew how to enjoy herself.

I wonder sometimes whether Sontag really followed the religion of art. Perhaps she just liked what she liked and wanted you to like it too, as Nunez suggests in Sempre Susan. She often struck people, even those who complained bitterly about her, as a happy child with a great smile who loved books and movies. She saw Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante forty times, and cried and laughed at every screening. Her talent for enjoyment was, maybe, the truest part of her, and something any of us might envy. Not Sontag the scold, the prima donna, the failed novelist or disappointed lover, but Sontag the reader and moviegoer, the one who gives in to beauty: that’s the one who will live on.

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Column: Force Fields

On The Spectrum: Conspiracy Theories and Explanation

BY MARTIN JAY

This exercise is being written in the shadow of an extraordinary event—or rather one that has, alas, become all too ordinary—in which a sitting American president has retweeted an obscure and untrustworthy source accusing a past American president of complicity in the alleged murder of a convicted pedophile in federal custody. By the time you read it, this bizarre episode will have faded into condign oblivion, but rest assured, there will be many other comparable absurdities to illustrate an increasingly troubling sign of our deeply troubled times: the flourishing of the types of far-fetched pseudo-explanations of real events that have come to be called “conspiracy theories.”1 How to account for the efflorescence of such theories has been difficult, and how to combat them even more challenging. By and large, commentators have sought to explain their origins by focusing on their psychological roots and their burgeoning popularity by the proliferation of new media that have amplified their message. Building on the seminal work done by the historian Richard Hofstadter in the 1960’s on the “paranoid style” in American political history, 2 they often move quickly from the theories themselves to the minds of the theorists who hold them.3 Noting their frequent inclination to entertain more than one alleged conspiracy— think of exemplary figures like Alex Jones, Lyndon LaRouche, and that sitting American president mentioned above—commentators often stress the toxic mixture of persecution feelings, distrust of authority, projection of

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anxieties and manifest gullibility that predispose vulnerable individuals to deal with uncertainty and insecurity by seeking simplified answers to complex questions.4The mentality that can’t distinguish between superstition and science and takes such occult pseudo-sciences as astrology seriously, so they argue, also easily succumbs to conspiracy theories, especially when sudden and shocking events appear to defy normal explanation (for example, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, the death of Princess Diana, or the presidential election of 2016). As coping mechanisms employed to deal with trauma, they provide some reassurance against the collapse of defense mechanisms that normally function to ward off existential dread.

Students of conspiracy theories note as well the compensatory feeling they afford their exponents of superiority to the benighted masses who are being duped by official accounts that hide the truth. By scapegoating imagined plotters who should be held accountable and punished, conspiracy theorists, they also suggest, dodge any responsibility for what may have happened. Pondering the increased popularity of such theories beyond the fringes of society, they often blame the explosion of social media and the breakdown of gate-keeping on line. What had previously been spread by informal rumor-mongering and the vagaries of interpersonal contagion is disseminated with exponential effects through an unregulated internet that compresses the time and collapses the distance it takes for ideas, however unverified and implausible, to gain credence.

Whatever reasons one gives for their origins, dissemination, and functions, the proliferation of such theories has made it increasingly difficult to discriminate between actual “fake news” and fake “fake news,” as purveyors of the former disingenuously attempt to discredit those who were once trusted to make the discrimination. We now live in a time when the putative “leader of the free world” can defend himself against the accusation that he colluded to steal an election in secret with a hostile foreign power by claiming that the charge itself is a product of a “deep state” conspiracy against him. The tu quoque fallacy in which the accused turns around and claims that the accuser is hypocritically guilty of the same crime—a technique carried to perfection by said sitting president—works to muddy the waters still further. Or to mix metaphors, we are in a hall of mirrors in which the conspirator-in-chief turns out to be himself a major conspiracy theorist. However much he has brought it to perfection, it must be acknowledged that arguing fallaciously in this

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way has, alas, a venerable pedigree in the discourse surrounding conspiracy theories. When, in fact, the term became popular in the wake of the Kennedy assassination to dismiss those who doubted the official account propounded by the Warren Commission, the targets claimed in turn that the CIA itself had deliberately conspired to demonize them by calling them nut cases, thus doing what we would now call “weaponizing” the theory to prevent real investigations of inconvenient truths.5

All of this has been widely discussed, and I’m not sure I have much to add to what has already been said about the alleged psychopathological roots of conspiracy theory and the means through which it has become so prominent a feature of our current political culture.6 I want instead to approach it from a different angle: the relationship between conspiracy theory and what normally counts as responsible explanation in the human sciences, in particular in historical narratives.7 For in so doing, we will perhaps better understand the position of such theories on a spectrum of plausibility. Instead of putting them clearly beyond the pale, viewing them as nothing but manifestations of irrational pathologies, magical thinking, and technologically abetted mass hysteria, we can better appreciate how hard, if not impossible, it will be to eradicate them.

The most obvious connection with what normally counts as a valid explanation is the incontrovertible existence of actual conspiracies in history, secret plots by groups of people who sought, whether successfully or not, to bring about changes they couldn’t achieve in other ways. As the Nixon tapes show, metaphorical guns sometimes do give off incriminating smoke, and we discover that what had been publically denied and seemed on the face of it highly implausible did actually happen. Not only can paranoids have real enemies, but paranoid fantasies sometimes do have a foot in reality. Big Tobacco did really conspire to deny the carcinogenic effects of the products it sold and Big Pharma did really plot to promote opioid addiction. There was always at least a kernel of truth behind the Communist Conspiracy boogeyman so widely feared during the Cold War, although there were plenty of other less dubious explanations for resistance to the capitalist West. Nor is it always the case that actual conspiracies inevitably serve evil ends; think, for example, of Operation Valkyrie, the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, which unfortunately failed to achieve its goal. And American history would be very different if not for the plot of the Sons of Liberty to dress as Indians and toss some tea into Boston

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harbor. It would therefore be itself a sign of psychological denial—what has been called “conspiracy theory phobia”8—to discredit in advance all speculations about actual conspiracies.

Nor is it the case that the political inclinations of the theorists automatically correlate more easily with right-wing than left-wing sympathies, as the Russian collusion accusation against Trump clearly shows.

Vice, the recent biopic starring Christian Bale based on the career of Dick Cheney, explicitly assimilates him and his wife Lynne to those quintessential arch-schemers the Macbeths. It has no hesitation in presenting the decision to go to war with Saddam Hussein as a neo-con conspiracy designed to foster the power of the imperial presidency on the basis of a strong “unitary executive theory.”9 What such cases demonstrate is that the premature dismissal of all improbable explanations based on evidence that initially seems insufficient and reasoning that appears at first glance illogical may not only be a mistake, but also contrary to legitimate political concerns (however one defines the latter). It is hard to know what percentage of explanations that were once taken to be dubious conspiracy theories do pan out, but surely there are enough to resist an a priori stance of absolute skepticism.

There are, however, more fundamental reasons, besides the existence of the occasional real conspiracy, to justify a more nuanced appreciation of conspiracy theories, and it is these that I really want to explore. The phrase “conspiracy theory” itself, it should first be noted, is not purely descriptive, but always contains a negative connotation that distinguishes it from straightforward accounts of actual conspiracies. Although its origin has been traced as far back as the first years of the 20th century, it was not until the eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper targeted it in 1945 in his controversial denunciation of totalitarianism, The Open Society and its Enemies, that it attracted widespread attention and became more pejorative than descriptive.10 Popper’s aim was to defend a model of historical explanation—or rather more widely, one for the social sciences as a whole—that followed the method of the natural sciences, in which plausible conjectures about causes are always open to empirical refutations. He began by identifying conspiracy theories as a secularized version of the pseudo-explanations offered by believers in mythical powers exercised by the Gods on human affairs. Such explanations personify impersonal causes and attribute results to the intentions

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of those who desire them. Popper did not discount personal intentions, at least those motivating actual humans, but saw them as irrelevant for explaining events in a scientific manner: in all social situations we have individuals who do things; who want things; who have certain aims. In so far as they act in the way in which they want to act, and realize the aims which they intend to realize, no problem arises for the social sciences (except the problem whether their wants and aims can perhaps be socially explained, for example by certain traditions). The characteristic problems of the social sciences arise only out of our wish to know the unintended consequences, and more especially the unwanted consequences which may arise if we do certain things.11 Because unwanted consequences far outnumber those that are desired, the role of agency in history, Popper contended, is subordinate to the impersonal structures that inevitably thwart intention. Individuals or even small groups, moreover, should not be the proper focus of social scientific inquiry, which should be to analyze the existence and the functioning of institutions (such as police forces or insurance companies or schools or governments) and of social collectives (such as states or nations or classes or other social groups). The conspiracy theorist will believe that institutions can be understood completely as the result of conscious design; and as to collectives, he usually ascribes to them a kind of group-personality, treating them as conspiring agents, just as if they were individual men.12 In an accompanying footnote, the defiantly liberal Popper drew on an unexpected ally, Karl Marx, who rejected the claim that capitalists conspire to enslave the masses in favor of a structural analysis of the way in which capital determines the exploitation of one class by another.

Critics were quick to point out flaws in Popper’s argument.13The alternative between agency and structure cannot be decided in advance by fiat, with only the latter being called the object of genuinely “scientific�

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inquiry. Marx may be justifiably cited to support the claim that under capitalism impersonal structural forces largely determine human behavior, indeed that it is one of the indicators of its oppressive nature, but in the struggle to move beyond that system, its victims have to make their own history (as subsequent Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci and activists like Lenin clearly understood). Nor, moreover, does the fact that outcomes are often unintended preclude the possibility that conspiracies can play a certain meaningful role in the process. Although the Watergate burglars certainly didn’t intend Richard Nixon’s disgrace and resignation, they were part of a real conspiracy that led to that result. Unintended outcomes are, in fact, no less likely when agents act together in public as when they do in secret, so the thwarting of design is not much of an argument against conspiracy theory in general. In fact, it is only when we take into account intentions, public or private, in our writing of historical narratives that we can write them as ironic stories of unintended consequences.14

Popper, in short, opted in advance for structure over agency and unintended consequences over the realization of deliberate design as the marks of social scientific and historical explanation (as opposed to mere historical narrative). To put it somewhat differently, he valued causes over reasons in the understanding of historical occurrences.15 For the modern natural sciences, causation, of course, has supplanted earlier explanatory ways of making sense of the world. Only in certain religious circles can the so-called teleological “argument from design,” in which complexity is attributed to the providential intervention of a divine master craftsman, still compete with evolutionary theories based on random mutations and adaptation to environmental exigencies. Although the anodyne phrase “everything happens for a reason” can still occasionally comfort victims of inexplicable or unjust events that otherwise seem cruelly arbitrary, it has no purchase when it comes to explaining natural occurrences. San Francisco may be destroyed by an earthquake, but it won’t be because God is punishing its citizens for their naughty behavior.

In the case of human affairs, we are less inclined to attribute our actions and their consequences exclusively to the working out of causal processes, however tempted we sometimes are by analogies from natural science. Our dogged faith in the possibility of human freedom, which philosophers like Kant have long insisted is at odds with natural determinism, means that we find it hard to reduce human action to the

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instinctual behavior of animals or the programming of mechanical automatons. Although social scientists have persuasively shown that there are often collective patterns that transcend individual actions—the stochastic probabilities that make statistics possible—there is always a residue of contingency in even the most intransigent behavioral regularities. To take a classic example, Emile Durkheim was able to show that there were more or less steady percentages of the population as a whole likely to commit suicide, but never able to predict in individual cases who would actually end their lives.

Conspiracy theories, we might say, embrace—if perhaps too eagerly—the difference between natural scientific explanation based entirely on causality, and social scientific interpretation, which insists on paying at least some attention to reasons as well as causes and distinguishes between actions and mere behavior. By insisting on the intentionality that motivates people to act, no matter how much they may be also driven by unconscious needs or eventually thwarted by forces out of their control, such theories pay homage to the meaningfulness of human action and the responsibility, moral as well as practical, for what follows. Although it is highly unlikely, pace certain pop theologians, that “everything happens for a reason,”16 it is no less problematic to assume that nothing ever does.

When people come together—or to stick with the lyrical etymology of “conspire,” when they breathe together—they sometimes do concoct plans for action, which they hope will influence the future.

Conspiracy theorists, moreover, share with many humanist scholars a preference for interpretation over explanation. They distrust the official accounts offered by those in power or the conventional wisdom of public opinion—what in the case of a good literary critic would be scorned as a naïve reading of texts--and seek to uncover latent motives and discern arcane connections. In so doing, they adopt a variant of what Paul Ricoeur famously called “the hermeneutics of suspicion.”17 Treating events as if they were single-authored artefacts rather than overdetermined or merely contingent, they emulate the dogged quest for that elusive “figure in the carpet” sought by the narrator in Henry James’ celebrated short story.

Connecting dots whose relations may elude a superficial glance or are masked by the deliberate obfuscation of those responsible for them, they pay tribute to the power of active imagination. Because their imaginations may be, to be sure, a bit hyper-active, they can be accused of seeing dots

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that may not really exist and then finding excuses to salvage a pattern that is more than the sum of its parts. In so doing, they are open to the charge of excessive projection of their ideas or fantasies on to the world.

We should, however, acknowledge that a certain amount of projection is inevitable in our encounters with the world. In their chapter on the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno even suggest that in a certain sense, all perception is projection. The projection of sense impressions is a legacy of animal prehistory, a mechanism for the purposes of defense and obtaining food, an extension of the readiness for combat with which higher species reacted actively or passively to movements, regardless of the intention of the object. Projection has been automated in man like other forms of offensive or defensive behavior which have become reflexes.18 Although projection seems to be an outdated defense mechanism, it may well linger in even the most sophisticated cognitive encounters with the world: “The system of things, the fixed universal order of which science is merely an abstract expression is, if Kant’s critique of knowledge is applied anthropologically, the unconscious product of the animal tool in the struggle for existence—it is the automatic projection.”19 However much one may want to distinguish dubious psychological from defensible epistemological projections, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest the two remain to some extent intertwined: “paranoia is the shadow of cognition.”20

For this reason, it would be mistaken to posit a stark and undialectical opposition between the “irrational” mentality that gives rise to conspiracy theories and the “rational” one that produces plausible accounts of nature or human history based solely on the sober evaluation of hard evidence. They are better positioned as extreme points on an explanatory/ interpretive spectrum, ideal types that rarely do justice to the complexity of our attempts to make sense of the world. Conspiracy theories cluster on the projective or, if you prefer, paranoid end of the scale, spurning the other extreme of passive empiricism and causal explanation. But the important point is that their differences from more plausible accounts nearer an equilibrium point in the middle are ones of degree, not of kind.

Or to employ another metaphor, they are understandable in the terms of

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Plato’s pharmakon, in which the dosage is what differentiates a cure from poison. Speculative imagination is healthy when it imbues discrete “facts” with plausible meaning, which can then serve as a hypothesis for further testing, but is fatal when it builds its castles entirely in the air.

A still better way to conceptualize the relationship is to say that projection, to avoid moving to the purely phantasmatic end of the spectrum, has to be tempered by self-critical reflection. Such reflection is very different from the tu quoque fallacy in which what is seen in the reflection is a mirror image of the looking subject, a simple duplication of the projected self (Trump, the likely colluder, calling the investigation of his crimes a “witch hunt” out to get him). Instead, it is a reflexivity that is skeptical of excessively neat interpretations in which everything is the result of deliberate design rather than fortuitous happenstance, and hidden string-pullers always make puppets dance. It is a reflexivity that extends its hermeneutics of suspicion to its own concoctions and the hidden motives they may themselves express, rather than assuming that critique should be directed only at external targets. It is a reflexivity that pauses before granting agency only to certain subjects chosen in advance and not others (George Soros can’t be blamed for everything!), and refuses to attribute extraordinary powers to subjects too grandiose or implausible ever to be even closely verifiable—the reptilian elite posited by Dan Ickes, the Elders of Zion with their sinister Protocols, the Illuminati and other demonized collective actors who never emerge from the shadows.

But however much we may want to temper excessive projection with sober reflection, there is little chance of purging all of the imaginative inclinations that produce conspiracy theory. Automatically distrusting all authority may be a sign of pathology, but so is blind obedience to whatever powers may be. History is never merely the working out of impersonal, structural forces or the mere effect of random contingency, even if the narratives we fashion to make sense of it can rarely, if ever be reduced to deliberate agency, whether covert or not. But if as Hannah Arendt famously said, power is “acting in concert,” then “breathing together” will be inevitable, and some of it, for good or for ill, will take place outside of the glare of public scrutiny. And so, when incarcerated celebrity pedophiles find a way, despite all apparent precautions, to cheat prosecution and spare their army of covert enablers the embarrassment of disclosure, who, after all, can say with absolute certainty that they died by their own hand?

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Notes 1.To name only a handful of the most popular in recent times: the Kennedy assassination, the 9/11 cover-up, Area 51 and the Aliens, the faking of the moon landing, the CIA and AIDS, the Reptilian elite, Obama and birtherism, the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism, the “faking” of the Sandy Hill School shooting, and the “murders” of Vincent Foster and Seth Rich. Whether or not these will stand the test of time and join such long-standing exemplars as the Illuminati and the French Revolution or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion remains to be seen.

2. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine (November, 1964). The article was soon published in a frequently reissued book, most recently in 2008 in a Vintage edition with an introduction by Sean Wilentz. For recent critiques, see Scott Radnitz and Patrick Underwood, “Is Belief in Conspiracy Theories Pathological?

A Survey Experiment on the Cognitive Roots of Extreme Suspicion,” British Journal of Political Science, 47, I (January, 2017), pp. 113-139; and Kurtis Hagen, “Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style: Do Conspiracy Theories Posit Implausibly Vast and Evil Conspiracies?,” Social Epistemology, 32, 1 (2017), pp. 24-40.

3. See, for example, Roland Imoff, “About the Kind of People Who Believe in Conspiracy Theories,” Aeon (May 7, 2018). The resort to psychopathology as an explanation of abhorrent political beliefs began before the Second World War in attempts to explain racism and totalitarianism. See Sander L. Gilman and James M. Thomas, Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity (New York, 2016).

4. See, for example, Ted Goertzel, “Belief in Conspiracy Theories”, Political Psychology, 15, 4 (1994) 731-42; For critiques, see Bradley Franks, Adrian Bangerter, Martin W. Bauer, Matthew Hall and Marc C. Noort, “Beyond ‘Monologicality’? Exploring Conspiracist Worldviews.” Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 861 (2017) and Kurtis Hagen, “Conspiracy Theorists and Monological Belief Systems,” Argumenta, 6 (May, 2018), pp. 303-326.

5. See the thread in https://projectunspeakable.com/conspiracy-theory-invention-of-cia/ 6. See, for example, Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis, 1999); Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, 1999); Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven, 2001); and Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley, 2003).

7. For a selection of ruminations on this theme see, David Coady, ed., Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate (Hampshire, 2006); and Matthew R.X. Dentith, ed., Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously (London, 2018).

8. See Juha Räikkä and Lee Basham, “Conspiracy Theory Phobia,” in Joseph C. Uschinski, ed., Conspiracy Theories and the People who Believe in Them (Oxford, 2018).

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9. The claim of absolute executive power with no interference from other branches of government is based on a reading of Article II of the American Constitution, which says:“The executive Power [of the United States] shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

10. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. II (London, 1945), p. 94. Popper developed it in an essay included in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 2nd ed. (New York, 2002).

11. Popper, “The Conspiracy Theory of Society,” Conjectures and Refutations, p. 166.

12. Ibid., p. 168.

13. See, for example, Charles Pidgen, “Popper Revisited, or What is Wrong with Conspiracy Theories?,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 25, 1 (March, 1995).

14. For a discussion of this issue, see Martin Jay, “Intention and Irony: The Missed Encounter between Quentin Skinner and Hayden White,” History and Theory, 52, 1(2013).

15. The distinction between causes and reasons has not always been made by either theology or philosophy. Leibniz’s “principle of sufficient reason,” which argued that even historical events could be understood as ultimately rational, did not clearly distinguish between the two.

It was not perhaps until Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in 1813 that cause and reason were clearly demarcated.

16. Serious theologians are less inclined to accept this idea. Take, for example, David R. Liefeld, who writes: “The Church also must make clear that the constantly repeated refrain, ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ is not Christian faith nor even a suitable basis for it. Such sentiments degenerate into paranoia even more often than they reflect authentic Christian faith in the providence of God.” “God’s Word or Male Words? Postmodern Conspiracy Culture and Feminist Myths of Christian Origins,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 48, 3 (2005), p. 473. He makes his argument in the context of criticizing feminist arguments for the conspiratorial origins of patriarchy.

17. There is, in fact, a lively discussion of the putative overlap between conspiracy theory and the hermeneutics of suspicion. See, for example, https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/ questions/41894/whats-the-difference-between-the-hermeneutics-of-suspicion-and-conspiracy-theory 18. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Ca., 2002), p. 154.

19. Ibid., p. 154-155.

20. Ibid., p. 161.

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The Enigma of Constancy: The Resilience of Trump’s Base

The Enigma of Constancy: The Resilience of Trump’s Base

*

BY TODD GITLIN Since the day in June 2015 when he slithered down the escalator into the Trump Tower atrium to announce his candidacy, Trump’s approval ratings have been consistently low—never more than 45 percent—and relatively invariant. Either fact by itself is remarkable. The combination is amazing.

In November 2016, Trump won 46.1 percent of the popular vote.

From his inauguration onward, his weekly approval rating, according to Gallup, wobbled between 45 percent and a low of 35 percent in August 2017, shortly after the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In December of 2018, 82 percent of Republicans approved of Trump. But only 26 percent of Americans identified as Republicans. Independents who approved of Trump made up another 14 percent, and Democrats who approved of him, another two percent. In other words, about 37 percent of the adult population overall approved of Trump—precisely within the range measured by the surveys.

During his first fifty-four months in office, Trump’s approval ratings were confined within a ten percent band. His popularity with *What follows is part two of Todd Gitlin’s deconstruction of the Trump phenomenon in American culture and politics. Part one appeared in our Fall 2019-Winter 2020 issue, number 204-205, under the title “For The Love of Sin: Toward An Understanding of Trump’s Base” (pages 67-94). A version of this essay with full footnotes appears on the Salmagundi Magazine website: salmagundi.skidmore.edu

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a substantial minority—though never a majority—was the most stable thing about him. Normally, public opinion toward presidents wavers far more widely, depending on what is going on at the time. Events intrude.

Presidential policies and statements matter considerably. Accordingly, all presidents from Harry S. Truman through Barack Obama have seen their approval ratings fluctuate wildly. Truman’s approval fluctuated as much as 54 points; George W. Bush’s by 39; Ronald Reagan’s by 31.

The Trump anomaly is how little his approval has fluctuated.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump started off without a honeymoon. By Gallup’s measure, his largest one-month rally was three percent, in September-October 2018, during his fight to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. A three percent rally was also a record low seen during any administration since Truman’s. According to Gallup’s Jeffrey M. Jones, “The 10-percentage point range in Trump's approval is the smallest for any president during his first two years in the Oval Office by a significant margin.”

This fact begs to be reckoned with. Anyone who steps outside the right-wing echo chamber knows that he has lied, misled, and half-truthed thousands of times, and been exposed, and proceeded to lie about his lying. The bulk of Trump’s followers don’t care. His approval is largely impregnable. There is no way to tell whether the followers are the same individuals from week to week, month to month, but on balance, no matter how many abandon him, a more or less equal number join his team. Come what may, at least 35 percent of the country remains in his embrace. He is their Trump right or wrong. How is such consistency possible?

Some of it is, no doubt, lockstep partisanship. Partisanship is a hallmark of this era. Having chosen a party, partisans stick with it. Gallup’s Jeffrey M. Jones notes that, on average, during the first two years of his presidency, 85 percent of Republicans approved Trump, as against 8 percent of Democrats. That yawning gulf of 77 points in party preference exceeded even the average under Barack Obama (83 percent Democratic approval as against 13 percent Republican). Party loyalties have hardened into identities that are firm and getting firmer. So it is that, for example, Democrats and Republicans avoid dating each other, don’t want to be neighbors, and don’t want their children to (as it were) intermarry. The two parties do not clearly inhabit distinct territories; there has been neither

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a legal secession nor a military combat. So there is no civil war. But what has taken place is that the two parties diverge radically not only about their conclusions but about the considerations they bring to bear to reach those conclusions.

Journalists gravitate to single-factor theories of why elections turn out the way they do. So does public opinion in general, and 2016 was no exception. One theory, heavily favored in mainstream media, is that what put Trump over the top was a certain economic rationality, a reaction against economic stagnation—in other words, a kick in the shins to “the system,” a rejection of “the establishment”; in particular, against policies that consigned working or middle class voters to economic marginality over recent decades, and against the groups that promoted those policies. Trump voters were estranged because they were ground down and neglected. But the notion that economic opinions elected Trump doesn’t hold up. Contrary to run-of-the-mill journalism, the public at large was not especially angry in 2016. It was Republicans who were angry.

According to the political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, whose book Identity Crisis is the most thorough analysis yet published, “2016 stood out not because voters were angrier but because their improving views of the economy had not much affected their views of Obama and the country.” Trump succeeded in making 46.1% of the voters—strategically located—think of themselves as aggrieved whites.

The research tells us that Trump supporters in 2016 were no more anxious economically than others. The median Trump supporter reported an income “right around the median income for American households overall.” “Trump support was only weakly correlated with whether respondents were worried about losing their own jobs.” Protest voters were voting not against economic policy that had disadvantaged them and their families but against the false view that during Barack Obama’s presidency, racial and ethnic minorities had received benefits that deserved to go to whites.

For this view the case is clear: Trump blared out racial resentment. “[S]upport for Trump was tied most strongly to white grievances: views of immigration, Muslims, and blacks; and liberal views about economic issues. These factors, more than economic anxiety, helped explain Trump’s surprising path to the Republican presidential nomination.” One may

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characterize Trump’s vote as a protest vote, but a protest vote that stands solid, first, through a long nomination process, and then through a long general campaign, only to segue into unprecedentedly consistent support for a president. This is more than a protest vote—it is a declaration of identity.

The question is: How substantial is this identity, and how impermeable?

In particular, is it impermeable to verifiable truth? Do those who stand fast in the bedrock 35 to 40 percent of the population who constitute Trump’s rock-bottom base think that he tells the truth? Not necessarily.

So there remains an enigma I highlighted in the first part of this essay: what exactly do his supporters approve, and why?

How well informed are those who support Trump? In late November and early December of 2018, the Washington Post Fact Checker staff asked a national sample to evaluate a series of factual claims without stating whose claims they were. Eleven of these claims were falsehoods to which Trump had subscribed. They included the claim that global warming has natural causes; that the US supplies a majority of NATO’s budget; that North Korea has done more to end its nuclear weapons programs in six months under Trump than in the previous quarter-century, that Democratic Senators support an “open borders” immigration policy. They also included two claims about the 2016 election: that evidence shows that millions of fraudulent votes were cast, and that Russia did not interfere.

In all, only 41 percent selected the true responses. To put it another way, assuming that the Republicans who affirmed the false claims were Trump supporters, a majority of Republicans who supported Trump disagreed with him on central questions of fact.

Now, here is another extraordinary thing. Seventy-one percent of the Washington Post sample said they “regularly thought Trump makes misleading claims.” Of that 71 percent, more than two-thirds (49 percent) said they thought these claims were “usually flat-out false,” as against 22 percent who said they were “usually just exaggerations.” If you like, call these “low-information voters,” as political scientists tend to do, and you must still confront the fact that these were voters with above-average education. They are, one way or the other, fact-resistant. Seventy-eight percent of Trump supporters believed Trump’s false claims. Twenty-two percent of them did not believe those claims but supported Trump anyway.

Perhaps this critical mass of Republicans did not know they preferred

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Trump to truth, or perhaps they were indifferent to truth. Either way, a substantial body of Americans refused to let truth stand in their way.

Like the most fervent of Foucault fans, they held a purely instrumental view of truth. The Washington Post poll found that 41 percent of Republicans said false claims were sometimes acceptable “in order to do what’s right for the country.” In 2018, only 49 percent of Republicans thought it “extremely important” for a presidential candidate to be honest, as against 70 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents. This question was designed to match precisely a question that had been asked in an AP poll in 2007. Then, the identical 70 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents had thought honesty “extremely important.”

But by dramatic contrast, in 2007, 71 percent of Republicans had thought honesty “extremely important”—a percentage barely different from Democrats or independents. Something happened to Republicans so that, in 2018, more than half did not much mind dishonesty on the part of their political leader. Forty-one percent of Republicans said false claims were sometimes acceptable “in order to do what’s right for the country.”

In other words, a critical mass of Republicans must have approved of Trump while taking issue with important Trump falsehoods.

For example, 65 percent of the sample said they thought that Russia tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, as against only 15 percent who said (as Trump, citing Vladimir Putin, did) this was false. Sixty-five percent said the “main” cause of global warming was human activity, as against 19 percent who said (as Trump did) the causes were natural, not human. Forty-four percent thought there was no evidence that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in 2016, as against 25 percent who thought (as Trump did) that there was such evidence. Only one-quarter of Americans in the fall of 2018 believed, with Trump, that the migrant “caravan” approaching the Mexican border from the south “included terrorists,” along with an additional 13 percent who were “not sure, but believed this claim was likely to be true.” The sum of that quarter and that eighth—38 percent—takes us into the range of Trump approval overall.

In sum, when it comes to politics, between three and four in ten Americans have cut loose from truth. Some one-third of Americans believe Trump’s falsehoods and support him. More than four in ten think their leader’s false claims are acceptable. Call this postmodernism if you like; I call it nihilism.

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This is surely in no small part because of the media they rely on.

Asked to name their two main news sources, 29 percent in the Post poll answered: Fox News. In addition, ten percent named local radio, four percent national radio, nine percent Facebook; and 15 percent “other.”

Unfortunately, the survey did not get more specific. Is Rush Limbaugh on a local radio station “local” or “national”? How many of those who designated Facebook as their prime source were talking about right-wing Facebook sources in particular? Among adults who said Fox News was one of their top two sources for political news, 33 percent believed in Trump’s false claims tested in the poll, on average, compared with 21 percent of those who said Fox was not a main news source. They did not let their disagreements with his factual claims stand in the way of their support. It was not just that they lived in a bubble, or a silo, or some other metaphor for self-encapsulation. They lived in falsehood. And they didn’t mind. There was something more important to them than truth.

That something was—and remains—comfort. Actually, a particular kind of comfort—the feeling of righteous consistency that derives from avoiding internal conflict. Social psychologists, following Leon Festinger, have long used the term “cognitive dissonance” to describe the mental distress caused by holding contradictory beliefs simultaneously or trying to preserve a belief in the face of contrary evidence. Naturally people prefer to reduce such distress. One way to manage this task is to alter the now discordant belief. Another is to rationalize contradictions. Another is to reframe, or spin, or otherwise evade information that challenges the belief, and occasions when one might have to confront such information.

There is, in other words, a need not to know.

One of the foundational findings of the research on cognitive dissonance is that, faced with a conflict between conviction and evidence, the believers will prefer their conviction to the degree that they have deeply invested, emotionally and practically, in it. The landmark study by Festinger and his co-authors—of how a flying saucer cult adapted to the fact that its prediction of flying saucer deliverance from a great flood was never confirmed—concluded that the intensity of a disconfirmed belief might actually increase to the degree that the conviction was strongly held at the start; that it was reinforced by other believers; and that they had invested time, money, and attention—“skin in the game”—such that backing off from the belief would be, to them, prohibitively expensive.

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So the will to reduce cognitive dissonance helps the Trump base stay in line. To the true believer, it is better to be wrong with Trump than right with his enemies.

As weird as this may sound, for the purpose of minimizing internal friction it may help not quite to believe one’s beliefs. It is possible to tell a pollster that one “thinks” or “believes” a proposition about which one actually has little to no idea, yet to say that one “thinks” or “believes” because the pollster is an authority who thinks it preferable to believe than not to believe. It is possible to “think” or “believe” shallowly or squishily, as in “I think the American health care system is the best in the world,” or “I think that lowering tax rates on the wealthy encourages them to invest more and thus to create jobs.” For some of his followers, continuing belief in Trump may well be belief that hardens to dogma regardless of whether the reasons for that belief hold up. It is, to paraphrase a Barack Obama slogan, belief that one need not wholly believe in.

Some of the strongest minds of the mid-twentieth century struggled to understand how readily the modern public will accept falsehood.

George Orwell used the term “doublethink” to cover the practice of forgetting inconvenient facts and also forgetting that one had forgotten them.

More attuned to the sociology of mental surrender was Hannah Arendt who, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, pointed out that totalitarian movements find it useful to practice “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism” and that “the whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements” enables them to do so. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” she wrote, “from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating.” If everyone cheats, than there is no moral vantage point from which to oppose a cheat. Arendt went so far as to see a slippery amalgam of dogma and evasion as deeply entrenched in the history of modern society altogether: “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses.”

Arendt anticipated a world of verbal garbage that the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt would famously call bullshit—utterances set forth without regard for whether they are true or not. The liar and the truthteller, Frankfurt argued, are alike in that they both know the difference between truth and falsehood. But bullshitters disrespect truth so much that they

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neither know nor care whether what they say is true. To the bullshitter, all propositions are moves in a game, assertions of power—no more, no less.

Whether a statement describes reality matters less than whether it has the effect of shoring up the leader’s dominance. In this technical sense, many of Trump’s followers must treat his declarations as bullshit—as words whose semantic meaning is irrelevant but whose practical import is that they are Trump’s. Trump has uttered, or tweeted, them. They feel true; they have what Stephen Colbert memorably called “truthiness.”

Trump “owns” them. Your duty is to affiliate with the idol, to stand firm with him against “enemies of the American people.” Loyalty trumps independent thought. Cognitive dissonance underwrites one’s sense of reality. Cynicism triumphs. What’s real is what it’s correct to feel. Truth follows affiliation.

In the land of the tall tale, an instrumental approach to truth comes as no stranger. One may dispute the balance of blame between the political parties, or how much responsibility accrues to Richard Nixon in particular, but it is plain that a turning point occurred with the cult of Ronald Reagan, who, when challenged, was capable of dancing away from some of his more risible proclamations by claiming that he was just kidding. (It would have been hard to believe Nixon was ever kidding.) By the time of “supply side economics,” various combinations of dogma and evasion had become central to Republican politics. What Reagan’s onetime rival George H. W. Bush had called “voodoo economics” has flourished for almost four decades, from Reagan to Paul Ryan. The Republican boilerplate to the effect that budget deficits are unforgivably devastating flourishes when Democrats are presidents but is tucked into the memory hole when Republicans occupy the White House. Republicans cheerily live with the deficits caused by military spending.

But policy positions are one thing and the surrounding tone of a world view is deeper and more dangerous. By 2016, the rejection of well-established science had become a necessity for a career in national Republican politics, for it was a matter of principle, in their eyes, that if disastrous climate change were indeed socially caused, a clamor for government policy to mitigate the damage would arise; but since a government regulation was, by now, anathema, the inner psychologic had to

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be arranged to suit the predisposition. No climate change —> no need for sizable government intervention. Q. E. D. But the Republican veer toward untruth went, and goes, further.

Policy judgments weren’t the half of it. It hardened into an outlook, an identity, a virtual way of mental life. Gradually, in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the demonization of liberal expertise became foundational—sanctified by religion, fueled by contempt for intellectuals, and funded handsomely by oil companies. In 2000, candidate George W. Bush occasioned much mirth by dismissing vice-president Al Gore as “Ozone Man,” but it was not the rowdy son who originated the putdown; it was his once patrician father who, in 1992, started dismissing vice-presidential candidate Gore in those words for being so bold as to endorse the scientific judgment that the ozone layer was in the process of being destroyed by industrial chemicals. ("You know why I call him Ozone Man?" said the elder Bush. "This guy is so far out in the environmental extreme, we'll be up to our neck in owls and outta work for every American. He is way out, far out, man.")

Left-wingers committed distortions, too (the Green Party’s Jill Stein endorsed the cause of anti-vaccine crusaders), but it was overwhelmingly the right that saw the world through partisan lenses. When George W. Bush invaded Iraq, he cited the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction prominently in his rationale. Seventeen years later, it remains an Republican article of faith that the Iraqi dictator possessed those weapons, or “weapons programs,” at the time Bush gave for going to war. According to a 2006 poll, “a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents…said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD.” Later polls have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story. A poll, in early 2015, found that that 50 percent had eroded to 42 percent, although more than 50 percent of Republicans (and viewers of Fox News) thought it “definitely true” or “probably true” that American forces found an active WMD program in Iraq. Seven years after George W. Bush left the White House, and it had been widely reported that Saddam Hussein had eliminated WMD programs after the first Gulf War—in 1991—Bush was still obfuscating and half of Republicans were still aligned with him.

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Examples are many. The following are culled from the psychologist John Ehrenreich’s stark 2017 analysis, “Why are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies”: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t). Then there are the false beliefs about generally accepted science. Only 25 percent of self-proclaimed Trump voters agree that climate change is caused by human activities. Only 43 percent of Republicans overall believe that humans have evolved over time.

“And then it gets really crazy,” Ehrenreich writes, not overstating. Republican partisanship extends beyond the acceptance of talking points that are directly policy-minded: Almost 1 in 6 Trump voters, while simultaneously viewing photographs of the crowds at the 2016 inauguration of Donald Trump and at the 2012 inauguration of Barack Obama , insisted that the former were larger. Sixty-six percent of self-described “very conservative” Americans seriously believe that “Muslims are covertly implementing Sharia law in American courts.”

Forty-six percent of Trump voters polled just after the 2016 election either thought that Hillary Clinton was connected to a child sex trafficking ring run out of the basement of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., or weren’t sure if it was true.

Such evidence amply bears out the psychologist Solomon Asch’s findings from experiments of the 1950s. Asch found that his subjects readily revised the evidence of their senses in order to conform to what their peers saw.

In the Enlightenment theory that propelled the expansion of newspapers in the nineteenth century, information and education combine to make up the lifeblood of democracy. The more information, the better.

The free flow of information resists the tyranny of the majority and works inexorably toward collective self-improvement. From the continuous sifting

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and winnowing of information, in a free marketplace of opinion, truth will out. Liberals might for good reason fear the despotism of public opinion, but they could assume that eventually citizens of good will would make effective use of their liberty.

Education was the cure-all. Schooling would swell the knowledgeable majority, who would learn to appreciate the value of circulating minority views so that they could be directly confronted, affording the opportunity to learn even from error. James Madison was promoting education, not a freedom-of-information act, when he wrote, in 1822: A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

In Madison’s spirit, John Stuart Mill further argued that a majority confronting its dissidents in a rational manner would breathe new life into dead beliefs. All in all, liberty would not only serve the cause of individuality but enable the entire society to function as a permanent learning process.

Unification through knowledge would overcome divergent interests.

But educational credentials, at least formal ones, have ceased to function as theory prescribed. Not only does class division undergird educational differences, but formal education does not dissolve ignorance.

Ehrenreich wrote: College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.

It’s also not just misinformation gained from too many hours listening to Fox News, either, because correcting the falsehoods doesn’t change their opinions. For example, nine months following

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the release of President Obama’s long-form birth certificate, the percentage of Republicans who believed that he was not American-born was actually higher than before the release. Similarly, during the 2012 presidential campaign, Democrats corrected their previous overestimates of the unemployment rate after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the actual data. Republicans overestimated even more than before.

John Stuart Mill seems to have imagined a republic unified through the expression of differences, evolving, perhaps, toward a confluence of discourse, however contentiously along the way—or even because contentiously along the way. Under the protracted guidance of something like an invisible hand, the republic would eventually consolidate through speech, shaped through presumably endless conversation tending willy-nilly, or asymptomatically, toward some sort of consensus. Alexis de Tocqueville warned about the danger of uniform opinion—tyranny of the majority—, toward the end of the first volume of his Democracy in America, and marveled about the social proximity of “intermingled” Americans whose character would draw ever closer to a common type, even as, politically, “every village forms a sort of republic accustomed to conduct its own affairs.” Associations would protect the majority against its tendency toward self-tyranny. Plurality would underwrite stability.

But Tocqueville was not naïve about America’s prospects. He pointed to one grave limit to the country’s future stability: “the more or less distant but inevitable danger of a conflict between the blacks and the whites of the South of the Union,” which was “a nightmare haunting the American imagination.” However placid the American surface, racial inequality was the inescapable tectonic cleavage. Once again—it is no less true an observation for being banal—Tocqueville was prophetic.

No division cuts deeper in American culture today than the one derived from centuries of slavery and white supremacy. No false precision here: no precise calculus is possible; male domination surely grips contemporary culture by its own logic. But white racism set a tone for our other collective secessions from reason and, as I argued in the first half of this essay, still exerts a mighty influence on the polarization of opinion today.

No cause looms larger in the American right’s secession from reason than protectiveness of white privilege.

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What we confront now throughout much of the world, not least in the United States, is a sealed-off bloc unified by a backlash against liberal culture, a bloc apparently impervious to argument and evidence and fed by an unending flow of reinforcing propaganda. This block represents a worldwide cultural backlash toward ethnonationalism throughout the developed world. Each national branch belongs, paradoxically, to an Ethnonationalist International—one might call it an axis. It fervently believes that it is the true nation and fears that, culturally and demographically, it is losing its grip. It pumps up its feelings of righteousness with rallies and rituals—“Lock her up! Build the wall!” That it is rejected by “enemies of the American people”— institutions of higher learning as well as established media—only confirms its rectitude. As John Ehrenreich pointed out, “self-described conservatives tend to place a higher value than those to their left on deference to tradition and authority. They are more likely to value stability, conformity, and order, and have more difficulty tolerating novelty and ambiguity and uncertainty. They are more sensitive than liberals to information suggesting the possibility of danger than to information suggesting benefits. And they are more moralistic and more likely to repress unconscious drives towards unconventional sexuality.”

All signs point to the conclusion that Trump’s base, seized by backlash, amounts to more than one-third of Americans. That is, it numbers about eighty percent of those who, throughout Trump’s first two years in the White House, approved of him. This bloc is overwhelmingly white and disproportionately rural. According to a November 2018 poll, Trump’s support in rural areas was 61 percent, as against 26 percent disapproval, while in cities, only 31 percent approved of him while 59 percent disapproved. In other words, rural net approval was +35, while his urban net was –28. (The same poll found his approve-minus-disapprove numbers among all adults as 43-45, or -2—a considerably smaller number than other polls.)

This bloc is disproportionately evangelical and reliant upon Fox News. In the fall of 2019, “when asked whether they believed that immigrants were ‘invading the country’ and replacing its ethnic and cultural background, 78 percent of Republicans who rely on Fox News said yes, compared with 52 percent of Republicans who do not consider the network their main news source.” The hard core of Trump supporters are

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self-sequestered, largely in the South, Midwest, and prairie states, along with rural and exurban areas elsewhere. But however advantaged by the Electoral College, they cannot, by themselves, guarantee a majority of electoral votes. They are nowhere near a popular majority. Under favorable circumstances, however, they can prevail. 2016 afforded them the favorable circumstances. Not only did the Clinton campaign frequently blunder, but James Comey’s eleventh-hour intervention was potent. Disinformation emanating from Russia made a difference. So did voter suppression. In a close election, victory has joint authorship.

I am not arguing that all of Trump’s supporters—even all the evangelicals—approved of him for the same reasons, in the same spirit or with the same intensity. I am not arguing that pure faith, ungrounded in material rewards, explains the entirety of Trump’s base of support, or its relative stability, any more than I argued in the first part of this essay that his followers’ projection of their transgressive impulses onto him explains the sum of his appeal. Trump surely accrues support from voters who believe that he kept his promises and specifically that his policies helped either the local or the national economy to the degree that his most fervent promoters claim. I do not want to lump all Trump supporters into the evangelical box, since white voters without college degrees make up a larger share of Trump’s vote than white evangelicals. (So do whites over fifty.) Whether white evangelicals will continue to loom as large in the Republican base as they have to date, or will remain as enthusiastic, is arguable. Perhaps young white evangelicals are beginning to peel away from the old-time religion. The Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, an important evangelical advisor to George W. Bush and a fierce opponent of Donald Trump, thinks the exodus is underway, pointing to "the massive sell-off of evangelicalism among the young. About 26 percent of Americans 65 and older identify as white evangelical Protestants. Among those ages 18 to 29, the figure is 8 percent.”

It seems unlikely, though possible, that they will return to the fold as they age. Still, many are the complicating variables—and this is only to speak of known unknowns. It is also conceivable that Trump’s power to bind his followers may crack. Insofar as his cultic following relies on material results—in particular, the building of a wall that is more than symbolic—faith in Trump has an empirical limit. The psychohistorian

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Robert Jay Lifton observes that the fervor of followers, once disappointed, “can be quickly transformed into the anger of the betrayed.” But it strikes me as at least equally likely that the base’s attachment to Trump can outlast many disappointments insofar as they can be blamed on the treachery of his unrelenting enemies. Even a zombie movement can have its life prolonged by the right-wing echo chamber. Anyone who thinks the fervor of zealots is the result of rational calculation is not living on Planet Earth. One must also contemplate the possibility that, after Trump, a less polarizing version of him might emerge to sweep up ever-Trump remnants of a Republican Party, and augment them, given that the party lacks any rival consolidating force beyond the alloy of government-hatred and cultural backlash. Conceivably a near-Trump successor to Trump as a more palatable avatar for backlash—Trump with a human face, if that is not an oxymoronic description—might sweep into the future Republican leadership.

But now we are stretching the limits of prediction to the breaking point. In any given election, the identity of Trump’s Democratic opponent will matter one way or the other. Catastrophic events may always intervene.

Campaign strategies and tactics will, as always, matter. If Democrats return to power and rule wisely, they can, over time, trim the size of Trump’s base. But the fervor and loyalty of that base is not near vanishing. For the followers whom Trump called “the Second Amendment people,” any effective turn against their Leader is likely to prove inciting. For some time to come, his decisive evangelicals will be in no mood to collapse quietly. They will be inspired by these words of the influential evangelical organizer George Barna: “God never waits until He has a majority on His side to move forward in power and to claim a decisive victory.”

In other words, the base can be defeated. But they have been roused. They are in no mood to expire quietly.

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Conjure Women: Romare Bearden and the Stories Great-Grandmother Told*

BY KEVIN BROWN Casual familiarity was the tone my great-grandmother’s oral history narratives assumed. As widow of the poet Countée Cullen, executrix of his literary estate, Ida Cullen-Cooper took pride in knowing everybody and everything connected to the Harlem Renaissance, including artist Romare (“Romie”) Bearden. Countée, his many friends, colleagues and students were referred to by first name or by nickname. It was as if they’d merely slipped out into the kitchen to fix themselves a snack, and were expected back any moment. Countée and Ida Cullen were among the first to purchase Romie’s artwork, and upon Countée’s sudden death six years after he married her, Ida Mae became a noted collector in her own right.

Our relationship grew and changed between the year I was born and the 11 months we spent together until her death two years before Bearden himself crossed over. I spent 21 years, 10 months and 29 days living and working in New York. But one visit in particular, more or less narrowed down by audio-visual impressions, stands out: The late Toni *An essay-review of: The Romare Bearden Reader, edited by Robert G. O’Meally (Duke University Press, 2019).

Conjure Women: Romare Bearden and the Stories Great-Grandmother Told

Romare Bearden Bearden’s Studio on Canal Street, New York City (1976) (Photo by Blaine Waller)

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Morrison publishes Song of Solomon (1977) in a trade paper edition of yellow, maroon and black; actor Ruby Dee records Countée’s children’s book, The Lost Zoo, in 1978; an obituary of Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas, one of Romare Bearden’s mentors, appears in The New York Times in 1979. Until she downsized, Ida’s Tuckahoe house and Park Avenue condo had been virtual galleries of African and African-American art and culture: here a book by Langston Hughes, illustrated by Jacob Lawrence; there a first edition of Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, with cover art by Aaron Douglas. She owned various artifacts: Benin bronzed heads, Dan masks; a painting by Beaufort Delaney, the close friend of Countée’s student Jimmy Baldwin; terra-cottas; a Hale Woodruff watercolor of medieval Chartres. She rewarded my curiosity with a docent tour.

“Palmer Hayden’s work,” she explained, “was more traditional.

He didn’t go in for the abstract as much as some of the others did.”

“Hale Woodruff studied in Mexico with Diego Rivera. Taught at NYU for decades, child. I’ll take you down to the Village one day. See his old apartment. Introduce you to his family.”

“And these,” she pointed out a pair of bookends, “Countée commissioned Augusta Savage to create.” In Paris, the poet and the sculptor socialized between 1928 and 1930. My great grandmother explained that, although Savage had executed portrait busts of James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois with characteristic skill, many of her works were damaged, lost or simply destroyed because she couldn’t afford to have the clay or plaster cast in bronze.

I stop short before an object, bright red, blue and black: “Circe Turns a Companion of Odysseus into a Swine.” One of six closely supervised screenprints from his 1977 Odysseus Series, signed, numbered and custom-framed, it was given my great-grandmother as a present by her loyal friend, and was on proud display in her Kip’s Bay apartment.

As clearly as I can sense the imagery of Jean Toomer’s sound-collages in Cane, I could hear the collar-beads and bangles the Africanized sorceress’s slender, near-naked figure adorns. Could see what John Edgar Wideman means when he writes, “All I really have to say is ‘dance’.” Circe’s arms flail, her feathered headdress preens, her torso thrashes to the downbeat of something like “Adoration of the Earth” or “Sacrifice” from The Rite of Spring; the right arm rises up above the altar where a skull’s displayed;

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phobic serpents coil up the left; Circe summons forth spirits investing her with the power to step un-imprisoned through the frame.

“That,” my great-grandmother’s proud, ancestral voice proclaims, startling me out of my trance, “is Romie.”

“One day,” the oracle continues, “you’ll meet his wife Nanette.”

Then, matter-of-factly, “Lives down there on Canal Street, near Chinatown.” * * * What is it you see, asks Rachael Z. DeLue, in Romare Bearden’s artwork? Why is it you just can’t stop looking? How is it they remain, decades after his death, sources of what Wallace Stevens calls “imperishable bliss”?

A fitting complement to Schmidt-Campbell’s An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden (2018), Robert G. O’Meally’s Romare Bearden Reader gathers nearly three dozen previously uncollected pieces, eight of them artist’s statements, book chapters, essays, journal entries, art reviews and speeches by Bearden himself dating from the mid-1930s to 1993. As a source of information about and insight into Bearden’s various periods, styles and media, The Romare Bearden Reader builds on foundations laid by Henri Ghent and Calvin Tomkins. This is reinforced by biographers like Myron Schwartzman in Romare Bearden: His Life and Art (1990) and Romare Bearden: Celebrating the Victory (1999), as-told-to accounts of Bearden’s working methods that do for the artist what Alex Haley does for Malcolm X in the Autobiography.

But the best guide on how to “read” a Bearden is Bearden. Gallery-goers and museum-goers, even those intimately familiar with his visuals, may not realize just how “literary” an artist Romie really was. His writer friends—James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, poet-painter Derek Walcott—admired the way he might refer to a sonnet by Drayton as casually as he would to a painting by Titian. Bearden enjoyed browsing bookstores with Murray, and amassed an impressive library of his own.

Too much the perfectionist to pursue writing as a mere hobby, Bearden devoted Tuesdays and Thursdays to reading and research, spending as much time in libraries and archives as he did in museums and galleries.

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As a writer, Romare Bearden didn’t come from out of nowhere.

To put his writings in context, it helps to know when, where and why he published them. His mother Bessye Bearden was a columnist and editor for The Chicago Defender, part of a national network of black daily newspapers like the Baltimore Afro-American (to which Romare later contributed political cartoons) and the Pittsburgh Courier. During the fat years of the Harlem Renaissance, c. 1920-1930, when Romare was between the ages of 8 and 18, Bessye befriended black millionaire A’Lelia Walker. Walker owned a 34-room mansion in Upstate New York, in Irvington-on-Hudson. That was her weekend getaway. For day-to-day living, she preferred her Sugar Hill hideaway on Edgecombe Avenue. For partying, Walker also had twin townhouses in Harlem. These she proposed as a gathering place for ballet dancers, boxers, communist rabble-rousers, mobsters, movie stars, scientists and social-climbing gold diggers. The idea caught on, and Walker’s “at-homes” became a Wednesday night institution. Part literary salon, part night club, the Dark Tower, as it came to be known, was a place where, downstairs, guests could listen to Bessie Smith, drink bootleg liquor, dance. Upstairs, in the library, they could play bridge, comparing notes on literature and society with editors, publishers and talent agents. Parties legendary even by the standards of the Roaring 20s took place at the Dark Tower. And so it was that, on any given Wednesday, Arna Bontemps, W.E.B. Du Bois, Rudolph (“Bud”) Fisher, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain LeRoy Locke, Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace (“Wallie”) Thurman or Dorothy West might be greeted by an African-American servant in a powdered wig and classical Renaissance doublet in the marble entrance hall decorated with Aubusson carpets and Louis XVI furniture. As New York host, A’Lelia Walker was the glue that held the Harlem Renaissance together. Part of her charm derived from the fact that she didn’t even pretend to like reading, and was visibly bored by high-brow conversation. She had a smart set of writer friends to do that kind of chore. What truly excited Walker was collecting. She accumulated 600 volumes of limited editions bound in Moroccan leather, reclining on custom-built shelves, and authored

by Balzac, Boccaccio, Casanova, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Rabelais and Rousseau. Walker collected books the way she collected royalty. If she wanted to hear a little music on her 24-carat-gold grand piano, Walker

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could simply invite George Gershwin over to play. Or Maurice Ravel, if he happened to be in Harlem, then considered an overseas arrondissement of Paris. No, Walker much preferred listening to live blues; or watching dancers glide across her parquet floors. As the Great Depression set in, the lean years of the Harlem Renaissance saw less affluent people like Bessye Bearden no longer splurging to get their hair done in the stylish salons where Walker made her millions. Walker went broke, and little by little, the treasures of Villa Lewaro were auctioned off—most of them, according to Bessye Bearden, for pennies on the dollar—some for as little as $1.50.

Even during the Depression, when Bessye Bearden entertained dignitaries in her parlor less often than she would have wished, President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration enabled young visual artists like Romie to collaborate with literary artists in the way he would the rest of his life. By age 23, Bearden had already assumed his rightful place in what essayist Elizabeth Alexander calls a “literary continuum,” contributing—both “in print,” to quote W.E.B. Du Bois, “and in paint”—to “the African-American critical enterprise.”

Bearden’s first essay appeared in Opportunity, the Urban League publication for which Douglas had designed cover art in the mid-1920s.

From the publication of “The Negro Artist and Modern Art” (1934) to the posthumously published children’s book Li’l Dan the Drummer Boy (2003), Bearden’s writings are indeed preoccupied with centuries-old, purely aesthetic questions of how two-dimensional media limited to horizontals and verticals can suggest a third dimension without recourse to the illusion of mechanical perspective or “mere photographic realism.” But in “The Negro Artist and Modern Art” we also encounter the political Bearden—an aspect of his art sometimes overshadowed by his connoisseurship, just as Bearden’s reputation for sonorous chords of color, harmonious or dissonant, sometimes obscures what Mary Lee Corlett calls his “consummate skills as a draftsman, accentuating both the delicacy and the powerful simplicity of his lines.” When Bearden says, “[t]he Negro artist must come to think of himself not primarily as a Negro . . . but [simply] as an artist,” he echoes Cullen’s notion, criticized in an earlier manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), published in The Nation

by Langston Hughes, that the Negro poet must come to think of himself not primarily as a Negro but simply as a poet.

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Ralph Ellison recalls discovering Bearden during the mid-1930s, when Social Realism dominated the art scene. Both artists came of age between 1914 and 1935, between World War I and their respective studies at Depression-era New York University and Tuskegee. Each struggled, first to find an artistic medium and then to attain mastery within that medium.

As a boy, Ellison had toyed with the alto sax. After leaving Tuskegee in 1936, he took a class with Harlem Renaissance sculptor Richmond Barthé, and “developed a more than casual interest in the visual arts.” Similarly, Bearden took a day job as social worker, and so came late to oils, thinking of himself as a painter rather than cartoonist only after mastering the rudiments of figure drawing under Berlin artist George Grosz. “When I first started to make pictures,” Bearden writes, “I was particularly interested in using art as an instrument of social change.” Yet, even in those early days, though “socially conscious and politically committed,” though dedicated to discovering what Bearden calls a “useable Black heritage” and Ellison calls “the relationship between our racial identity, our identity as Americans, and our mission as [artists],” both artists were nevertheless equally determined to avoid becoming either “effete exponents of ‘art for art’s sake’ on the one hand,” or “political hacks on the other.”

Another thing the literary artist shares with the visual artist is an aesthetic mirroring not only what O’Meally calls the “fragmentation” of black identity in the United States but also “complex layeredness,” its “refusal ever to be only one thing.” In “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma” (1946), published three years after his mother’s sudden death from pneumonia, Bearden challenges the “privilege of the oppressor to depict the oppressed.” He’d praised the way muralists like José Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, though influenced by European masters, nevertheless created highly original work made in North America and steeped in themes like the Mexican Revolution. Why shouldn’t African-American artists do the same? If Epstein and Modigliani could profit from studying African sculpture, why shouldn’t Richmond Barthé study Saint-Gaudens?

Eventually, beautifully variegated strains of African, Asian and European influence—from Benin bronzed heads or Dan masks to the poet-painters of classical Chinese calligraphy and Japanese portraiture to what, in The Painter’s Mind (1969), Bearden called “the great classical periods during the Tang, Ming and Sung dynasties” to the Ravenna mosaics—would

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come together in the bright tesserae of a Bearden masterpiece like Quilting Time (1986). Similarly, certain artistic, geographic, historical, linguistic, political, psychological or sociological motifs from Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev successfully served as models for Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952).

Co-authored with Murray, “Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings” (1969) derives in part from Bearden’s 1968 interview with curator Henri Ghent, and appeared the same year Bearden and Carl Holty published The Painter’s Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting. So, the exclusion from The Romare Bearden Reader of perhaps duplicative and dauntingly technical material from The Painter’s Mind may be intentional. However, O’Meally provides no explanation for omitting some representative excerpt or other from Six Black Masters of American Art (1972). Bearden was as catholic in his appreciation of contemporary artists different from himself as he was of the Old Masters.

Both the “painter of the Cézannesque still life” and the “painter of the Gauginesque nude,” both Loïs Mailou Jones (professor of design and watercolor at Howard University when Toni Morrison was there minoring in classics from 1949 to 1953) and children’s book illustrator Charles Sebree (The Lost Zoo) as well as the Hale Woodruff of the “garish and strident” Amistad Murals. In Six Black Masters, Bearden devotes entire chapters both to predecessors like Augusta Savage or Horace Pippin—no more “primitive,” Bearden argues, than the douanier Rousseau—as well as to younger artists like Jacob Lawrence.

O’Meally’s survey of Romare Bearden as writer concludes with, among others, an excerpt from the posthumous A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (1993). Conceived as early as 1965 and written in collaboration with Harry Henderson, the book Bearden died before finishing was envisioned as a corrective to what he perceived as art history’s neglect of African-Americans like Henry Ossawa Tanner—“a better painter,” Bearden argues, “than Prendergast; especially in his late paintings, the ones he did in the late ‘10s and ‘30s”.

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* * * As I said, writer Romare Bearden didn’t come from out of nowhere. Perhaps the Harlem Renaissance he literally came of age in didn’t so much flare out as continuously change venue, from turn-of-the-century gathering spots like the Marshall Hotel on West 53rd Street to the Dark Tower and other literary salons of the 1920s and 30s and so on to the jazz clubs, recording studios and concert halls of 52nd Street during the 1940s and 50s. Spirituals and ragtime evolved into blues. Blues evolved into early jazz. Jazz evolved into big band swing. Swing evolved into bebop and on into the Black Arts Movement. The Beats openly acknowledged their debt to writers like Langston and Arna, who as they collaborated on Poetry of the Negro were in turn discovering younger novelists, poets and playwrights like Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Ted Joans, Larry Neal, Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker. So, to a very real extent the circle remained unbroken as visual artists like Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), who in the early 40s had studios in the same building as Claude McKay, continued active years after Ida Cullen-Cooper died.

The Harlem Renaissance had ceased to be an extant movement, but its scattered remnants hadn’t ceased to be a community.

Institution-builders kept building. It took three years, but Ida Cullen-Cooper successfully lobbied for the New York Public Library off Lenox next to the Schomburg, adjacent to what had been the original site of A’Lelia Walker’s Dark Tower, to be rededicated as the Countee [sic] Cullen Branch. Public School 194, on 144th Street, was likewise re-dedicated as the Countée Cullen School. Actively courted by archives, libraries, museums and other institutions, Ida Mae transformed into the kind of griot Henri Ghent and Calvin Tomkins portray Bearden himself being, granting audience to newspapers and radio, fielding inquiries from curators, receiving visits from scholars foreign and domestic. She came into her own, took over the family business and remained active in the cultural life of New York for the rest of her days—traveling, giving lectures and readings of Countée’s work. From 1947 to 1986, she was the living embodiment of a vanishing tradition.

Writers kept writing. Shortly after he and 3,000 other mourners attended Countée’s memorial service, Richard Wright left Greenwich

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Village for Paris, living the remainder of his days in exile. Jimmy Baldwin, who’d studied French and Creative Writing under Countée at middle school P.S. 139, followed in Wright’s footsteps two years later. The larger-than-life character my great grandmother called “Zoe-rah” died the year I was born. When I was in second or third grade, Jean Toomer died, and the “prose oratorio” (Nathan Huggins‘ phrase) called Cane was “rediscovered.” It sold all of 500 copies during the author’s lifetime, but Arna admired its “fractured unities” so intensely that he archived for the Fisk University Library every scrap of paper Toomer ever doodled on—15 cartons worth. Alice Walker made pilgrimage to Zora’s grave when I was a junior in high school. Langston, complaining he’d become a de facto unpaid ambassador for the State Department, frittering away his writing time entertaining authors like Wole Soyinka and Léopold Senghor at Kennedy White House state dinners, wrote relentlessly till he couldn’t write anymore. After 65 years of “squeezing life,” as Countée put it, “like a lemon,” Langston taxied himself to a hospital, checked in with severe abdominal pains, and died two weeks later. As his body was wheeled into the crematorium, they chanted from “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” When I was a freshman in high school, Arna—who never stopped publishing, books for children such as I’d been or young adult biographies and histories for teens such as I now was—died of a heart attack, aged 70, while working on a short-story collection.

Growing up when, where and how I did meant two things. In late 1960s and mid 1970s San Francisco and its Silicon Valley suburbs, it meant there were black role models in this boy’s life, Romare Bearden being just one of many. Which meant that, unlike Dorothy West half a century earlier, I never wanted to become the “great Negro writer” she eventually became in works like “Elephant’s Dance: A Memoir of Wallace Thurman.” But I could relate to Countée’s just wanting to be a poet, not “a Negro poet.” I read all kinds of books and authors, hundreds of them: books on art history; literature; fiction and nonfiction; Latin American authors; black women writers; Dead White Males; writers ranging from Henry Adams to Marguerite Yourcenar. More than once, I read Ellison’s Great African-American Novel. I also watched hundreds of feature films and documentaries. But I spent most of my time lugging around a crate full of filters, a heavy tripod and an Omega 4x5 view camera, or looking

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at Mark Rothko or Clyfford Still at the De Young and Legion of Honor museums.

Romie and Nanette visited the Caribbean for the very first time in 1960. His friend Ida Cullen-Cooper wintered in St. Croix. With advancing age, each suffered during New York cold snaps, Ida from Reynaud’s disease, and Romie from a stiff back and aching joints. When he retired from his day job, Romie and Nanette began spending each February through March on Dutch/French island of St. Martin, where his watercolors lay drying in the sun. By the time I entered high school, he’d begun making artwork from cut-outs of pre-painted construction-paper, cobalts and clarets, hues more saturated than his earlier pastels. The small but influential following he’d had been building among curators and collectors since the 1930s grew to the point where in the early 1970s Bearden finally received the recognition that had eluded him in past decades: a Guggenheim fellowship; a solo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art; election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Bearden was now a full-time painter with a winter home in the Dutch-French Caribbean, where he and his wife Nanette could escape the long New York winters.

This change in circumstance benefited both his writing and his art. By the time I graduated high school, printmaking became one of the ways in which Bearden was constantly reinventing his visual vocabulary.

The 20 “distinct yet unified works,” as Richard Powell describes them, comprising the Odysseus collages, some large-scale and others intimate, bear titles like “Cattle of the Sun,” “Home to Ithaca,” “Odysseus Leaves,” “Poseidon,” “The Sea Nymph,” “Siren’s Song,” and “Troy Burning.” Stark yet vibrantly saturated with color, sinuously geometric, they sing a Trojan War hero’s roots, his departure, his wanderings, his shipwreck, his temptations and, finally, his homecoming. The Odysseus Series illustrates the conquest of the Mediterranean by successive waves of African, European and Semitic peoples, the great migrations, the trade routes and civilizations. The collages are possessed of both timelessness and dignity, convey both action and repose. Even as a young writer in 1977, I knew it when I first saw Circe; knew, as August Wilson knew when he said the same year that, in Bearden, he’d found an artistic mentor, and aspired to write plays the equal of Bearden’s images, just as Bearden himself knew he aspired to make images emulating the rhythms

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he heard between the notes of Earl (“Fatha”) Hines’ piano. I aspired to write something, but had no more idea what to write than Romie, in the very early 1940s, knew whom to paint. I only knew I wanted to make writings that combine precise amplitudes, simple sonorities, and vivid clarities the way Bearden’s Odysseus collages do.

For Romie’s friend Ida, New York energy had been electrifying in the 1930s. By the time I moved there in 1985, she was tired of the place: tired of outrageous supermarket prices; tired of cultural events; tired of her part-time housekeeper’s foolish chatter. She was tired of Life. She loved Romie and all her other friends, but they were dying off, like Owen Dodson.

85 years old, Ida Cullen-Cooper had cultural capital but low energy. 24 years young, I had high energy but no capital. In her shrewdly intuitive way, she saw my ambition for what it was: incorrigible; unagented. Her arthritis smelled like liniment. Ida Cullen-Cooper needed a fresh set of eyes and legs to help with all the unglamorous and never-ending chores entailed in tending a literary estate—copyrights, correspondence, reprints, theatrical productions, the preservation, orderly disposition and archiving of cultural artifacts and scholarly materials with various institutional collections. For almost a year between June 1985 and May 1986, we forged a tenuous alliance.

With no ceremony or basic training and only the briefest of orientations, I was put to work. One of my innumerable duties was sorting and opening mail.

An annuity statement grabbed her attention.

“Don’t open that!”

She swiped it from my hand.

“Matter of fact, I want you to set up a meeting with Rob Bone.

Trusts & Estates attorney, don’t you know. Have him draw up a codicil.

Gonna leave you something in my will.”

Ida Cullen-Cooper was in pain. I fetched a nitroglycerine tablet.

Palms upturned, she shooed me out the door.

“Next time you come, bring me a little groceries. From Gristedes.”

I left Kips Bay, headed home to Harlem, and never saw Ida Mae again.

The trust attorney handed me two things on May 6, 1986: a check worth one year’s rent on a studio down the Lower East Side; and a copy of the New York Times.

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“Ida Cullen Cooper, who spent years traveling the country to keep alive the work of her late husband, the poet Countee Cullen, died of a heart attack Saturday at her home on the East Side of Manhattan. She was 86 years old. She also was active in the civic life of her neighborhood and the cultural life of Harlem, where a branch of the New York Public Library, at 104 West 136th Street near Lenox Avenue, bears the poet’s name. Mr. Cullen, who died in 1946 at the age of 42, was an important writer of the Harlem Renaissance in the 20’s. Mrs. Cooper, a native of Tulsa, Okla., was married to the poet in 1940. In 1953, Mrs. Cooper married Robert L. Cooper, who was widely known for his work with troubled youths. Mr. Cooper died in 1966. Survivors include a daughter, Norma Nimmons; a brother, Harry D. Roberson; a sister, Alice Mae Woods; a granddaughter, and a great-grandson.”

Without doubt, he’d still be remembered today, even without her intervention, but it’s safer to say Ida Mae Roberson’s obituary wouldn’t have been news fit to print in the paper of record if not for her marriage to Countée Cullen. Regardless, I owe my very existence to her as a matter of biological fact. And I can’t imagine sustaining a literary life grounded in reality without the example of their life together. We remain—Countée, Ida Cullen-Cooper and I, in some cases by blood, in other cases by marriage but in any case by shared history and tradition—a family, inseparable.

“These,” Zora said, “are my people.” At the peak of his poetic powers, Countée’d won more prizes at a younger age than any other writer of the Harlem Renaissance, and seemed to embody what Gerald Early called “many of the hopes, aspirations, and maturing expressive possibilities of his people”—all 10,000,000 of them. He was the movement’s poster boy.

It was no long-shot I would end up writing about him.

Ellison delivered Romare Bearden’s eulogy in April 1988 to the hundreds gathered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. More than a quarter-century after his death from bone cancer, Bearden’s art still convincingly transmutes “the idiomatic particulars of Afro-American experience” into what Albert Murray calls “aesthetic statements of universal relevance and appeal,” and so it comes as no surprise his “hugely resonant” themes should be reflected both in the writers who influenced him and the writers he influenced. Romare Bearden is an artist writers will never stop writing about.

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In An American Odyssey, Schmidt-Campbell notes that Bearden created a breathtaking range of powerful female figures: “matriarchs; Conjur Women; religious icons of mother and child; the Virgin Mary with annunciate angel; women engaging in the everyday routine rituals of their lives; sensuous nudes, lounging and bathing; young women with older women; women with men or alone.” I thought I’d found my subject when, as a biographical portraitist born 14 years after Countée Cullen died, Bearden became the subject of the very first book I wrote 14 years after the shock of encountering “Circe.” But my true subject turned out to be a group portrait with Ida Mommy’s oral history narratives at its center and myself, as participant-observer, hovering about the periphery. John Edgar Wideman writes that Bearden’s collages remind you of the way women who helped raise you talked. “Her stories flatten and fatten perspective.

She crams everything, everyone, everywhere into the present, into words intimate and immediate as the images of a Bearden painting. When she’s going good [she] manages to crowd lots and lots of stuff into a space that doesn’t feel claustrophobic. She fills space to the brim without exhausting it.” The grain of Ida’s voice, to borrow Eudora Welty’s phrase, contributed immeasurably to my own “sensory education.” Preserving the folklore and traditions of the Harlem Renaissance was essential to the woman Ida Cullen-Cooper became, just as preserving those of the Deep South was for Zora. She was every bit as ambitious as Countée, as controlling as Walter White, as indefatigable as Alain Locke, as intelligent as Dorothy West, as shrewd as Charles S. Johnson, and had as acute a sense of historical mission as Arna. Oral history wasn’t merely a component of Ida Cullen-Cooper’s character; Ida Cullen-Cooper was the living portrait of an oral historian. “Orality,” my “showing” of her “telling,” had to play as much a part in the narrative as her stories themselves.

The movement we know as the Harlem Renaissance was, like all communities, a factious social network with its natural fair share of back-biting, bickering, envy, grudges, long-cherished hatreds, infighting, paranoia, resentments and suspicion, reasonable and otherwise. “Characters” there was no need to invent: a fast-talking, night-clubbing, blondhaired, blue-eyed black man called Walter White; a writer, late resident, after an adventurous life lived collecting folk songs, voodoo spells and folk dances, of the Garden of Heavenly Rest, buried open casket, in a pink

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nightgown and fuzzy slippers. There was a scene-stealing cast of dozens, some authors of memoirs of their own, others subjects of multi-tome biographies themselves. There were operatic plots, scenes and situations so melodramatic to begin with that it would be tacky to embellish them. But what did “Circe” and the Odysseus collages, what did the art of a storyteller like Bearden have to teach an aspiring portraitist? How, in a hybrid of portraiture and self-portraiture combining poetry and fact, humor and pathos, exposition and anecdote such as the New Journalists were creating when I started publishing around 1977, how in a character-driven narrative taught as a novella yet reliable as a fact-checked, long-form investigative piece, how to tell a within the traditional coming-of-age framework the story of one writer’s quest for a personal version of a “useable past,” how tell the story of a young writer learning to become a storyteller? What were the secrets of narrative propulsion, of maximizing human interest, of reproducing life upon the page? What, exactly, was the secret of those “right relations” among narrative elements in transition—character; description; dialogue; plot; point of view; scenes; storylines; and tone— Turgenev speaks of? How to tell a good story well? How had Bearden done it? The raw material lay all about me. All I had to do was connect the dots.

Failure and doubt flesh out a character as much as aspirations and achievements do. To do him justice, I needed to know what Bearden was like not as a monument but as a man. But in my mind as on my great-grandmother’s wall in Kip’s Bay, Bearden’s work was frozen in time as an historical artifact, not an evolutionary process. Until I became a working writer myself, until the challenges of sustaining creativity into middle age became real to me, I simply had no way of imagining Romie as a struggling artist, forced to work 9 to 5 and paint from 6 to 9, averaging at best a couple hours concentrated work on any given weekday. Ida Cullen-Cooper told me many things--secrets, lies. She never lived to tell me about the Siren’s Songs, about the hazards and temptations, the red herrings, the time frittered away in well-intentioned but ultimately fruitless gatherings; the stressors and anxieties self-medicated with potentially fatal mixtures of nicotine, prescription medications and alcohol; the rejections; the self-deceptions; the endless hours of research, drafting, revision and marketing on projects that ultimately go nowhere; the manuscripts

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irretrievably lost—all the jottings in the margins of a life as opposed to official biography. She never told me the only certainty to be counted on is interruption, whether temporary in the form of familial, financial or social obligations, or permanent in the form of death.

I didn’t inherit “Circe.” Ida Cullen-Cooper was far too savvy to entrust a work of art like that to a 25-year-old scraping by. Perhaps the spell Circe still casts is my great-grandmother’s influence; perhaps it’s the subjectivity, selectivity and distortions of memory—mine, hers, others’—and memory’s role in shaping our identity. Whatever the case, Circe’s image proved to be precisely the right catalyst at that particular juncture of time, place or readiness. The money was only an honorarium.

My great-grandmother’s real endowment was this trove of material.

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Lighter than Air

BY JENNIFER STOCK “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing.”

— Karl Marx, Das Kapital

I. Out of my mother’s collection of opera glasses, I have one pair left. It sits on my desk in Brooklyn. Each barrel is hand-painted with enamel scenes, which mirror one another, but are not the same, like separate frames from a film set on a fantastical slice of the 18th century. On the front, the artist depicts an aristocratic couple in two scenes of music and courtship. On the back, picturesque estates set on a people-less expanse, with vegetation blurring into fields, fields dissolving into sky. The eyepiece is mother-of-pearl, marked “Geo C. Shreve & Co. San Francisco.”

Shreve & Co still exists as a small jewelry company, but at the time that the opera glasses were made, in the late 19th century, it was a prominent silversmithing firm.

I almost always look at the back of the opera glasses instead of the front. The man and woman are vaguely ridiculous; he struts about in purple pantaloons, and in the woman’s left-side rendering she is unable to place her hands properly on the guitar. Her fingers splay like limp slugs on the strings—a failure of imagination on the part of the artist, who

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managed an anatomically correct rendering of the man playing the same instrument on the front right.

But the scenes on the back interest me: twin slivers of countryside fabulously pared down, yet somehow boundless, the tufts of grass and trees like excerpts from a long sheet of toile. The artist, seeking to depict an idealized landscape for a late 19th-century urban consumer, borrowed French pastoral motifs of the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Two buildings, with the trumped-up air of garden follies, dissipate into plumes of grey-violet smoke. Wispy trees blanch into a sky lifted straight out of a Watteau. Its wrap-around bucolic, a limitless landscape of ease, and for what? The artist wanted to allow the owner of the opera glasses a daydream in which all of the industry that created his or her wealth melted away.

I imagine the person who bought these opera glasses in San Francisco, someone who longed for this artificial stance towards nature, someone who demanded fantasy and ornamentation, someone whose problems were, as Benjamin said of Proust’s characters, “those of a satiated society.”

II. One pair of vintage enamel opera glasses sold on Ebay: $1400.00 One month of standard assisted living in Zionsville, Indiana: $2988.00 OnemonthofdementiaunitassistedlivinginZionsville,Indiana:$3799.00 One month of assisted living in Glen Cove, Long Island: $5097.00 One month of assisted living in Brooklyn, NY: $3944.00

III. In the hall leading to the Long Island apartment I choose for you, lithographs of hot air balloons float in gilded frames. They’ve been launched above green carpet with tan scrollwork. Instantly, you mistake the place for a hotel. This misapprehension—that you’re living in a hotel and might exit for the nearest airport soon—is one you will hold for as long as you live here.

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All around you, the elderly sit salted away in small rooms. Many try to be kind about the situation. I’ve seen that most people are kind to you, for example, smiling through complicated meltdowns. But at worst, you are gripped so hard (when you refuse to go to lunch, when you refuse to shower, when you refuse because that’s what you are still able to do) that bruises stain your wrists and arms.

In the lobby still lifes radiate against black backgrounds, Dutch imitations in outsized frames. The sofas are plush. Faux ornamental vases and urns decorate corners that could remain vacant. Every detail has been attended to; everywhere someone has been compensating for something.

The supposed tastes of middle to upper-middle-class elderly—arts and antiques so washed of context that they sit smiling like Cheshire Cats —have been carefully averaged into a schmear of the unselfconsciously picturesque.

In the dining room, cubes of canned fruit have been splayed in glass goblets. The cognizant ones request fresh fruit, but you don’t. Polite little dumps of rice line your plate.

When Christmas comes you will not want to open your presents.

After a while you are not allowed to walk outside by yourself.

After a while, you stop trying.

* * * On your first day in Brooklyn I find you wandering in the industrial zone of Red Hook. I see you from a distance, walking slowly up Van Brunt Street with uncertain steps, a little overdressed for the mild fall weather—cloaked in a trench coat, steadily making your way past a series of factories. I slump in relief as my boyfriend slows the car and pulls over.

I jump out, calling to you.

“Dad?” I’m sure it’s you; it’s a question only because I’m not sure how to approach the moment. You look like a vagrant; with your rough, handsome face you’re a stand-in for the neighborhood. I observe your well-worn skin, your messy silver hair, your piercing eyes—eyes which now broadcast a misleading degree of clarity.

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“Well there you are,” you say, a certain disquiet dissolving from your face.

Not long after I drive you to a gilded cage.

IV. I park illegally and rush to the Red Hook post office. Inside, a kind of lethargy and acceptance. This is no longer the busiest port in the world. On Yelp the post office has received an average of two stars over the course of 24 reviews. I start looking at Yelp reviews for other Brooklyn post offices and find most targets of vitriol.

Customers sift through unsorted piles of forms. The windows are covered with a thick scrim of dirt, the floors filthy. I shift uncomfortably, recognizing myself in the surroundings—I’m also barely keeping it together. The woman in front of me tries to pick up her package, or her roommate’s package; she doesn’t have the right ID, or maybe it’s that the ID doesn’t have the right address. She is confused, she argues; the line behind her sways impatiently. The postal worker looks remote, his expression locked.

When it’s my turn, I hand over the opera glasses. I imagine them nestled demurely in their cardboard box, cobalt blue, encircled with painted flowers and marble accents. Exquisitely cool, perhaps bored, as out of place in this post office as Alma Mahler would be. The postal worker raises his eyebrows when I name the insurance amount. I freeze with sudden regret, but before I can change my mind they are placed through an interior post office window, out of sight.

V. I sit by your bedside at your new place. You have been sick and wake intermittently. The content of your dreams and your waking becomes indistinguishable. You jolt up, telling me in a tiny, strained voice how worrisome it is to be in a hot air balloon. We’ll never get this on the ground, you say. I’ve learned to follow along with your stories—try to think

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what might be comforting to someone stuck in a balloon. Set free, losing touch with the ground, you would think our perspective might improve, but it doesn’t. Adrift, we crouch in a basket below brazen primary colors, lurching in lazy, indeterminate paths. The fields recede in a disorienting haze, and we’re stuck in a sinuous band, the atmosphere claustrophobic.

I continue to keep my tone light, for your sake, but we both know this balloon isn’t coming down.

VI. Near the IKEA in Red Hook, there’s a building at which I often stop to look. It seems to offer the most irreconcilable assortment of architectural non-decisions possible in a limited amount of space. It’s made of stone, kind of, but the stone gives way haphazardly to irregular fringes of brick, swathes of concrete blocks, and a segment of opaque glass, from which a red exhaust pipe emerges. Exactly two of the glass blocks have been painted white. Someone has ornamented the metal door with a swollen cat face. A few pipes burst out and then disappear just as suddenly into the building again. The cracks drunkenly eject weeds. There are eight windows, and precisely one has been boarded over with striated wood, while another shuts its eye with a plain grey board. The building warns, “No Dumping.”

The energies of collapse must look innocuous on the smallest level—zillions of shifts and endless readjustments according to a handful of basic forces. Only in aggregate, strings to quarks, quarks to particles, particles to atoms to molecules, to pile-ups, to jumbles, to molder, to tangles, to some or another drosscape. Staring at the building, I think of the Ghirlandaio painting “Old Man with his Grandson,” in which the fixed, earnest gaze of the little boy beams gracefully past the bulbous, disfigured nose of the grandfather. I think of my father’s snarled brain, of structure suspended in the act of dissolution, of wanting to love what is ugly—of being caught, locked in its gaze.

Lighter Than Air

VII.

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I sold my family’s collection of opera glasses without much forethought, in quiet desperation. My father was having a Lear-sized meltdown. Suburbia left him no wilderness to which to escape, left him rambling down meridians in bleak zones of far-flung sprawl. At one point he stumbled down a creek bank in our neighborhood to hide from the police. His outsized rage and confusion seemed to call for containment.

My mother had died; I had no close relatives, little money. I scoured eBay.

VIII. Throughout most of my childhood, the opera glasses stayed in a glass cabinet mounted to the wall of our living room. I peered at them, and at myself reflected in the cabinet’s mirrored back panel. Because we lived in suburban Indianapolis, in a sea of Wal-Marts and Olive Gardens, purveyors of the cheap, disposable, and simulated, the opera glasses were my mother’s form of resistance, an insistence on craftsmanship and beauty. For the original owners, the opera glasses launched them closer to the stage, to the sweat and the makeup, to the physiological effort of controlled fluctuation. For us they were a visible testament to things older than K-mart. In a landscape carpeted with commodity architecture, what Saunders so aptly calls the “expedience-formed vistas,” my mother created an oasis, filling our house with books, old postcards, and antiques, covering the outside with old-fashioned roses. Of course, some will insist that my mother’s passion for opera glasses was just a different bourgeois dream, one in which a Steinway B and opera ephemera stood in place of an SUV, or a trampoline.

IX. After your first month in assisted living, they call to tell me that you’ve walked into the parking lot. I remember blinking, disoriented on the other end of the phone, saying, so what? We will have to place him

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in the locked unit until you return from your trip, the voice said. What’s wrong with walking in the parking lot, I said.

What if I had just let you wander?

I picture, with small satisfaction, a shocked look from the Director of Community Outreach, or any other of your so-called officials at the assisted living facility. That’s right, I said, let him wander.

One time I visit you at a meal, and I notice your acquaintance Joe at the next table. Joe looks at me and starts crying very suddenly, with the primal, direct stare of someone who knows, and yet doesn’t know, that everything has been lost. His napkin remains tidily folded on a bone china plate. I fail to comfort him and come back to your table—you’re stubbornly silent. I try to coax little emblems of happiness out of you, but it doesn’t work. Is the watermelon juice I brought any good? A weak nod.

It’s towards the end of your life, and you tell me, this place is a sinking ship. I realize that as your body caves your mind lifts off, that you are enduring the uncomfortable sensation of becoming heavier and lighter at the same time.

I wish I could ask you, is the cost obscene?

X. The opera glass collection acted as a portal into a childhood of operas. I like to think they form a partial explanation of myself, of why I wrote a one-act opera in college, of why I have a doctorate in music composition.

My mother brought me to the opera with her for the first time when I was about six, despite her friends’ protestations that she was insane to pay for my ticket. Of these early visits, I remember a glow emanating from the stage. Settling into plush seats, I savored the balance between forward flung light and a reciprocal, encroaching darkness. It’s as though I settled in before a fire for a few hours, comfortable while remote and incomprehensible action flickered across the stage.

On one occasion, my mother explained that there would be a beheading at the end of the opera. So I waited patiently on the outdoor bleachers that had been set up in the gardens at Versailles. The singers

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far away, I sat in a tunnel of sound. One day this intensity would become important. But at the time I simply endured the onslaught. I was nine and a simulated beheading filled me with sufficient dread to sit still for a few hours.

The audience began to look around uneasily as a light drizzle started. The opera singers were under an overhang, but cables snaked around everywhere. Eventually an apology over the loudspeaker. My mother grabbed my hand and led me away. The opera could not continue.

To this day, countless operas later, I have still only seen half of Andre Chenier.

XI. Now that I sold all of the opera glasses, except one pair, I can focus on the way in which the collection dissolved. I transformed it into cosmetically-tinted health care, at places where capital blooms from aestheticizing decay within a corporation’s idea of home. Do a Google image search of “assisted living facility.” Though I am in my early thirties, I have spent a great deal of time in places just like the buildings you see.

One thing I’ve learned is that most of the facilities keep caged birds, for the edification of the elderly.

XII. Looking at my remaining pair of opera glasses reminds me of my mother, of the enthusiasms with which she navigated her life. I also feel a sense of kinship with the garden follies painted into their tiny landscapes.

They evoke the fantasies of capitalism, that the more capital we have, the larger and more distorted our fantasies can be.

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XIII.

JENNIFER STOCK

You still recognize me most of the time. Almost every other fact of your life has vanished, leaving spare bits of reality floating around you in a fantastical mist, which you greet with general acceptance and occasional rage. You don’t remember my mother, or that you used to live in Indiana. You still like to look at books; you still love bagels and coffee.

Today I’ve brought you a truly delicious bagel—the superiority of bagels in New York City one compensation for having uprooted you.

You regard the bagel dubiously, bringing it to your mouth and lowering it again.

“Is this a 24 hour bagel?”

I stare at you, startled, my defenses low for aberrant conversation.

I imagine your neurons crawling over unpromising terrain, snatching at images and forming distorted constructions.

“I got it from a 24-hour deli, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yes, but is it a 24 hour bagel?”

“It’s a freshly toasted bagel, and you should eat it before it gets cold,” I answer briskly, hoping to end the matter, clinging to logic.

“I don’t want to eat it. I need to know if it’s 24 hours.”

I gulp, gazing at you.

“Yes, actually, come to think of it, that is a 24 hour bagel. I got it from a place that only sells 24 hour bagels.”

Satisfied, you start to eat.

“This is delicious,” you tell me. We sit in your small apartment, hovering like motes on the 10th floor. Far below, tiny orange ferries move unsteadily across our frame of vision, on a distant strip of river overwhelmed by sky.

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Mark Strand Going Fast

BY SPENCER REECE

1 2014. New York City. Before Mark Strand died, we had a cup of coffee at the French Roast between 6th and 11th in Greenwich Village.

Behind Mark, a large plate glass window across which were moving huge swathes of humanity: a throng of Eastern European women in babushkas, then a dwarf, then students with back packs, then the poet, Sharon Olds, her hand shaking with a cup of coffee, then a muscular black gay man in a tank top with biceps large and gleaming and undulating as anacondas.

Couldn’t stop staring at his build. Manhattan often seems to me like an aquarium and I am observing from the other side of the plate glass looking in.

“When do you leave for Madrid?” Mark asked. I had been back and forth between Spain and the US, presenting documents with gold seals and wax seals, hoping to get government approval for the post I had just accepted at the Episcopalian cathedral. Behind inch-thick bullet-proof glass, clerks were stamping my paperwork, their staplers moving as fast as the heels of flamenco dancers.

“Soon, I just have to wait for the visa to come through now,” I said.

“I love that city,” Mark responded. “The light... just before it gets dark.” His voice was that of someone who had spent time in museums.

“Did you know Elizabeth Bishop?” I asked suddenly. It was a jump but he wasn’t surprised. Who loves a jump in thought more than

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two poets in a coffee shop in New York City? I have a little theory that poets better understand their genealogy through story swapping, and that through this story swapping poets make up their own tribe or class—a purely egalitarian class—based on their shared art.

“Yes... well, I met her a couple of times... I wouldn’t say we were friends, really, the first time in Brazil; frankly, I don ́t think she cared for me that much, or for my poems...,” Mark said.

“Tell me about her...” I asked, like a child beseeching a parent for a bedtime story.

“She asked me a lot of questions about Lowell. About who had won which prize. She was keenly aware of the prize winners.” The waitress came near, her breasts jacked up and pushed forward with tombstones tattooed on each one. Mark admired this unique presentation of breasts.

“Elizabeth was so proud of her lover’s physique,” Mark said.

“Lota,” I asked.

“No, this was later with Alice,” Mark said.

“Oh.” Bishop, the reticent alcoholic lesbian who lived in Brazil for seventeen years, writing poems that eschewed her humiliating drinking and her difficult orphaned childhood. I related to leaving a great deal unsaid.

I was eager — no earnest, that quality I’d mainly kept tamped down, to learn everything I could about her from him. I wanted to connect to her.

And I wanted to connect to him.

2 Mark Strand and I met shortly before he died. “I have cancer,” he said right away.

We were eating cupcakes. Mark had kindly offered to treat me. I tried to appreciate the waitress’ breasts along with Mark. Fall was tumbling down the canyons of New York City: orange, yellow, brown. Everyone on a cellphone, wearing Irish fishermen sweaters and Calvin Kline black turtlenecks. People moved as if they were on a gigantic chessboard. The sky the color of a weathered wood shingle.

I uncrossed my legs. Too feminine. To be feminine as a male meant not passing. Mark Wunderlich when he read a draft of this said,

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“There’s no gay man that won’t relate to the quandary about crossing or uncrossing your legs.” This neurotic self-monitoring had followed me nearly my entire life. To appear too feminine translated as failure. “I knew you were gay,” as a statement was a switchblade. I was fifty one years old and the year was 2014.

Strand had written in a poem in my high school anthology: We all have reasons for moving.

I move to keep things whole.

I had my reasons for moving, as Bishop had hers, as Strand had his. I think my gypsy nervousness, the need to always keep the suitcase open, goes back to my Mom. It surprises me now in my fifties, sometimes, that I ́ve moved so much. I thought, sometimes, Mom, Dad, Carter and I would just stay put in the Midwest forever. Fragmented and fractured — Mom changing who she was, Dad changing who he was, me changing me, my dear brother witnessed our folly. I felt responsible for him in my teenage brain. I felt we had ruined my brother because we were all so broken. And maybe that is why we had moved so much. To keep things whole.

I uncrossed my legs. I stopped looking at the handsome black man out the window. Yes, Mark Strand encouraged me: he offered me a kind of blessing before our cupcakes. “This is good, you moving to Madrid.

This is good,” he said. As he said it, it became real, like a photograph that was materializing from its chemical bath after having been in a dark room for nearly forty years: I was moving to Madrid.

3 Mark’s tone about the cancer sounded like he was talking about a vacation spot he was going to visit although he wasn’t enthused. He had a very handsome face. I imagined women had fallen in love with that face, not to mention that mind. Perhaps a man or two had as well. I don’t know. I never really got to know Mark Strand that well. A bit like

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my cousin in that way, yet both stand in for something larger, as if their brief brush against my life somehow intensifies their significance.

“Do you want me to place your name on the list of those wanting healing when I get to the Cathedral?” I said. And I felt like my young six-year-old self next to my father. For Mark felt distant and with distant men I seemed to somehow thrive — I knew all the moves.

“I’m not religious,” Mark said, bemusedly. “My father was Jewish,” he said. I think now he said that to put me off more. I wanted to assure him that I was not meeting him to evangelize. That, in fact, for those competitive priests that whispered behind my back in seminary, I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought of me as the worst evangelist in their company, maybe even some kind of embarrassment.

Yet, there I was.

“My mother is half-Jewish, just like you then...” I added. Which felt sort of daring, revealing the part of my mother that moved so much in her unconscious, like a shark, never resting. Felt almost like coming out of the closet. Why doesn’t anyone ever say, “I am a quarter Christian?”

Mark left his cupcake uneaten. He looked sad. The grit of New York, the air rubbing against our cheeks like sandpaper. I thought of Mom again that New York day. Slowly sliding down the wall when I was six. I never could fix her. There was so much I couldn’t fix.

New York moved all around Mark and me — one poet about to die, the other about to be a priest. Mortality must have been with him at every moment. I didn’t know what that felt like: being tested for HIV after a promiscuous bout comes close. After testing negative I remember it made me want to push death as far from me as possible, like it could never touch me, but of course it would and will.

The smell of coffee and trash and baked bread moving up our nostrils. In the news John Hinckley Jr. had been released from St. Elizabeth’s now and was going home to live with his mother. He was sixty years old. Jodi Foster had given birth to two children and not unlike the Madonna they seemed to have been born through some kind of immaculate conception. She was ready in her fifties to say, accepting an award, that she was lesbian.

I didn’t understand how or why I had become a poet any more than how or why I was becoming a priest: the more people asked the less

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Mark Strand Going Fast

BY SPENCER REECE

1 2014. New York City. Before Mark Strand died, we had a cup of coffee at the French Roast between 6th and 11th in Greenwich Village.

Behind Mark, a large plate glass window across which were moving huge swathes of humanity: a throng of Eastern European women in babushkas, then a dwarf, then students with back packs, then the poet, Sharon Olds, her hand shaking with a cup of coffee, then a muscular black gay man in a tank top with biceps large and gleaming and undulating as anacondas.

Couldn’t stop staring at his build. Manhattan often seems to me like an aquarium and I am observing from the other side of the plate glass looking in.

“When do you leave for Madrid?” Mark asked. I had been back and forth between Spain and the US, presenting documents with gold seals and wax seals, hoping to get government approval for the post I had just accepted at the Episcopalian cathedral. Behind inch-thick bullet-proof glass, clerks were stamping my paperwork, their staplers moving as fast as the heels of flamenco dancers.

“Soon, I just have to wait for the visa to come through now,” I said.

“I love that city,” Mark responded. “The light... just before it gets dark.” His voice was that of someone who had spent time in museums.

“Did you know Elizabeth Bishop?” I asked suddenly. It was a jump but he wasn’t surprised. Who loves a jump in thought more than

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two poets in a coffee shop in New York City? I have a little theory that poets better understand their genealogy through story swapping, and that through this story swapping poets make up their own tribe or class—a purely egalitarian class—based on their shared art.

“Yes... well, I met her a couple of times... I wouldn’t say we were friends, really, the first time in Brazil; frankly, I don ́t think she cared for me that much, or for my poems...,” Mark said.

“Tell me about her...” I asked, like a child beseeching a parent for a bedtime story.

“She asked me a lot of questions about Lowell. About who had won which prize. She was keenly aware of the prize winners.” The waitress came near, her breasts jacked up and pushed forward with tombstones tattooed on each one. Mark admired this unique presentation of breasts.

“Elizabeth was so proud of her lover’s physique,” Mark said.

“Lota,” I asked.

“No, this was later with Alice,” Mark said.

“Oh.” Bishop, the reticent alcoholic lesbian who lived in Brazil for seventeen years, writing poems that eschewed her humiliating drinking and her difficult orphaned childhood. I related to leaving a great deal unsaid.

I was eager — no earnest, that quality I’d mainly kept tamped down, to learn everything I could about her from him. I wanted to connect to her.

And I wanted to connect to him.

2 Mark Strand and I met shortly before he died. “I have cancer,” he said right away.

We were eating cupcakes. Mark had kindly offered to treat me. I tried to appreciate the waitress’ breasts along with Mark. Fall was tumbling down the canyons of New York City: orange, yellow, brown. Everyone on a cellphone, wearing Irish fishermen sweaters and Calvin Kline black turtlenecks. People moved as if they were on a gigantic chessboard. The sky the color of a weathered wood shingle.

I uncrossed my legs. Too feminine. To be feminine as a male meant not passing. Mark Wunderlich when he read a draft of this said,

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Mark Strand

“There’s no gay man that won’t relate to the quandary about crossing or uncrossing your legs.” This neurotic self-monitoring had followed me nearly my entire life. To appear too feminine translated as failure. “I knew you were gay,” as a statement was a switchblade. I was fifty one years old and the year was 2014.

Strand had written in a poem in my high school anthology: We all have reasons for moving.

I move to keep things whole.

I had my reasons for moving, as Bishop had hers, as Strand had his. I think my gypsy nervousness, the need to always keep the suitcase open, goes back to my Mom. It surprises me now in my fifties, sometimes, that I ́ve moved so much. I thought, sometimes, Mom, Dad, Carter and I would just stay put in the Midwest forever. Fragmented and fractured — Mom changing who she was, Dad changing who he was, me changing me, my dear brother witnessed our folly. I felt responsible for him in my teenage brain. I felt we had ruined my brother because we were all so broken. And maybe that is why we had moved so much. To keep things whole.

I uncrossed my legs. I stopped looking at the handsome black man out the window. Yes, Mark Strand encouraged me: he offered me a kind of blessing before our cupcakes. “This is good, you moving to Madrid.

This is good,” he said. As he said it, it became real, like a photograph that was materializing from its chemical bath after having been in a dark room for nearly forty years: I was moving to Madrid.

3 Mark’s tone about the cancer sounded like he was talking about a vacation spot he was going to visit although he wasn’t enthused. He had a very handsome face. I imagined women had fallen in love with that face, not to mention that mind. Perhaps a man or two had as well. I don’t know. I never really got to know Mark Strand that well. A bit like

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my cousin in that way, yet both stand in for something larger, as if their brief brush against my life somehow intensifies their significance.

“Do you want me to place your name on the list of those wanting healing when I get to the Cathedral?” I said. And I felt like my young six-year-old self next to my father. For Mark felt distant and with distant men I seemed to somehow thrive — I knew all the moves.

“I’m not religious,” Mark said, bemusedly. “My father was Jewish,” he said. I think now he said that to put me off more. I wanted to assure him that I was not meeting him to evangelize. That, in fact, for those competitive priests that whispered behind my back in seminary, I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought of me as the worst evangelist in their company, maybe even some kind of embarrassment.

Yet, there I was.

“My mother is half-Jewish, just like you then...” I added. Which felt sort of daring, revealing the part of my mother that moved so much in her unconscious, like a shark, never resting. Felt almost like coming out of the closet. Why doesn’t anyone ever say, “I am a quarter Christian?”

Mark left his cupcake uneaten. He looked sad. The grit of New York, the air rubbing against our cheeks like sandpaper. I thought of Mom again that New York day. Slowly sliding down the wall when I was six. I never could fix her. There was so much I couldn’t fix.

New York moved all around Mark and me — one poet about to die, the other about to be a priest. Mortality must have been with him at every moment. I didn’t know what that felt like: being tested for HIV after a promiscuous bout comes close. After testing negative I remember it made me want to push death as far from me as possible, like it could never touch me, but of course it would and will.

The smell of coffee and trash and baked bread moving up our nostrils. In the news John Hinckley Jr. had been released from St. Elizabeth’s now and was going home to live with his mother. He was sixty years old. Jodi Foster had given birth to two children and not unlike the Madonna they seemed to have been born through some kind of immaculate conception. She was ready in her fifties to say, accepting an award, that she was lesbian.

I didn’t understand how or why I had become a poet any more than how or why I was becoming a priest: the more people asked the less

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I knew. All the answers seemed uninspired or verging on the bromides you could find in the literature of the meetings with their twelve steps.

The answer lay in the air. The air was my business. The air was where I worked, between me and the page, or me and God. What I was fairly certain about was that humanity, in its best moments, was trying to move towards illumination and acts of mercy, each and every one of us, atheist or believer, Jew or Christian, mentally ill or not, famous or anonymous, with a kind word, an invitation to read a poem, or eating a cupcake, or saying “I’m one too,” or electing to give birth to a child or welcoming a child home who’d made an unimaginably horrible mistake. And in that moment, Mark dying before me, I felt mercy for everyone I could think of who’d ever crossed my path. Mercy.

4 One day as the goldfinches were coming to the thistle feeder, and just before my mother fell down once more, upon my computer screen came a note from Mark Strand: Dear Spencer, Well, we’ll have lunch again. The reduced dosage has meant a lessening of those onerous side effects. I am feeling quite a bit better. Regarding our conversation, I ́d like to have a soul, and perhaps I do, but I can never find it. I never write about it myself because I can ́t find it. Or, if I find something I take for it, it seems remote, embedded elsewhere, in a fable perhaps, or a joke, or some fictive concoction.

Yours, Mark The note, written on the screen, was like the messages biplanes write in the sky — ephemeral, not to last long. So much felt like it was going fast now, too fast. I didn’t like it. I knew Mark had cancer and was

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searching for his soul. I was no expert on soul finding. I wanted to slow things down.

I told Mark I would see him in New York soon. It would be my last time to see him.

5 “I’ve been doing collages lately, I am done with writing poems.

I don’t have anything more to say,” Mark Strand said to me in New York City, his head in profile. I wanted to fix the statement, remove the negative, but I’d been in Al-Anon just long enough that every once and a while I stopped throwing myself into someone else’s life. I had to bite my tongue not to say anything. Had a terrible time with patience, not wanting to fix Mark or my mother sliding down the wall. Wanted to say, “No, no, you will write more.” But a silence sat between us. A homeless man came to the table where we were eating cupcakes. We lowered our eyes to avoid his gaze.

6 “Time to go, kid,” Mark Strand said. “Yes, but,” I stuttered. “No, I really must go. I am tired, very tired.”

“Yes,” I said, “Yes.” I perhaps will always hate endings. I wanted to say something more to him, but what more was there to say to someone I wanted to know better but did not know that well? We weren’t that close. So why does this moment stay with me so?

“Give my love to Madrid. Remember me on Horteleza Street,” Mark said. Then I watched him step down, off the curb, and cross the street, becoming part of the vast human stream of New York City, stepping down into the subway, his body submerging like in a baptism — Mark, tall, stately, Lincoln-esque —his gray kind head gone without a trace into the distance of the bells and traffic of Manhattan. One month later he was dead.

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Jesus, Immaculate and the Pig, Essex, Vermont This is where Jesus dumped Immaculee, before wandering off to tend another flock of clouds, down in the psych ward, clutching her bible and scattered papers, preaching to the nurses.

Jesus in his nursing home bathrobe, polyester slippers, Jesus whose rings-of-Saturn halo floats passively from the fridges of all the Congolese in this quaint Vermont town. Jesus who for all practical purposes, did nothing to stop her gang rape in Essex, Vermont (instead of the Congo, rape capital of the world), Yes Jesus gave her a tepid blessing as she left each day, her psyche padded like a hockey player, but when winter got tight and stingy, snow tendrils swallowing the trailer like a great white squid, Jesus fell asleep in front of the TV, while her mother prayed and cooked the loso ya boulayi, ntaba, mipanzi, makemba et salade, banana, pepper, cassava steam rising, the heat cranked up, the trailer humid as a jungle, Immaculee’s mind loosening enough for one memory to squeeze out of its cage, snorting, then shrieking, a frantic pig squealing in her skull.

For days the pig raced inside her head, shredding raw sirens, while Jesus did nothing but smile from his perch in the Lazy Boy, like he’d had too much weed.

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Even when the family held hands, prayed the rosary together, Jesus with his puddle-dull dopey eyes draped like a Dali doily over every refugee couch in that town, Jesus, with his tapered yellowing fingers, could not catch the pink squealer screeching, tearing about, shattering teacups.

Jesus who comes to her at night, feeling guilty, like a cat kneading the lap where it wants to settle. Jesus who circles around and around, pawing, suggesting forgiveness to the grunting white thugs, then curls up and closes His eyes, purring while the pigs roam frantic and wild and the night skins the moon alive. * * * Come Jesus, wake up, put your Bed, Bath and Beyond self to rest, give her something more than the Prodigal Son, or the social worker draped in polar fleece huddled like a wolf outside her door.

Please, Jesus, rise up from your beige Lazy Boy, put your mangy Old Testament fur on, summon the ragged dark clouds and your fake Game of Thrones sword.

Help her pin the squirming pig down, help her finally slit the motherfucker’s throat til the blood blooms relentless and warm across the carpet floor.

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The Valley of the Shadow

BY BARRY GOLDENSOHN

The Lord is not my shepherd. I am not a sheep.

I do not eat grass or consent to be shorn.

I do not breed children with daughters or granddaughters.

I can count and use languages.

I do not follow my leader in long lines or orderly flocks from pasture to pasture at the tinkle of his bell.

I eat the meat of many creatures including sheep.

I hunt, grow and gather much of my food.

I lodge in cities and love their unruly culture half of every year, and I live on a wilderness lake with the wild music of loons the other half.

The presumption that I need a shepherd amuses me and the presumption of shepherds enrages me.

I don’t need staff or rod. I know I’ll die.

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What She Sees in the Diorama

BY JAN C. GROSSMAN The exhibits are unchanged, although they have replaced an antelope or painted an ibex.

The creatures pose in perpetuity, still spreading a wing, opening a jaw.

One can almost see, though, in the jungle dark, patches in the fur and torn feathers, a lustreless eye.

But fierce in their habitat, a cave of glass boxes in the mezzanine, they glare out of the stillness and shadow, defying time.

She never liked them before.

She does not like them now as a human form seems to rise from the dry grass, emerging among the moss and plants, new hollow curves beneath the eyes, and hair discolored, more coarse, the arms and hips thicker than last time she looked.

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It is survival of the fittest she thinks of as she blinks in the light of the next hall, facing other females of the species, traveling together with matched white skirts, their bones braced under tanned, taut skin.

Quick-footed, they move as one; they are young.

She has been here a long time, has wandered, missed a turn, lost her path.

But she sees herself again, in dawn-like light, among the nomads.

Here, women, barely clothed, kneel and lean to scoop the earth with hollowed gourds while their babies watch from baskets in the reeds.

She kneels, too, bends over the tented hood of the stroller, tools in both hands, skillfully easing a straw into the juice box, doling out crackers, resealing the bag.

In time she will find her way out, her sandaled feet moving silently, purposefully, across the wide marble floor.

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Edict

BY SADAF HALAI Motif, in the Master’s ghazal, is both agent and provocation. Given time, suffering becomes the balm itself.

The transgendered headless body in Peshawar is decomposed, rubbed out by torture.

An old photograph shows her seated: the pose part school-girl, part film-star. The head is tilted, the index finger touches chin, the studied ode to frailty. But unlike Ghalib we no longer wrestle with our wishes, those thousand winged deserters, each one a thug, an exhalation. A vapor billows past the fruit stall and the open drain, it is a nausea that will not lift no matter who the doctor, no matter what the medicine. We feel by feeling.

In everything is ordained design. But sometimes it’s hard to tell apart the iris of the eye and the flecks inside the sun, the knuckle of the hand and the chin it rests upon.

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Modigliani and the Poets

Modigliani and the Poets

BY JEFFREY MEYERS The cultured and literate Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was passionately interested in and emotionally involved with Italian and French poetry of the past as well as with the work of his friends, Anna Ahkmatova, Max Jacob and Blaise Cendrars. On the 100th anniversary of his tragic death in 1920 we can see how the poets who fascinated him portrayed the pain of sex and love, the exaltation of art, the effect of narcotics on creativity and the need to suffer extreme experience. They encouraged his compulsion to live dangerously, and taught him to see the artist as victim, outcast and superman. They provided intellectual justification for the deliberate derangement of his senses and glorified his devotion to art.

He didn’t just read poets. He lived according to their principles as if they were imprinted on his body as well as in his mind. These powerful poets both inspired his work and—as he was drawn to disaster and followed their maniacal descent--helped to destroy him.

Modi (as he was called) was Jewish, Italian, handsome, charismatic, charming and seductive as well as impoverished, tubercular, alcoholic, self-destructive, suicidal and involved in many wretched love affairs. Proud of Italian poetry, he fluently recited Dante’s Inferno and La Vita Nuova, Petrarch’s love sonnets, Ariosto’s epic Orlando Furioso, Leopardi’s lyrical Canti, Carducci’s patriotic declamations in the Odi Barbare and D’Annunzio’s sensuous Canto Novo. Modigliani’s French listeners missed the meaning of the words when he declaimed long passages in Italian, but they understood his need to express himself, make an

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impression and assert his national identity. The poignant lines from the Inferno that he loved to quote seemed to reflect his own tragic decline.

They expressed his intellectual confusion: In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost (1.1); his disappointments and failures: Without hope we live in desire (4.42); his sense of hopelessness and depression: What sweet thoughts, what longing led them to the woeful pass (5.113); the contrast between his great expectations and abject wretchedness: There is no greater sorrow than to remember happy times in misery (5.121); his descent into poverty, alcoholism and drug addiction: Consider your origin: you were not born to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge (26.118).

These famous and familiar lines, schoolboy knowledge for most Italians, contained bitter truths for Modi. One friend, thinking of Modi declaiming Dante’s Inferno, compared his cries while drunk to those of “a sinner condemned to eternal torment.”

Modi’s refined and cosmopolitan mother had translated into French works by the poet, playwright and novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio (18631938), the most famous Italian author of his time. At the turn of the century D’Annunzio was notorious for his heated rhetoric, his luxurious way of life and his flamboyant love affairs. During the Great War he became an outstanding hero in all three military services. After the war, he ruled the

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Amedeo Modigliani with Pablo Picasso with Andre Salmon (Montparnasse, 1916) independent city of Fiume for a year before being blasted out by the Italian government. The historian Denis Mack Smith defined the quintessential qualities that so strongly appealed to the young and impressionable artist: “Perpetually lonely and unsatisfied, [D’Annunzio] took everything to excess, seeking always for new experiences and indulgences, for greater speed, greater passion, a more shocking private life, a more violent assault on convention than anyone else. . . . He preached that everything should be forgiven the artist, who was a superman above ordinary morals, just as he should also be above the payment of debts.” For Modi, Nietzsche’s ideas were filtered through and reinforced by D’Annunzio.

D’Annunzio penned a characteristically Nietzschean passage— mocking conventional morality, emphasizing self-overcoming, transcending good and evil—in The Triumph of Death (1894): “Where lives the strong, tyrannical dominator, free from the yoke of any false morality, sure in the feeling of his own power, convinced that the essence of his

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person overcomes in value all accessory attributes, determined to raise himself above Good and Evil by the pure energy of his will, capable of forcing life to maintain its promises to him?” Unlike D’Annunzio, Modi was never able to force life to recognize and reward his genius.

Modi was also drawn to the D’Annunzian connection between sexuality and creativity, between spilling sperm and spreading paint. In his autobiographical Sparks from the Hammer (1928), D’Annunzio, using a sculptural metaphor in his title, confessed that this concept had dominated his life: “Always something fleshly, something resembling a carnal violence, a mixture of atrocity and inebriation, accompanies the begetting of my brain.” In a similar fashion Modigliani—alluding to D’Annunzio’s novel The Flame of Life (1900)—exclaimed: “I need a flame in order to paint, in order to be consumed by fire.”

The source of Modi’s fiery inscription on his drawing “Portrait of a Woman with a Hat” (1918), which combines spirituality and sensuality, has not been identified. But it sounds very much like the combustible D’Annunzio: “By chance the woman of great soul and beauty would also burn with an immeasurable fire of insane desires.” Another aphoristic inscription, on his drawing of Lunia Czechowska (1919), quotes a passage from D’Annunzio’s journal Il Convito (The Banquet, 1895) that exalted the godlike power of the artist: “Life is a gift from the few to the many, from those who know and have to those who don’t know and don’t have.”

Modi’s mother gave him Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1896) when he left Livorno for Paris. He was struck by Wilde’s observation: “all men kill the thing they love”—an idea that had tragic implications for his lovers—one of them a pregnant suicide-- at the end of his life. Wilde, the quintessential fin de siècle aesthete, made a sharp distinction between the exaltation of art and the banality of ordinary life, and declared: “It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art, and through art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.” This credo of art for art’s sake had a strong appeal for Modi, encouraging him to despise the ordinary claims of life, endure poverty and neglect his own health while devoting himself to painting.

Modi was also intrigued and influenced by the hothouse French poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lau-

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tréamont. Baudelaire, the high-priest of intoxication, did for hashish what Thomas De Quincey had done for opium. By describing its effects in highly charged poetic prose, he persuaded artists that hashish would heighten their imagination and strengthen their powers of creation. After taking the drug, attacks of irresistible hilarity and ceaseless mirth, of overwhelming languor and disturbing dreams, gave way to a feeling of well-being and plentitude of life. The rush of mental images and the intensity of colors that flowed into the brain, transporting the artist into unknown realms of experience, were particularly appealing to Modi, who was always searching for new sensations. As Baudelaire declared: “All surrounding objects are so many suggestions provoking in [the smoker] a world of thought, all more highly colored, more vivid and more subtle than ever before. . . . External objects acquire, gradually and one after the other, strange new appearances; they become distorted or transformed. .

A new subtlety or acuity manifests itself in all the senses. . . . The eyes behold the Infinite.”

In his authoritative “Poem of Hashish” (1860), based on long experience with the drug, Baudelaire wrote that the unappetizing sweetmeat, the size of a nut, looks “like a yellow-greenish hair-oil and retains the disagreeable odor . . . of rancid butter.” He suggested strengthening the dose by melting it in a cup of black coffee. He also described the kind of artistic personality (exactly like Modi’s) that would be most responsive to this kind of experience: “a temperament half nervous and half choleric . . . a cultivated mind, practiced in the study of form and color; and a tender heart, wearied by unhappiness but still ready for rejuvenescence.”

Baudelaire rapturously portrayed the surrealistic expansion of time and space, the exhilarating, irresistible antidote to depression, and “the pitch of joy and serenity at which he is compelled to admire himself.” He emphasized that “hashish spreads over the whole of life a sort of veneer of magic, coloring it with solemnity and shining through all its depths. Scalloped landscapes; fleeting horizons; perspectives of towns blanched by the cadaverous pallor of a storm or illumined by the concentrated glows of sunset, depths of space, allegorical of the depths of time. . . . The universality of all existence arrays itself before you in a new and hitherto unguessed-at glory.”

Like De Quincey, Baudelaire vividly described the appalling

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nightmares and increasingly negative effects of the drug, as well as the difficulty on the “terrible morrow” of creating art while under its influence. The hashish-eater experiences “a sensation of chilliness in the extremities . . . and a great weakness in all the members. In your head, and throughout your being, you feel an embarrassing stupor and stupefaction. . . . All the body’s organs [are] lax and weary, nerves unstrung; [there are] itching desires to weep, the impossibility of applying oneself steadily to any task. It is in the nature of hashish to weaken the will.” Lured by the prospect of delightful sensations, Modi forgot about the aftereffects.

While the visions lasted, it was impossible for him to paint; when he returned to a normal state, the wondrous visions had vanished. Hashish did not help his work and certainly undermined his already frail health.

He identified with Baudelaire’s Albatross which, like the outcast artist or poet, soars above the ignorant multitude but is shot down, crippled and mocked: “The Poet shares the fate of this prince of the clouds, / who rejoices in the tempest, mocking the archer below; / exiled on earth, an object of scorn, / his giant wings impede him as he walks.”

Modi was only too eager to embrace extreme ideas that would explain and exalt his role as an artist. Rimbaud provided the aesthetic justification for what Baudelaire called the “artificial paradise” of hashish.

Rimbaud had demanded an artificially induced, self-destructive, deliberate derangement of all the senses that would enable the tormented, sacrificial, even insane artist to become “the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed” and to plunge into unknown, unheard of, unnamable spiritual visions. Under the malign influence of Rimbaud’s revolutionary ideas and intense hostility to bourgeois morality, Modi told a friend: “You must have that holy cult, the cult of everything that can exalt and excite the intelligence! Try to provoke and perpetuate these fertile stimulants, for they alone can lift the intelligence up to the highest creative levels. It is for them that we must fight. Can we allow them to be shut away from us behind a hedge of narrow-minded moralizing?”

Modi usually carried a copy of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror in his pocket—sometimes torn into sections for portability. He would spontaneously erupt with passages of his favorite author, whether or not his companions wanted to hear his ranting. Isidore Ducasse, the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont, was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, of French parents in 1846. He came to France in 1860 and died there in

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1870 at the age of twenty-four. The first part of his prose poem appeared in 1868, the second was published posthumously in 1890. Like Modi, he led a wretched existence, died miserably and achieved posthumous fame.

Lautréamont’s rapturous, hallucinatory, satanic monologue, which shares the cruelty and black humor of the Marquis de Sade and Antonin Artaud, resembles the musings of a maniac. Maldoror, the defiant and unconstrained anti-hero, a rapist and murderer, absolutely revels in the most disgusting and self-destructive behavior. He rejoices in the violation of virginal innocence and the infliction of suffering and degradation, and uses morbid imagery and sadistic fanaticism to exalt the principle of evil.

This almost unreadable book fascinated Modi and his contemporaries. André Gide, writing in 1905, described its extraordinary emotional impact: “Here is something that excites me to the point of delirium. He leaps from the detestable to the excellent.” It is hard to imagine how this repellent fantasy attracted readers as sensitive and intelligent as Modi and Gide. On the positive side, Lautréamont gave savage voice to the deep impulse of writers and artists to reject normal life and fulfill their own creative destiny. Yet Maldoror’s scorn for humanity is so great that he no longer cares what anyone else thinks or feels, an illogical and preposterous position for an artist. Ultimately, the book celebrates absolute power.

Two literary historians give some idea of its bizarre tone and shocking content. The perverse hero has strange tastes, expressed in disturbing shifts of style and mood: “Maldoror, a demonic figure, expresses his hatred of mankind and of God, and his love of the Ocean (a famous passage), blood, octopuses, toads, etc. There are nightmarish encounters with vampires and with mysterious beings on the seashore. The work is an amazing profusion of apostrophe and imagery, at once delirious, erotic, blasphemous, grandiose and horrific.” In the 1920s, Lautréamont’s deliberate cruelty appealed to the Surrealists and Dadaists. The prose poems “express his loathing of humanity through a Byronesque figure called Maldoror. His sadism, his voluntary self-abandonment to torments from the depths of his mind, his adoration of the sea as the cradle of thoughtless cruelty, led to his being acclaimed later by the surrealists as a forerunner. In a famous passage Maldoror watches shipwrecked sailors torn to pieces by sharks and then mates with the most dreadful shark of

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all.” Describing this sexual encounter, Lautréamont exclaims that “their throats and breasts soon fuse into one glaucous mass exhaling the odors of sea-wrack.” Maldoror gleefully boils kittens in a tub full of alcohol, and convulsively confesses: “I am filthy. Lice gnaw me. Swine, when they gaze upon me, vomit. Scabs and scars of leprosy have scaled off my skin, which exudes a yellowish pus.”

Modi’s lover Beatrice Hastings, in a clear-eyed judgment that opposed his own, called Lautréamont “a poor, self-tormented creature for whom, had he lived, no earthly refuge was possible but an asylum.” Modi, who could never quite tear himself away from this vampiric book, frankly admitted it “had ruined his life.” He may have been particularly thinking of a bombastic, suicidal passage in which Maldoror defiantly confronts the world with no more than the strength of his artistic genius: “Whether I gain a disastrous victory or whether I succumb, the battle will be good: I alone, against humanity. I shall not employ weapons made of wood or iron; I shall kick aside the strata of minerals extracted from the earth: the powerful and seraphic sonority of the harp will become beneath my fingers a formidable talisman.” Lautréamont--like Nietzsche, D’Annunzio and Rimbaud--believed the defiant law breakers were the real creators.

Modi absorbed their explosive intellectual cocktail into his bloodstream and chose, as they had urged, to live dangerously.

Modi belonged to the tradition of the artiste maudit, which seemed a pun on his name. This lineage went back to the medieval poet François Villon and included many nineteenth-century French poets from Baudelaire to Rimbaud and Modi’s beloved Lautréamont. As the artist Maurice Vlaminck wrote, emphasizing the cursed fate of his contemporaries: “One is born a painter, as one is born a hunchback. It is a gift or an infirmity.”

In 1884 Verlaine published Les Poétes maudits. Modi and his friends Maurice Utrillo, Chaim Soutine and Jules Pascin—“grouped together as though violence of temper and proneness to trouble constituted a school of art”—were later called les peintres maudits. Modi’s self-destructive drinking gave him a double personality. When sober he was gentle, charming and intelligent; when drunk he would suddenly become nasty, aggressive and violent.

Modi had an idyllic affair with a great poet when both were

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intoxicated by art, when poetry brought them together and intensified their love. In May 1910—in an intellectually exciting atmosphere when Russians conveyed an attractive mystery—Modi met the young Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Both had studios in the same building, which housed many young, struggling artists. When they met he was twenty-six; she was twenty-one, just married and on her first trip to Paris. They were immediately attracted to each other, and though she soon returned home, they corresponded all that winter.

Born in 1889 in Odessa, in the Crimea, the daughter of a naval officer, Akhmatova grew up near St. Petersburg. Tall, elegant and attractive, with a striking Dantean profile, she wore dark bangs and exotic shawls.

The English historian Isaiah Berlin, who met her in Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg) in 1945, remembered her as “immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness.” Joseph Brodsky, her poetic protégé, described her as “five feet eleven, dark-haired, fair-skinned, with pale gray-green eyes like those of snow leopards, slim and incredibly lithe, she was for half a century sketched, painted, cast, carved, and photographed by a multitude of artists starting with Amedeo Modigliani.”

Anna wrote dramatically powerful love lyrics and clear, intense evocations of the Russian countryside. In one of her poems, “White Flocks,” she rhapsodically declared: Everything is for you: my daily prayer And the thrilling fever of the insomniac, And the blue fire of my eyes, And my poems, that white flock.

The cultural historian Orlando Figis observed that Anna “returned to the classic poetic principles of clarity, concision and the precise expression of emotional experience.” He quoted her “Prayer, May 1915, Pentecost,” written five years after she met Modi and during the Great War, when she was prepared to sacrifice everything for the patriotic cause: Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover,

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And my mysterious gift of song-This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.

When Anna returned alone to Paris in May 1911, after her marriage to Nikolay Gumylov had fallen apart, she and Modi began their love affair. She embodied his aesthetic ideal and he drew her in the attire of an Egyptian queen. She often modeled for him and recalled: “You see, it was not likeness that interested him. It was the pose. He made some twenty drawings of me,” portraying her slender, graceful body and her handsome face with its aquiline profile, short fringe and hair done up in a knot. A critic noted that her memoir, which emphasizes their intuitive understanding, reflects her own character as well as his: “in describing Modigliani she describes what she herself was like—with her ability to guess other people’s thoughts, have other people’s dreams, to hold conversations that had little or no connection with events of the ordinary day-to-day world.”

With her poet’s eye, Anna perceived that Modi, despite his circle of friends, suffered the melancholy and loneliness of a foreigner in Paris, and had sacrificed everything for his art. But he believed in himself and, despite many failures, had the courage to keep on working: “I knew him when he was poor, and I did not understand how he survived—he didn’t possess even a shadow of recognition as an artist. . . . All that was divine in Modigliani only sparkled through a sort of gloom.” Modi, who wanted to keep Anna all to himself, avoided his friends but also revealed his isolation: “He seemed surrounded by a dense ring of solitude. I don’t recall that he exchanged greetings with anyone in the Luxembourg Gardens or the Latin Quarter, where everyone more or less knew one another. I didn’t hear him mention the name of any acquaintance, friend, or artist, nor did I hear him tell a single joke. . . . He was courteous, but this was not the result of his upbringing, but of his exalted spirit.”

They visited the Louvre, where Modi, then a young sculptor, talked passionately about Egyptian art. As the horse-cabs clattered by in the moonlight, he took her to see the old Paris in the streets of the Latin

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Quarter. She remembered that “we would sit under his umbrella on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, a warm summer rain would be falling, and nearby slumbered le vieux palais à la Italienne [the old Luxemburg palace, built in the Italian style]. Together we would recite Verlaine, whom we knew well by heart, and we were glad that we could remember the same things.” Their mutual love of Paul Verlaine’s poetry sealed their love for each other. They seemed to look at the world in the same way and with the same belief in their destiny as artists. Verlaine’s poems, with their heady mixture of nostalgia and torment, their images of statues, moonlight and rain, were just the sort of thing Modi might have written if he had been a poet. His affair with Anna was romantic, poetic and intensely literary, and he recited Verlaine as he’d once recited Dante and D’Annunzio.

Verlaine’s “My Recurring Dream,” with its opposition of hot fever and tears to cool hands and stone, suggested their own guilt-ridden, bittersweet passion: She does understand . . . and the fever of my pale brow Only by her can be cooled, as she weeps. . . .

Her gaze is like the gaze of statues, And her voice, distant, calm, and low, Has the inflection of dear voices that are stilled.

“Moonlight,” mixing dreams and passion, also conveys the melancholy mood of their ephemeral love: With the calm moonlight, beautiful and sad, That brings dreams to the birds in the trees And the sobs of ecstasy to the fountains, To the tall fountains slender among the statuary.

Sitting under his enormous old black umbrella, they remembered Verlaine’s famously heart-wrenching “Tears Flow in My Heart,” with its doleful vowels and persistent rhyme of “pleure” and “coeur” (weep and heart):

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Tears flow in my heart As rain falls on the town; What languor is this That creeps into my heart?

Gentle sound of the rain On earth and roofs!

For an aching heart Is the song of the rain!

Verlaine transformed the pity and sadness, the sobs, tears and heartbreak of love into poignant lyrics. His poetry connected art with grief (“les sanglots longs / Des violons” –the long sobs of violins) and made Modi’s poverty and melancholy seem beautiful, even dignified. For Modi, the poems recalled his wasted youth; for Anna, they suggested the willing self-sacrifice (for art and for others) that she would endure throughout her life.

Anna recalled an incident that symbolized their magical understanding and intimacy, even when apart: Once, when I went to call on Modigliani, he was out; we had apparently misunderstood one another, so I decided to wait several minutes. I was clutching an armful of red roses. A window above the locked gates of the studio was open. Having nothing better to do, I began to toss the flowers in through the window.

Then, without waiting any longer, I left.

When we met again, he was perplexed at how I had gotten into the locked room, because he had the key. I explained what had happened. “But that’s impossible—they were lying there so beautifully.”

She used those few minutes very well; she left the studio and put the flowers in her place. The red roses in this fable not only flew over the gate and through the window, but also—like two embracing lovers—fell into an exquisite pose.

Completely absorbed in his sculpture, Modi did not paint Anna,

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who would have been a ravishing subject, but he made many sketches of her. “I didn’t pose [or did she?] for his drawings of me,” she recalled, “he did them at home and gave them to me later. There were sixteen [or twenty] in all, and he asked me to mount and hang them in my room at [her family estate] Tsarskoe Selo. They vanished in that house during the first years of the Revolution.” Anna’s biographer Roberta Reeder reproduces two slight sketches of her, with thick dark hair and a thin elongated body.

In one, she’s standing and seen from behind; in the other, she’s seated with extended arms and seen from the front.

Four other drawings are now in Paris and Rouen. Two of them, more finished versions of the earlier sketches, have shaded outlines that give depth to the form of her figure. The first shows the strands of her high black hair, the delicate features of her face and, in profile, her distinctive, unmistakable nose. The second portrays her bent head, fingers, navel and up-tilted breasts, and shows, framed on the back wall, a childlike sketch of a little house. The other two drawings, cut off beneath the buttocks, are more interesting. In one, Anna lies on her belly, her arm tucked under her cheek, apparently asleep. In the fourth drawing her reclining body is unnaturally elongated. A dark, curtained, slightly menacing window appears in the background and a headless man, with muscular left arm, stands over her as protector—or voyeur. Modi’s cool, objective drawings contrast with the intensity of his love.

Reeder connects Modi to one of Anna’s early poems, which shows that she decided to end the affair by returning to her husband and to Russia, the anguished source of her poetic inspiration: “When you’re drunk,” written in 1911 when Anna was close to Modi, juxtaposes “images that convey how the everyday world was transformed in the mind of the poet through her guilty love” (she was still married to Gumylov): When you’re drunk it’s so much fun— Your stories don’t make sense.

And early fall has stung The elms with yellow flags.

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We’ve strayed into the land of deceit And we’re repenting bitterly, Why then are we smiling these Strange and frozen smiles?

We wanted piercing anguish Instead of placid happiness.

I won’t abandon my comrade, So dissolute and mild.

“The poem shifts suddenly,” Reeder adds, “from the speaker talking to her lover to the metaphor of yellow autumn leaves resembling flags fluttering in the wind—then abruptly returns to the speaker’s feelings of guilt and joy.” In this poem the transient moment of drunken pleasure--Modi needed alcohol to shake him out of his somber mood--is immediately undercut by the guilt and regret that makes the lovers awkward and frozen. Anna must have had her share of “piercing anguish” with Modigliani, who seemed doomed to suffer and could not possibly provide “placid happiness.” The poem ends with her decision to extinguish their future for the sake of her dissolute husband.

After returning to Russia in 1911, Anna joined the circle of Acmeist poets and became the brightest star of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde. She was cut off from the West by the Great War, the Russian Revolution and the Soviet dictatorship. But she learned of Modi’s death from an obituary that compared him to Botticelli, and discussed him with Ilya Ehrenburg and read about him in a book by the French writer Francis Carco. She later recalled, with some exaggeration and nostalgia: “ I was lucky. I met him before everyone else. Everyone who remembers Modigliani now made friends with him in 1914, 1915. Whereas I knew him in 1910 and 1911.”

A legendary seductress, Anna had deep romantic attachments with many talented men and three husbands. But her life, like Modi’s, was tragic.

Under Stalin, her work was suppressed, two husbands and her son were sent to prison camps in the Soviet Gulag, and Gumylov was executed on a false charge. She was expelled from the Writers Union, had her books pulped and was completely silenced for more than thirty years. Deprived

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of her food rations, she eked out a living as a translator. Nevertheless, she memorized her poems until they could finally be published after Stalin’s death, bravely bore witness to the horrors of twentieth-century Russia and became the wintry conscience of her country. “Requiem,” her major poem, preserved in poetic memory the torments of a generation.

When Isaiah Berlin visited Anna, she spoke of her friendship with Modi and still had one of his drawings hanging over the fireplace.

The others, along with his love letters (none of Modi’s words about her has survived) were lost during the terrible three-year-siege of Leningrad.

Berlin admired “her intellect, critical power and ironical humour [which] seemed to exist side by side with a dramatic, at times visionary and prophetic, sense of reality.” He concluded that “her entire life was one . . . uninterrupted indictment of Russian reality.” Anna died after a lifetime of suffering, forty-six years after Modi, in 1966.

Modi and Anna met at the height of their physical beauty and creative powers, and at the threshold of their careers. Her return to Russia averted the inevitable disaster that would have occurred if they had remained together. Young, gifted and full of hope, they couldn’t imagine the tragedies that would soon overwhelm them, though she later wrote that “the future, which as we know casts its shadow long before it appears . . . cut through our dreams.” Anna was, along with Picasso, the only real genius in Modi’s life. She was his ideal love—never again to be realized—the only woman with whom, despite the undertones of sadness, he had a joyful and harmonious attachment.

Modi’s great friend Max Jacob (1876-1944) was born in Quimper, Brittany, the son of a Jewish tailor. The art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, said that Jacob’s strange, piercing, “admirable eyes, with their extraordinarily tender quality, seemed to contain all the sadness of Israel.” Jacob had been severely beaten as a child and as an adult suffered from overwhelming anxieties. At the age of eighteen he entered the Ecole Coloniale, but his training for a post abroad was interrupted by military service—also interrupted when he was discharged six weeks later as a hopelessly incompetent soldier.

To sustain his precarious existence, Jacob took on a series of humiliating jobs. He was a sweeper in a department store, carpenter’s helper and lawyer’s clerk; tutor, piano teacher, singer and secretary; art

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critic for the newspaper Le Gaulois. He dabbled in painting and had once shared a room with the impoverished Picasso. They even shared a bed: Jacob slept in it at night, Picasso during the day. He also had a sideline in magic and mysticism, in fetishes and cabalistic signs as well as in astrology, horoscopes, palmistry, fortune-telling, divination and clairvoyance, and encouraged Modi’s fascination with these arcane subjects. Modi’s drawing of Jacob included astrological and cabalistic allusions: a crescent moon, a six-pointed Star of David and a French inscription that read: “To my brother very tenderly the night of 7 March the moon grows larger.”

The hopelessly unworldly and high-minded Jacob inevitably failed in all these ventures. One critic called him an “unemployed artist, unreadable poet, exile from the coteries of Parisian life.”

Short, puny, unprepossessing, and an abject coward, Jacob was a bent-over, sharp-nosed, craggy-faced, gnome-like man, who in 1906 looked much older than thirty. Picasso’s lover Fernande Olivier wrote that “he was already bald, with a nervous, evasive expression, high colour and a pretty, elegantly curved mouth, which gave a suggestion of delicacy and wit and malice as well.” He wore a long raincoat with a bright red lining; and his tiny room always had a peculiarly musty odor, compounded by the overflowing garbage cans just beneath his window. His room was, the critic Charles Douglas recalled, “a mixture of smoke, paraffin, incense, old furniture, and ether. He received [guests] once a week, quite as a man of the world, a curious collection, not of friends only, but sometimes utter strangers.”

Francis Carco captured the multifarious aspects of Jacob’s paradoxical character, which so intrigued Modi: “He was gossipy and sublime, obliging, eager, bantering, profound, coquettish, ironical, sophisticated. . . .

Max’s kindness, his distinguished manners, his readiness to help others and his clever talk inclined people to put up with him.” Other friends noted Jacob’s baffling “mixture of genius and ridiculousness, love and hate, sweetness and rage, kindness and cruelty. . . . [He] could be mischievous, dirty, bitter, arrogant, perfidious, thoughtless, insolent and much else, but he also had enormous charm and a sporadically saintly nature.”

Picasso’s biographer John Richardson emphasized Jacob’s liveliness, learning, and elfish humor: “He was always ready to share the treasures of his well-stocked mind, his poetic imagination, his mystical obsessions

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and his high camp sense of fun. . . . He was infinitely perceptive about art as well as literature and an encyclopedia of erudition—as at home in the arcane aspects of mysticism as in the shallows of l’art populaire. He was also very, very funny.” To amuse his companions Max would roll up his trousers, expose his hairy legs and do an animated dance accompanied by an absurd little song. The artist Gino Severini, enchanted like Modi and all of Jacob’s friends, offered a balanced view of his elusive personality: “Jacob is often considered a sort of clown or juggler by some, by others a magician or mystic, and yet others see predominantly his vices and excesses. . . . But what a refined and elegant man!” Jacob believed that drugs heightened his poetic imagination and ability to predict the future.

In pharmacies he could buy his favorite flasks of ether for only thirty centimes and Modi sniffed the readily available liquid under the expert guidance of the addict.

When Jacob was still an atheist, “he would throw himself on his knees when passing [the cathedral of] Notre Dame and implore: ‘God, if by chance you exist, see to it that I am not too unhappy.’ ” But on October 7, 1909, three years after meeting Modi, Jacob had a vision of Christ (or, according to some dubious friends, a drug-induced prank) and rapturously wrote: “There was something on the red wallpaper. My flesh fell to the floor. I was stripped by lightning. . . . The celestial body is on the wall of my poor room. . . . He is wearing a robe of yellow silk with blue cuffs. He turns and I see that peaceful shining face.” Jacob converted to Catholicism, was received into the Church in February 1915 and took the name of Cyprien, a saint associated with magic. Picasso, his sceptical godfather, jokingly gave the new Christian a copy of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ with the inscription: “To my brother Cyprien Max Jacob. In memory of his baptism.” In about 1921 Jacob dedicated a poem, “To Monsieur Modigliani to prove to him that I am a poet,” in which he described, in light-hearted fashion, his Catholic conversion and what God meant to him.

Jacob’s inability to resolve the conflict between his religious beliefs and his homosexuality and drug addiction deepened his misery and intensified his sense of sin. His homosexual friend Jean Cocteau observed that “Max was unlucky in his love affairs, always getting involved with people who didn’t give a damn about him. . . . Max dreamed of chastity,

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and he was always punishing himself because he could never attain it.”

A friend, who’d been shocked by Jacob’s lascivious behavior at an artists’ ball, wrote of her sense of shame when he publicly made love to an attractive boy in the studio of the artist Moise Kisling: “ ‘ He’s cracked, you know,’ Kisling said to me, with a laugh. ‘He’s turned Catholic, but look how he acts, the swine. And yet, if I asked him for his best coat, he’d give it to me for nothing. He takes drugs, you know. He says he saw Christ in his room, very handsome and smart. Sounds likely! If I were Christ I wouldn’t go into Max’s room, never fear.’ ” The major themes of Jacob’s poetry are the pleasures and sadness of rural and urban life, and the consolations of Catholicism. His poems— racy, colloquial, ironic—avoid profound emotion and combine the quotidian with the macabre. One critic wrote that “his work is a paradoxical mixture of fantastic humour and mysticism. While writing poems which combine parody, pun, burlesque and verbal acrobatics of every kind, he lived a life of fervent piety. . . . His most influential work was Le cornet à dés [The Dice-Box] (1917), autobiographical prose poems on apparently gratuitous subjects (a pointless anecdote, a nightmarish vision, a sharp visual perception) in a brilliant style and masterly rhythms which inspired later innovators, particularly the Surrealists.”

Two of Jacob’s aesthetic ideas influenced Modi’s art. Jacob’s essay on style, first published in 1916 as a Preface to Le cornet à dés— whose title alludes to Stéphane Mallarmé’s volume of poems, Un coup de dés (1897)—advocated the use of a classical style in order to place one’s work in a richer thematic tradition. Following this idea Modi modeled his elongated nudes on the great tradition of nude paintings from Titian and Velázquez to Goya and Ingres. In the same Preface, Jacob, who discussed these ideas with Modi, also insisted on the modern idea that “a work of art exists in its own right and not in relation to reality.” This aesthetic principle seemed to justify Modi’s divergence from realism and his intensely idiosyncratic vision.

Modi’s three portraits of Jacob, one of his favorite models, are quite different from Picasso’s two pencil drawings (1915 and 1919) of him. Picasso’s realistic, incisive works show the vulnerability, pain and sadness in Jacob’s character. In Modi’s bust-length portrait, painted in 1916, the gray-haired Jacob wears a curved-brim top hat (cut off at the top

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but covering his bald dome), black jacket, white shirt and blue tie flecked with white dots. One eye, under high-arched eyebrows, is cross-hatched over blue; the other is blank gray. Modi gives him a ruddy complexion, and captures the long, aquiline blade of his nose, the sly evasive expression of his small, thin-lipped mouth, and his charming dandified air. The affectionate portrait makes Jacob more fashionable and self-assured than he really was, but reveals his intelligence, sophistication and wit.

Jacob and Modi were both Jewish, talented, obscure, generous and desperately poor. Jacob valued Modi’s extraordinary understanding of and ability to recite French poetry; and the critic André Salmon hinted that Jacob (like so many others) was actually in love with Modi. The poet described the painter as a “broad-shouldered man, with a vaguely Dantesque profile, but short nose. It was Jewish. His laugh was lively, clear and quick. He was usually discontented, indignant and grumbling.

His face and body were beautiful and very dark. He had the bearing of a gentleman in rags.”

Deeply sympathetic, Jacob connected Modi’s negative qualities to his pursuit of an aesthetic ideal: “His unbearable pride, grim ingratitude, arrogance; all of these expressed nothing else but his longing for crystalline purity.” He praised Modi’s character and lamented his early death: “Modigliani, your work . . . is savagely cut in two by a ghost. . . .

Death came and our sorrows with it! Your life of simple grandeur was lived by an aristocrat, and we loved you. We’re left with mourning and you remain sadly close to us.”

Max Jacob had the saddest story of all Modi’s self-destructive friends. The last photo of him shows a stooped, shabby and self-effacing figure. Though a Catholic convert, he was forced during the Nazi Occupation to wear the yellow star that stigmatized the Jews. He lived in an abbey with monks, but they were unable to hide or protect him. In February 1944, only six months before the liberation of France, he was arrested and sent to the prison camp at Drancy (north of Paris) to await transport to Auschwitz. In Drancy poor Max apologized to the other Jewish prisoners for offering prayers to a Christian God, and died of pneumonia before he could be sent to certain death in the gas chambers of Poland. Had Modi lived, he would have suffered the same tragic fate as Max Jacob.

There is a great contrast between Jacob, a weak and cowardly

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failure, and Blaise Cendrars, a heroic and adventurous warrior. Cendrars had met Modi just after the artist arrived in Paris in 1906 and was struck by how well dressed he was, how rich he seemed. Since then, Cendrars had traveled the world and fought in the war. He was a spectacular character, a fascinating liar who created legends about himself. But the facts were colorful enough. Born Frédéric Sauser in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, between Neuchâtel and the French border, he came from an Anabaptist family that had fled the French Jura. Soon after his birth his father, a professor of mathematics, moved the family to Egypt and started a hotel. Cendrars, constantly on the move, was educated in Naples, spent his late teens as a Swiss watch salesman in St. Petersburg, and studied philosophy and medicine at the University of Berne. In 1911 he took the newly completed Trans-Siberian railroad across Russia, which inspired his first major work, La Prose du Transsibérien (1913). He was in New York in 1912, moved to Paris that year, became a friend of Guillaume Apollinaire and Marc Chagall, married a Polish woman and had two sons.

When the Great War broke out he joined the French Foreign Legion and had his right arm blown off by a shell burst. His military citation, testifying to his courage under fire, reported that “although severely wounded at the beginning of the attack on September 28, 1915 and weakened by loss of blood he continued to lead his squadron and remained with them until the end of the battle.” Severini, struck by his insouciance, wrote that he took the loss of his arm “in stride with such high spirits, ease, and sense of humor. It was incredible to watch the gestural effects that Cendrars managed to express with that empty sleeve.” After the war, the multi-talented Cendrars worked for the director Abel Gance on J’accuse, a film based on Zola’s defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrote the scenario for Darius Milhaud’s ballet The Creation of the World and made five trips to South America. In World War Two, he saw combat as a correspondent for French newspapers.

Several English and American artists and writers were impressed

by Cendrars’ thirst for escape and adventure, his savage melancholy and violent temperament. The English painter Frank Budgen declared that “Cendrars seemed to have been everywhere: Russia. America. New York. St. Petersburg. Forests of the Amazon. He knew them all.” John Dos Passos exclaimed of Cendrars, who loved fast cars, that “it was hairraising to spin with him around the mountain roads. He steered with

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one hand and changed the gears on his little French car with his hook . . . took every curve on two wheels.” Ernest Hemingway, who hung out with Cendrars at the Closerie des Lilas, recalled an empty sleeve rather than a hook. In Hemingway’s account, he was (like Hemingway himself) an entertaining, heavy drinking fantasist: “[I saw] Blaise Cendrars, with his broken boxer’s face and his pinned up empty sleeve, rolling a cigarette with his one good hand. He was a good companion until he drank too much and, at that time, when he was lying, he was more interesting than many men telling a story truly.”

Cendrars’ disciple and imitator, Henry Miller, was rapturous about his tough guy persona, irresistible to women. He told Anaïs Nin: “Cendrars looks rough, like a sailor—he is one at bottom—and he speaks rather loudly, but very well. He has only one arm, the empty one, or halfarm slung affectionately around my neck.” In Montmartre, there were “whores hanging on to us, and Cendrars hugging them like a sailor, and urging me to take one, take two, take as many as you want.” Miller wrote that Cendrars, also passionate about Les Chants de Maldoror, looked like the broken-nosed boxer and actor Victor McLaglen and “emanates health, joy, vitality.” He praised Cendrars for consorting “with all types, including bandits, murderers, revolutionaries and other varieties of fanatics,” and for being a “roustabout, tramp, bum, panhandler, mixer, bruiser, adventurer, sailor, soldier, tough guy.” In short, Miller believed that he uniquely “restores to contemporary life the elements of the heroic, the imaginative and the fabulous.”

Blaise Cendrars said that Modigliani expressed his emotions even while painting: “His shoulders heaved. He panted. He had grimaces and cried out. You couldn’t come near.” Like Miller, Modi admired Cendrar’s zest and creativity and idealized him as a heroic version of himself. Cendrars took his pen name from the French words “braise” and “cendres,” which mean “glowing embers” and “ashes,” and saw art as a form of arson. His books, a literary historian has observed, “are attempts to isolate the ego he incessantly contemplated in his multifarious activities—businessman, film-director, jewel-peddler, journalist. . . . His characters live and move on an epic scale and he has been praised for the resulting ‘life-like’ quality of his work (in fact due to skillful narrative art), which breaks with the French analytic tradition.” Given his energetic volubility in life, it’s not

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surprising that Cendrars conceived “the poem as a Dionysian act, the poet inspired by a [kind of Nietzschean] creative frenzy. . . . His output became a flood, diffuse in structure, torrential in composition and bewildering in its variety.”

Capitalizing on Modigliani’s notoriety after his death, Cendrars liked to tell a dubious story about their days of drinking. His account, embellished by nostalgia, emphasized their swaggering male friendship and his superiority to Modi. Sitting together on the banks of the Seine with partly emptied bottles of wine and watching the legions of laundresses floating on the bateaux lavoir, they drunkenly toasted the washerwomen, who replied with obscene gestures. Modi offered to give the ugliest old hag the remaining bottle if she allowed him to kiss her on the mouth. She refused, he stripped off his clothes, fished the cooling bottle out of the river and walked toward her barge without the benefit of a plank. Since he couldn’t swim, he quickly sank and was bravely rescued by his onearmed copain. They celebrated the absurd incident by finishing off the last bottle of wine.

Cendrars’ minor poem, “On a Portrait by Modigliani,” which compares a beating heart to a Swiss ticking watch, vaguely indicated the emotional impact of Modi’s paintings. It was printed as an introduction to the catalogue of his one-man show at Berthe Weill’s gallery in December 1917: The interior world The human heart with its 17 movements in the spirit And the to and fro of passion.

Modi did a 1917 sketch of Cendrars with his head tilted back and a cigarette dangling from his lips. He also, Cendrars wrote, “painted my portrait as if he were sketching, very quickly. It took him about three hours, and between brush-strokes he recited poetry by Dante and Baudelaire.” In this portrait, he gave Cendrars a prim little mouth and a broad but not broken nose, and made him look more sensitive than tough.

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Modi, shamefully neglected in his lifetime, never made more than a total of $1,000. But after a spectacular posthumous revival, his idiosyncratic portraits and luscious nudes now make millions for dealers and collectors. One of his paintings fetched an astronomical $26.9 million in 2003, $31.3 million in 2004, $68.9 million in 2010, $70.7 million in 2014 and $170.4 million to a Shanghai collector in 2015. His physical beauty, glamour and charm, his great talent and frenzied work, his self-destruction and early death made him a legend, which added to the commercial value of his paintings. His life was tragic, but he had great courage as an artist and the strength of character to forge his own individual style. He could not entirely fulfill his artistic destiny but, wounded and inspired by great poetry, left us some of the most beautiful and original paintings of the twentieth century.

next:

BLACK AMERICA: THE STATE OF THE CULTURE a salmagundi symposium

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Black Intellectuals and The Condition of the Culture

The Black Intellectual & A Salmagundi Symposium

with Orlando Patterson Margo Jefferson

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The Condition of the Culture John McWhorter Darryl Pinckney Thomas Chatterton Williams at Skidmore College

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Session One: The Racial Delusion Opening Remarks by Thomas Chatterton Williams THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS: It’s an honor to be here with writers and thinkers whom I’ve looked up to and tried to model myself on for years, as I’ve tried to find my own way. In preparing for this conference over the past year, I kept returning to Bob Boyers’ original framing* through the lens of Harold W. Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. That book is one of the works like [Allan Bloom’s] The Closing of the American Mind that people may or may not have read, but whose title alone seems to resonate with everyone for an enormous variety of reasons, though often, as is certainly the case for me, not for the same reasons that motivated the author in the first place. But as I thought about it, it occurred to me—as others have pointed out—that one of Cruse’s undeniable achievements was really just to think long and hard about what American-ness, and thus identity, means and could mean. This was an urgent project in his day, and it may indeed be of even greater urgency in our own. What would it mean to re-think American-ness in the postObama, post-post-racial era of Donald Trump? What I liked about Cruse was that he was so thoroughly anti-status-quo, so unimpressed with radical rhetoric that did not entail some connection with meaningful action. This * The “original framing” appeared in a letter to the participants invited to this Salmagundi conference.

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is, I think—a distinction between rhetoric and action—worth dwelling on.

Action can be defined pretty generously. It need not have anything to do with a determination to go out and get arrested, but at minimum, I think, moving beyond mere rhetoric requires some form of alignment between one’s words and one’s behavior.

And so I can’t help but notice that—if there is, indeed, a crisis of the Black intellectual who, by so many measures is thriving today, more sought out and provided with platforms than he or she has ever been—then it probably has something to do with this very disconnect. Many of our most audible black voices today will say things that do sound radical. In one small—but not frivolous—example, we might use a formulation like, “people who believe they are white” in their writing.” That is not at all empty rhetoric. It’s quite radical. It’s a way of saying that whiteness is not something that is real, which is a way of saying that race itself is an illusion. This is a decades-old insight, of course. James Baldwin made the point as well as anyone. But it is nonetheless one that is, by any measure, still subversive, capable of raising many readers’ eyebrows, or worse.

But many of the intellectuals using such penetrating rhetoric today too often leave it on the page. They seldom ever display the kind of radical imagination, or perhaps just the willingness to face ridicule, that would force them to conduct their lives as though they genuinely believed, or wanted to believe, that the implications of such statements were true. In fact, much of the time the rhetoric itself can seem inconsistent. And thus they represent whiteness, and therefore race, as something much more like an essence, resulting in anti-racism work that can be powerful, testimonial, well-meaning, and even convincing, yet paradoxically capable of reinforcing the same received and deeply constricting ideas of racial difference they claim elsewhere to want to counteract. And so even though this is not at all what Cruse would have meant, I have come to believe wholeheartedly that the only action sufficiently radical to accompany a statement like “people who believe they are white,” which is just a way of saying that race is a lie, is to follow that logic to its necessary endpoint.

This would mean unequivocally renouncing racial categories and, to the extent possible, taking into account one’s class position and other factors, finding ways to live one’s life accordingly, in defiance of the convoluted logic upholding the color caste system. One radical, non-violent, and

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possibly self-sacrificing act for the black intellectual would be to start refusing to check boxes.

Let me backtrack and admit that I have not always been so willing, or able, to question conventional ideas of race and identity. I’ve spent almost the entirety of my life believing the fundamentally American dictum that a single drop of black blood makes a person black, primarily because that person can never be white. My father, a brown-skinned man from segregated Texas, is old enough to be my grandfather, and his grandfather was old enough to be born in the final year of chattel slavery. My mother is a pale-skinned Anglo-Saxon protestant from a bible-thumping, evangelical family in southern California. As a family, we were an island unto ourselves in a de facto segregated New Jersey town, whose white side we lived on as a form of silent protest against the attempts of various realtors to steer us across their invisible, but ultimately real, red lines. Yet despite these particularities we never questioned that ours was an unequivocally black household. Sometimes my father, a sociologist by training, would even joke, half-jest, that his wife wasn’t really white at all—she was just lightskinned, he’d laugh. Once, when I was ten or so years old, I pressed him on this, saying “Come on, you don’t really believe that, do you?” “Well, she’s got black consciousness, doesn’t she?” is what he’d say. It strikes me now, as an adult, that this exchange could occur nowhere else in the world but in the United States. And yet it made a certain amount of sense to me then. What I know is that my parents tried to prepare my brother and me for a reality beyond their doorstep as best they could, by proudly and confidently proclaiming and championing our blackness, so that, in turn, we might do the same, when the world would inevitably demand that we take a stance. As recently as 2012, a year before my French wife got pregnant, I published an essay in the New York Times defining my future children as unassailably black. They would be mixed, yes, but they would be as black as W.E.B. DuBois, if they wanted to be, I reasoned. In retrospect, I can see that it was a defiant last gasp of something, some way of looking at the world that I must have understood as being, whether I wanted to admit it or not, under dire threat.

At the time, I was convinced that I was in the right, and even pressed my wife to accept the same view, which was completely foreign to her European mind—a mind which had, frankly, never been exposed

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to plantation logic. Today I wince when I read that Op-ed. Parenthood changes everyone, but looking back on it now, I can say without exaggeration that I walked into that delivery room as one person, and came out an altogether different man. The sight of my blond-haired, blue-eyed, impossibly fair-skinned child shocked me, along with the knowledge that she was indubitably mine. I thought of Albert Murray’s wonderful line in The Omni-Americans: “But any fool can see that the white people aren’t really white, and the black people aren’t black.” And I did feel myself to be a fool right then. Like confronting the irrevocable knowledge that the sun does not, in fact, rise or set, contrary to linguistic convention. The reality of my daughter’s appearance laid bare for me a convenient fiction. From that moment on, I was consumed by three deceptively simple questions: What, if anything, remains black in my child? What—if I am a black man capable of having a daughter who looks like this—does race, as we construct it, even mean? What might all of our lives look like, should we dare to see past the color line? I began to write a book attempting to address these questions. Before long, I had to face the fact that it would require nothing less than for my actions to become commensurate, as commensurate as possible, with my rhetoric.

What has any of this to do with the black intellectual? While I was living in Berlin in 2017, I became intrigued by the notion of sonderweg in German history: literally the “special path” down which the German people have been fated to wander. In different eras, and depending on who employed it, the term could imply different things. It began as a positive myth during the imperial period, as some German scholars told themselves about their political system and their culture. During and after the Second World War, it turned distinctly negative, a way for outsiders to make sense of the singularity of Germany’s crimes. Yet whether viewed from within or without, from left or right, the Germans could be seen, through such a conceptual lens, as possessing some kind of collective essence. A specialness capable of explaining everything about them. And that’s why one could speak of a trajectory from Luther to Hitler, and interpret history not as some kind of chaotic jumble, but as a crisp, linear process. There’s something both terrifying and oddly soothing in such a formulation. For better or worse, it leaves many important matters beyond the scope of choice or action. It imagines Germans as having been either glorious

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or terrible puppets, powerful agents of forces nonetheless beyond their control. A similar unifying theory has been taking hold in America. Its roots lie in the national triple sin of slavery, land theft, and genocide. In this view, the conditions at the core of the country’s founding don’t just reverberate through the ages—they determine the present. No matter what we might hope, that original sin—white supremacy—explains everything: an all-American sonderweg.

The most shocking aspect of today’s mainstream anti-racist discourse, still the primary arena for the black intellectual, is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race, specifically the specialness of whiteness, that white supremacist thinkers cherish. Woke anti-racism, even when it pays lip-service to phrases like the aforementioned “people who believe they are white,” actually proceeds from the premise that race is real—if not biological, then socially constructed, and equally, if not more, significant still. This woke anti-racism puts it in sync with the toxic presumptions of white supremacism that would also like to insist on the fundamentality of racial difference. Working towards opposing conclusions, racists and many anti-racists alike eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off and legitimizing each other, while any of us searching for grey areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed and determinative, and almost supernatural in scope. This way of thinking about human difference is seductive for many reasons, but it has failed us.

In the months since the outcome of the 2016 election, I’ve been dismayed to see an opportunistic demagogue provoke racial resentment across the country and within families (mine as well). But I’ve also been troubled to watch well-meaning white friends who, on my Twitter timeline and Facebook News Feed, flagellate themselves, sincerely or performatively apologizing for their whiteness as if they were somehow born into original sin. John McWhorter has called this development “the flawed new religion of anti-racism…the current idea that the enlightened white person is to regularly—ritually?—‘acknowledge’ that they possess White Privilege.” He wrote this in a 2015 essay. Classes, seminars, teachings are devoted to making whites understand the need for this. Nominally, this acknowledgement of white privilege is couched as a prelude to activism.

But in practice, the acknowledgement is treated as the main meal. The call

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for people to soberly acknowledge their white privilege as a self-standing, totemic act is based on the same self-justification as acknowledging one’s fundamental sinfulness as a Christian. “One is born marked by original sin; to be born white is to be born with the stain of unearned privilege,” McWhorter writes. And so, it is therefore to be born with an essence; in other words, to walk that “special path” without excusing the racists or the sexists, which are, by all indications, both numerous and emboldened.

Today’s dominant liberal discourse, which the black intellectual plays a powerful role in shaping—and which sets up all whites as the nation’s only genuine actors, and all blacks and, to varying degrees, other minorities as their hapless props—has too often been counterproductive. The essential tendency, whether explicitly or implicitly stated—which Baldwin described as the “insistence that it is [man’s] categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended”—is always an evasion of life’s complexity.

Of course, black and other non-white people cannot meaningfully renounce their race if a significant number of whites do not join them. But neither can even the best-intentioned white people do this in a vacuum. We are a composite nation, as well as a nation of composites. And alt-right fantasies of an all-white ethno-state in Montana and the Pacific Northwest notwithstanding, we are stuck together. The racial resentments conjured and magnified by the 2016 election amount to a giant step in the wrong direction. It is impossible to deny that. But falling back into our narrow identities, even those forged by legitimate grievance, and foisted upon us by the bigotry of others, only delivers a further victory to the opponents of a healthy society.

To shift this dismal paradigm, thinking people of good will across the political spectrum are going to have to find a new vocabulary to move beyond abstract racial categorization and reflexive tribalism. And then they’re going to have to allow that vocabulary to change the way they act. Merely gesturing at the notion that race is a construct will never be enough. Treating race as a social fact amounts to nothing more than acknowledging that we were mistaken to think of it as a biological fact, and then insisting that we have to keep making the mistake. Walter Benn Michaels incisively points that out. A more durable rejection of the racism and xenophobia animating our public life requires an appeal to a deeper, more profound, and racially transcendent humanism. This, in turn, would

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demand the convincing expression of shared ideals and democratic values.

At its rhetorical best, “the American bedrock,” these are accessible to all, regardless of personal background. As James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, and many others have eloquently pointed out, racism—which I don’t believe can be meaningfully eradicated while maintaining the belief in race—hurts us all. It denies to those understood as black their humanity, while consigning those deemed white to inhumanity and indifference. But this hurts black people even more.

My wish, then, foolish as it may be—foolish in Albert Murray’s sense, I hope—would be for as many people as possible, of all skin tones and hair textures, to turn away from the racial delusion. But I don’t think that it would be unfitting in the least for black intellectuals—who too often, for so many reasons, end up reciting an American sonderweg notion of white supremacy—to take the lead here. Not only do we have the most to gain from the dismantling of the American black/white binary, we also have scarce incentive to wait for all, or even most, of the people deemed “white” to get on board. The fact is that we are all here because race, as well as the invented category of blackness into which so many of us have been thrown, has functioned first and foremost as a problem to be solved, distracting the so-called black intellectual from other pursuits, draining precious mental and spiritual energy. That the dreadful deceit was not put forth by the people most powerfully oppressed is an objection that resonates emotionally, but once we accept that truth, it does little to move us forward. One pressing task for the black intellectual—and it’s far from an easy one—will be to develop and model a rhetorical framework compelling and persuasive enough to inspire us all into a genuinely radical action.

ROBERT BOYERS: I have a first question for Thomas. It has to do with an extraordinary essay you wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attack on Kanye West. You speak in that essay about Coates’s “Mullah-like authority to assert communal possession of other people he deems to be a part of his community.” Coates claims for himself, you say, “the right not merely to refute a person’s argument, but to deracinate [that person] entirely,” as if he knows what all black people must share. Would you talk a bit more about that notion of “Mullah-like authority” and about that sense that there is a way to read people out of the race.

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TCW: The Coates essay was really disturbing to me. In his essay, Coates essentially pulled Kanye West’s black credentials from him, and he assumed his authority to do so, as though there is one way to think that is properly black, which is terrifying. It was an interesting thing to look at in our popular culture, because both of these men are extremely popular.

And a lot of black people weren’t comfortable giving up Kanye West, even though in sidling up to Donald Trump, he was doing things that really bothered a lot of people. I think that there were still far too many who felt comfortable that Coates had the authority to come down with the tablets and make a proclamation. And I said it was Mullah-like because there is, in fundamentalist religion, an idea of correct and incorrect behaviors.

You know, I want to get into a conversation where we talk about the fact that we’re moving beyond race, but this idea that there’s an essential blackness, and that one can violate it, has long been imposed upon black figures—Michael Jackson, for example. It was a moment in popular culture that really shocked me. Kanye West has this line, “This is my life, homie, you define yours.” And there are too many black people thinking in too many different ways for there to be one correct way.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Thomas, I disagreed with Coates on that, too, but I want to fill in a little bit of what you’re saying about the idea that he was behaving as a Mullah. Because I think that if Coates were sitting here, he’d be clicking his tongue and rolling his eyes. I think that what he’d think we were misunderstanding is this: it’s not that he was behaving like a Mullah; he feels that if you’re not fundamentally committed to battling the racist abuse that we suffer, then there’s something wrong with you. He’d say that it’s not Mullah-like, but just basic moral logic that if you’re not on certain barricades, then clearly you’re not interested in defending yourself. What’s on Coates’s mind is two things (though I can’t be in Coates’s mind, this is an attempt to reconstruct it): people are battling racist cops, and that’s the defining experience, particularly for any black man. Therefore racism is powerful in that way primarily.

When anyone talks about America being founded on racism, what they are mainly thinking about is the cops—and we know that Coates is definitely thinking about the cops. The second thing is that in general, Coates has his line that there’s nothing wrong with black America that the eclipse

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of white supremacy couldn’t fix. What he means is that if there are black teenagers killing each other over sneakers every summer, that’s because of how white people feel about black people and how that’s inculcated itself into our structures. If there are not enough black people going into STEM subjects, if they are under-represented in any way in any profession, the reason is because white people don’t like them and because racist structures control how America works. If you believe that—and Coates does—then it’s not Mullah-like behavior: he is behaving as a rational, self-concerned, moral actor, and he doesn’t understand why Kanye West isn’t one.

Now, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s vision of how cops and race work is vastly oversimplified, and you and I have talked about how there’s a whole article to be written about that, but Coates doesn’t know that, and even if he’s told, he’s not going to listen. We have to think of ourselves as in his head. As far as discrepancies in society, the idea that all racial discrepancies are due, to some extent, to something white people did or are doing wrong, is an oversimplification. You and I agree. But Coates doesn’t regard this as oversimplification, and he’s not going to hear it described that way. Here Coates is representative of a certain kind of black thought, as well as a kind of thought that many non-black people, who consider themselves fellow travelers, represent—and they’re not going to let go of it either. So, what we are faced with are different takes on the world. I worry that if you say—and I’m with and understand everything that you say—that he’s imposing his Mullah-like vision, he immediately dismisses that because I don’t think that’s what it is. And the same goes for his fans, which is about every second person who’s concerned with these issues, of any color at all, in the United States and beyond, and the danger then is that we don’t have a real conversation. After all, everybody’s thinking that you must battle the role that racism plays in black lives, so that really there is a conversation to be had.

TCW: What struck me as so terribly unfair about the whole thing is the idea that you have a claim to somebody else’s thoughts or behaviors.

Even if he’s coming from the perspective that you’re describing, he still doesn’t have a claim to pronounce on other people’s ability to draw on their experience to inform an outlook that deviates from what’s expected.

It’s scary to think that there’s an orthodoxy governing that.

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JM: But he—and we’re using “him” as a metonymy for lots of people— thinks that we just don’t know. He thinks that he can determine this because the truth is so obvious. We’re married to white women so, you know, there’s a problem there. We’re not representative; we just don’t understand the real problem. “You live in France”—I’ve never heard anyone say it, but you know that they must say it, so you just don’t know. And I’m an Ivy league professor, and I like musical theatre, and I don’t really know. So, as far as he’s concerned, he does know—and for reasons that I don’t think make him an idiot. But you’re not saying he’s an idiot, either.

TCW: You know that Coates is a Francophone.

JM: I’ve heard that.

TCW: And of course I’m not saying Coates is an idiot. I debated about whether I should get into the Kanye West altercation because I think you lose something in turning to him. He’s not a thinker; he’s drugged out of his mind on painkillers, and in any case writing about celebrities is always problematic. But what seemed interesting and important about this was that someone could tell you that you’re out of line, that you have a choice to make: to come back in the fold and to get in line, or to be ex-communicated. And I think that that’s relevant.

ORLANDO PATTERSON: Did Kanye West sort of bring that on himself?

I mean, he has a vast following, so I suspect, in a way, that he feels that he is speaking for his people when he speaks. There is some problem in his relationship with Trump, but they are both, in a sense, coming from the same place, aren’t they? That, in a sense, almost validates the clash, in that both really do feel that they speak for others. Now, I’d love to know, as a sociologist, what those fans of his are now thinking about him: Did they stay with him, or not? The question goes to the heart of the identity issue.

RB: I can’t help thinking here about an essay Thomas wrote about the artist Adrian Piper. In that essay, Tom, you say that at a certain point, Piper stopped allowing her artwork to be exhibited in all-black shows, not wanting to fulfill expectations based upon her race. When I read that, I thought

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of a number of white women writers who at one time or another refused to allow themselves to be included in anthologies of women’s writing, and of a gay poet who refused to allow his work to be anthologized in anthologies of gay writing. I suppose that this may well have something to do with a reluctance to speak for other people, though also with a desire to say ‘no’ to racial or gender categories altogether.

TCW: Though I understood Piper’s frustration, I don’t know if I would do the same thing. I recently thought about this question in the context of T Style Magazine, which recently had a cover featuring black writers.

And some very notable black writers weren’t included, and I cannot say for sure, but I imagine that some of them simply wanted to be writers and didn’t want to be black writers—not because there’s anything wrong with being black, but because that’s not something that white writers have to go through. You just want to be a writer, and you happen to belong to a tradition, or a group, but that may not be how you think of yourself when you think of all the singular experiences that go into comprising you as a person and as a creator of work. There’s a struggle between being an individual and being thrust into a larger collective to which you have no choice about belonging. And I think that this tension is very poignant for the black intellectual—it always has been, and it will remain so going forward. It’s one part of our responsibility to push against it. You know, Kafka wrote, “What have I in common with the Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself.” That’s not something you’re supposed to ask, or say, but it doesn’t invalidate the question.

RB: In some respects that is the essential question, no?

JM: Bob, this is the first time since 2010 that I have said yes to something where I was invited as a black anything. I decided in 2010 that that was enough, I am a person, and if I am invited somewhere I will talk about race issues but I will not be invited as a Negro representative. Because it feels like an abbreviation of myself. I don’t want people to think that that’s all I am. It’s not as if I think that they’re going to think I’m white.

I just thought that it isn’t right, that it’s too narrow, and it’s antediluvian.

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This is different, because it’s so special, and I just wanted to sit here with these people you’ve invited. But I hesitated at first. I sat at my desk, and I thought, this is one of those things where I’m being invited because of the color of my skin. That’s not what you meant, but my first thought was no, none of that—I’ll be invited as a Happy Linguist, and if they want to talk about how it feels to be colored, I thought, no, I’ll just write about it. And I’m happy to write about it. But I thought, no, this I have to do. But—don’t laugh—this is the last time—unless there’s something equally special—I’m not doing this again…at least, not until 2029. And that’s because of the abbreviation I feel in the way I’m allowing myself to be represented. Don’t ask why I don’t feel the same way about writing.

MARGO JEFFERSON: When you say you don’t feel that way about writing, do you mean with what kind of assignments you’re offered?

Because I find that interesting. And I think about that a lot.

JM: No, I will happily write about the black experience. Again, for me, writing is different. I feel it as a mission. And I wish to get my writing out there, but it’s less—you’re making me really think here—it’s less personal. You write it, you’re hiding behind the wall of the fact that you’re not there, and you go make your dinner and raise your kids. All this is opposed to “Hello, Professor McWhorter, standing in a blazer”—which I’m not wearing— “I wish to speak to you about 1/100th of your life, and that’s why I find you interesting, and why you’re here.”

MJ: “Let me remind you again that this is why you’re here,” yes.

JM: Yeah—that’s too much. This is great. But in general, no. Not as a way of life.

MJ: I must say, as someone who spent so many years in commercial journalism, I felt a lot of this pressure in terms of the kinds of pieces I would be asked to write, by which I simply mean 1,200 reviews of black writers, with no interest in whether I was making distinctions between those I was interested in and others I was not. However, I always felt that my desire—my mandate, my mission—was, in places like Newsweek

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or the Times, to bring as much textured attention as I could summon to minority writers, as well as to various women writers. But there’s always a line you cross: “It’s Marian Anderson’s 100th anniversary. Would you write about her?” Now, I know some stuff about classical music, but the fact is that I’d never been a classical music critic in my life. I’d only written about musical theatre, jazz, et cetera. And I said I wouldn’t do it.

For me to do this piece, well, it was clear that the Times was not taking Marian Anderson seriously, by their standards, as a major opera singer. I wouldn’t do it, and won’t do it.

JM: But, of course—I’m always trying to put myself in other people’s heads— they’re thinking that there’s something about Marian Anderson that only you are going to understand. Which doesn’t really make any sense.

MJ: I know. And that was, to some extent, probably true, but given the kind of piece they wanted, what I understood would probably have been so foregrounded that it would have become almost pure sociology. I really wanted her to get her due on her 100th anniversary. She was a soprano!

And I could have decided that I could find a way to do it. You know, the Times is really obsessed with black women opera singers, from Marian Anderson, to Shirley Verrett, and others. And actually, if you do hear earlier recordings, Marian sounds more like a soprano than a mezzo. But they feel that black women are automatically pushed towards being mezzos rather than sopranos because it’s earthier. And it’s usually not the lead role of the heroine, the beauty, the star. This is…what to call it? History?

JM: Margo, can I geek out for what is going to be eight seconds?

MJ: Let’s geek.

JM: Are there recordings of Anderson before the early 50s so that as time passes, you can hear how her voice changes?

MJ: Yes, I think you can hear the Lincoln Memorial recording. But there are also other recordings from the 40s. And isn’t it fun to geek? That’s why we came, right?

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DARRYL PINCKNEY: Forgive me for going back to Thomas’s first sentences, but just the mention of that title—The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual—brought back so much from my student days. It was one of those books that was always on the shelf, that a lot of people owned, but hadn’t read. And it was always very intimidating because you would open any page and feel that you weren’t black enough.

MJ: And there were many pages.

DP: Many pages! It’s a work of extraordinary vehemence about black cultural nationalism that also included a very inconvenient species of anti-Semitism, looking at the Marxist influence on black radicalism, and blaming American Jews for sort of imposing Marxism on black writers.

And one of the most extraordinary changes that we don’t talk much about is that Marxism as an alternative social vision is gone, so that black intellectuals had to find ways to hold onto it by looking to other countries.

Even the Panthers thought they were Marxists. But that was a long time ago. Nowadays, a lot of black intellectual life takes place without an idea of alternatives or social visions other than what we have. And people had always looked to black culture as a place for different answers. It wasn’t always a prurient interest. It was to experience another America, or a truer America, and especially a freer America. And that’s the thing that’s left, now—everyone is sort of echoing what Jack Kerouac’s character says when he walks through the ghetto in Denver: “Oh, I wish I was black because there’s more music, there’s more night, there’s more this, there’s more that…”

MJ: There’s less guilt.

DP: There’s less guilt. And this idea of there being a “this” side of town and a “that” side of town is still very much with us. I feel very funny, because I’m a big fan of white privilege...It’s just a joke, nobody laughed.

JM: I was laughing inside.

DP: But I also have to say that with my generation in school, there never was a black writer. There just wasn’t. And even in college, there wasn’t.

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You know, black writing was something done at home, it was in the family, it was personal.

MJ: And sometimes it was compensatory—your family wanted to make sure that you learned about the black writers that you weren’t going to get in school.

DP: Absolutely, yes. And insisted on their value that way. So, early on, after I’d failed at poetry, and failed at fiction...you know, Mary McCarthy said that young writers should write reviews. And I actually discovered that I was very interested to write about these black writers I’d never studied. And I found that it was something of an honor. And I learned a great deal, and that was added to my feeling of humility about literature and the past. I used to have arguments with people who would ask me, “You know, aren’t you a writer who happens to be black? Why do you call yourself a black writer?” But actually, I think that it’s a term of honor.

I don’t mind going to events centered around these subjects because I learn something. Because there’s actually no other way in my life for me to take it in, or to have these conversations and these experiences. I also think that blackness means so many different things historically, as well as from place to place and person to person, era to era. But when we talk about it, we mean something specific, especially in the United States.

And it has to do with its social aspects—maybe not so much with the psychological, anymore, because that’s the thing that really broke apart.

A thing we’ll talk about.

But then we were also talking about Kanye West. Someone like Kanye is criticized by someone like Coates because we are still in that world where black success is meant to be representative of possibilities, of change, and of virtue, and to speak to (and for) those who aren’t there.

We don’t talk enough about class and race in the United States. We also don’t talk about the class divide between black spokespeople and black people, which I think is an important thing. It’s as though black intellectuals have been made to take the place of civil rights leaders, now that we say that we don’t have any, because nobody’s paying attention to the NAACP, or other such groups. We turn to black intellectuals to take the positions and to speak in the way that civil rights leaders used to. Yet often, black

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intellectuals aren’t civil rights leaders and actually shouldn’t be, since the two aren’t quite the same.

As for Kanye West, he wouldn’t be the first black star to say something stupid. And I think that a lot of people who listen to his music can make the distinction. He didn’t just say something about Trump—he said something really ignorant about the Civil War. He wouldn’t be the first entertainer—black or white—to be ignorant about American history.

The saddest thing about Michael Jackson was how badly educated he was, as someone who had grown up having tutors on the road. He didn’t know a thing.

OP: Let me play the age card, as the oldest person here at this table— and that includes you, Bob. I have this really strange feeling of déjà vu. When I came to this country almost fifty years ago, we were having this same debate. We were in the middle of it! And my response to it was to write a book, published in 1977, called Ethnic Chauvinism: The Reactionary Impulse. In the 70’s we were going through something called the ethnic revival. You are all too young to remember that. And I thought that all this was getting out of hand. Over the years I came to believe we’d gotten over that, in part because of the Civil Rights Movement, which had several major achievements, apart from the growth of the black middle class. But I’ve had to accept that the ethnic revival and ethnic chauvinism are not things entirely of the past.

When I visited this country for the first time, in the early 60s, there really were two Americas. I’ll never forget. I stayed at my aunt’s, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for three months. And towards the end of the three months, I remember turning towards my aunt and saying, “I’ve been here for three months and I’ve not met a single white person! And as a matter of fact, I’ve not met a single black American—not in any kind of meaningful relationship.” This was a very segregated society, a white society. The Talking Heads on television were all white. You opened the New Yorker, it was all white. Even in the New York Times, blacks were represented mainly in the murder reports. It was the absence of blacks in most areas of American life that was impressive to me.

But something profound happened. Blacks became, in many important respects in the public sphere, a profound presence in America.

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In many ways they define American society. Their influence on the popular culture is out of all proportion to their numbers; one cannot imagine popular culture without seeing black persons. A dominant part of the Democratic party is comprised of black people. We had a black president which, for me, was the culmination of this movement of blacks in the public sphere. We know a lot about failures and persisting problems, but to neglect what has happened to American society in these decades is to miss something extraordinary. I find myself wondering about all of this in my relationship with graduate students, who often talk as if nothing significant has happened. And I don’t know how to explain that.

Of course there is no such thing as a unified black culture. The thing that we used to call “black” people doesn’t exist any more, apart from what we mean when we say “people of color.” What I’m getting at is the remarkable diversity within the black community, starting with class.

Those class differences in the 60s really didn’t matter as much as they do now. But I’m especially interested in the ethnic diversity which has emerged within the black community. One in every three black people in this great state of New York is of West-Indian Caribbean ancestry. While color still remains an important factor, it seems to me that one cannot seriously have an important debate without recognizing the enormous complexity of the black community which has emerged, a complexity not only based in terms of class, but in terms of region, ethnicity, and so on.

We have had a retrogression with Trumpism, but it seems to me that how we interpret this is going to be very important. Because there are already huge debates within my own discipline over what explains Trump. The original consensus was primarily concerned with globalization and economic resentment. The evidence is becoming increasingly clear that it was racial resentment that was the critical factor. One way or the other, the America we are talking about today is profoundly different than the America to which I returned in 1970. And I feel like we are still talking about that America, which is also what irritates me about Coates.

To pretend that the election of a black president meant nothing strikes me as just absolutely weird. We have to acknowledge the existing sociological and political realities, so as to acknowledge that this is a different world we’re in. This is not the old Jim Crow, and it’s ridiculous to act as though it is. But that’s where we are. Complete refusal to acknowledge

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the changes. We have to accept them and then ask ourselves what exactly it is that we’re dealing with here. Obviously there is a problem: we have a racist asshole as a president, he has a hoard of racists supporting him.

But then racists were always there. And yet this is a profoundly different society. We cannot talk as if we’re confronting what James Baldwin saw in the 1960s. Am I wrong?

TCW: There can be two profoundly different realities at once, right?

There can be a profound, racist core that provides a foundation upon which Trump can attract support, and we can also be making progress—and be a much-improved America, as compared to Baldwin’s time. And I feel like a lot of the commentary doesn’t allow for this complexity of multiple realities. So I’m with you on this, Orlando.

JM: Orlando, here’s the thing. I know what you’re talking about, and I’m interested in fixing this problem. And I especially know what you mean about how there was a certain kind of black person who was very angry in 1971. And that person still exists now, just as angry, as if no time has passed. I’m 53, and many people would be surprised to hear that my mother was actually quite the race-man. She even taught a course called “Racism 101” at Temple University in Philadelphia, when that was a newer course for white people to take. And so, there were often people at our house, with combs in their afroed hair. I was about 6 or 7, and I remember there being a certain type of guy who was angry and, looking back, was angry for reasons which make perfect sense when considering how things were, then. The Panthers still existed at that point. And now, I see black undergraduates at Columbia walking across campus with that exact same expression on their faces, trying to dress as much like that as possible. There’s a certain kind of black person who’s just as mad, as if nothing has changed. And it won’t do to call that person crazy—because they aren’t crazy—but you have to wonder why they are pretending that nothing has happened in 50 years. And I think that Ta-Nehisi Coates and William Jelani Cobb, and Melissa Harris-Perry, and Jenée Desmond Harris, Michael Eric Dyson, you know, all the people that you can name—all of these people would listen to you (and I think you’ll take this where I’m coming from) and they’ll think that you’re out of touch, that you’re a person

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who has gotten beyond a certain age, and that you just don’t know. And what you don’t know, according to them, is the cops—and this is what intellectuals interested in race at this point have to focus more on than we usually do. Why that person is still sitting on the same couch now, with his lips stuck out as though nothing has happened in this vastly changed America, is this myth about how all of our lives are constantly constrained and determined by having to be afraid of the police at all times. And if we don’t counter that myth—if we don’t work on that with data—the discussion is just going to sit still. Also—to go back to another thing you mentioned, Orlando—why is it that so many people pretend? You’re saying it’s partly that when things become so much better, it’s easier to focus on the details. I want to ask you a genuine question, as you’re a sociologist and I’m not: is part of it that it’s a handy way for a person who happens to be black to find a sense of group membership? As human beings, we seek the warmth of a group, and maybe, as you become ever more middle class and affluent, you’re less organically connected to what we might think of as “true” blackness, and so you want a group. There’s someone I am very close to, in whom I have seen this happen over the past thirty years—the idea that you feel a fellowship with people based on this oppression you supposedly always feel. And that means that you’re not going to let go of that picture of things. So, nobody’s crazy, nobody’s in willful denial, but I do think that a lot of people are getting a certain warmth and comfort out of this pretending.

OP: Okay. That seems persuasive to me—up to a point. And yet you know, this isn’t just a black problem. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about Jewish Americans. So much of what John just said applies also to Jewish Americans. Once, I went to speak to a group of older Jewish people in a very wealthy synagogue in Washington, and I was discussing segregation, and they were making exactly this point—that they grew up in a segregated America, which they’re old enough to remember. They said exactly what John just said—that several of their colleagues lived within Jewish communities and were invested in Jewishness for purposes of a felt organic connection. There’s a fascinating book called How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America [1998], about how though Jews ostensibly gained their whiteness, they still felt

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the need for community and identity. We black people are not the only group of people to have gone through this sort of process. In the conversation about identity, I’m saying that the reason why my upper-middle class graduate students are looking at me as if I’m out of touch is linked to the identity-searching that still has them in its grip. I grew up as a poor person in the poorest part of a poor colony, and when I look at my students I think, “Okay, well, your daddy was a lawyer and your mama was a doctor, and you’re looking at me and thinking that I don’t know what I am talking about…” And maybe that’s fair enough. I hope not. But I do think that whatever it is, these students are somewhat different than the boy John saw in his mother’s home, the angry black boy with the comb in his hair. Because that boy went through Jim Crow, alright? You know what I mean? That was not a middle-class person. That was real. And this is something else—when an upper middle-class black person looks at me and talks to me about the anguish of being black. On one level, I suppose it’s real—because if you think it’s real, it’s real—but on another level, it’s hard to take too seriously. And this is where I’m at right now.

I think other groups of people went through this, and prompted similar confusions and questions.

MJ: Women, LGBTQ people...all of these groups are grappling with genuine issues and legacies of exclusion. I also want to say, parenthetically, that black women are worried about cops, too, but I understand that that’s not at the core in the same way it is for black men. Maybe this is going back to what we were saying much earlier about intellectual and linguistic distinctions. The fact is that, class notwithstanding, expectations rise in people. If your family has done better, they are telling you that things are going to be better for you, that you’re not going to go through the same things that they did. And major aggressions are not the same thing as micro-aggressions. The moments of bigotry that my parents experienced at the University of Chicago and the University of Southern California were far more vicious than anything I experienced at Brandeis, or Columbia, or the University of Chicago Laboratory School. But I still experienced some. Let’s talk about class: everybody can tell you that as you move up in class, you begin to notice all kinds of things that range from the words people use to little slights that you never would have noticed before. Yet

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once you’re in a particular group, you see them, you feel them, and you are made to feel them. And I think that is what your, my, all of our students are experiencing: the legacy of raised expectations and of, in some ways, naïveté, but also of genuine hopes. Maybe, yes, a certain kind of grandiosity; there is a kind of solidarity in grandiosity that can come from legacies of aggression and kind of taking their place in that honor roll. But micro-aggressions are real. We need a much subtler, finer language for it.

And we need to make cultural, emotional, and sociological distinctions, and perhaps that’s what we’re not trying hard enough to do.

JM: I agree completely. Micro-aggressions are real, and there indeed needed to be a word for them. And I think that micro-aggressions are an important thing to talk about. What disturbs me is the idea that you’re supposed to collapse in front of them. I’m too old to get that. If some person gives you a funny look, or if you don’t get chosen for some group, or if somebody asks you where you’re from and you’re from Cleveland, frankly, it just doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter.

MJ: If it matters to that person, then they have to find an intelligent way to cope with that mattering. If it matters, it matters. We always say to people, “Get over it.” But what if you can’t get over it? Then, you start getting neurotic, you start acting out, et cetera. So, you know, you find a way. Everybody doesn’t have the same…

DP: I sort of don’t know where to start. I thought we had sort of indicated that this was a very complex question with many aspects…And so here I go. When I was growing up, the only place we could swim was the Jewish Community Center. The kids that asked you home were Jewish, because they didn’t know any better, but also because they wanted to know you.

Twenty years doesn’t seem very long to me now, but when I was young, it did, and it’s only now that I see how soon we were after World War II, and the effects that all that had on postwar life. When the Black-Jewish coalition fell apart in the late 70s and early 80s, it was a big trauma, really.

MJ: Yep., it sure was.

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DP: And it’s only now that we’re sort of getting over it by forming new coalitions.

Another big trauma at the time was a general falling apart of coalitions, in general. A lot of blacks asserted a kind of black separatism.

And in order to feel the tragedy of that, we would have to read something like How I Became Hettie Jones by Hettie Jones. And the world LeRoy Jones walked away from to become Amiri Barka is a dream culture of integration and mixed things going on. It was a real tragedy. I’m not saying that black America didn’t need to go through that in order to come away with a kind of black consciousness, but we take for granted now that that didn’t exist before the 60s. When I was in school, the people who were saying that I wasn’t black enough, or that I was an Uncle Tom, were black kids richer than I was. It’s always that a black authenticity is something militant, something of the street, something of the ghetto, and we still have that. The attraction of hip-hop for so many people is that it’s transgressive, which is why young white guys liked it as much as young black guys.

MJ: “Have you ever seen the crowd goin’ apeshit?”

DP: There are so many angry things I’d meant to say, but I’ve forgotten them all now. But, you know, in the 17th century, the House of Burgesses in Virginia ruled that an African could be a slave owner, but a European couldn’t be brought into slavery. So, whiteness was invented then, and we’ve lived with this the whole time. Many things have changed, because change is not uniform, and things go on at different times. All through the Obama years, everyone said “We have a black president,” yet the living conditions for most black people are the same as they were in 1960. And no one could account for that.

At the same time, it’s important for blacks in the Democratic party to think of itself as a voting bloc. If the same number of people turned out in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Detroit in 2016 as those who voted in 2012, then Hillary Clinton would have won the electoral college. What this election showed us is that there’s no such thing as not voting. This is what you get—this kind of minority government. I don’t think that white supremacy defines most white people. I don’t even think that white privilege defines most white people. I think white people have as hard a time being white as anyone else, especially now that white has come to mean

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this, and black still means that. You know, that white is “have” and black is “have not”; white is “luck” and “the future” and black is something like “no future.” These are kind of almost symbolic categories or allegorical words. They describe a social reality, but they also describe destinies, as Americans. You can be with the winners; you can be with the losers.

And behind it all is this terror of the future and of what’s happening in the world, which is driving everyone’s fear of scarcity, status, and what’s happening in America. The answers aren’t simple… I’ve lost my point.

Shit. I had such angry things to say but...I just couldn’t disagree more with some of the things being said…

OP: Nothing you’ve said sounds angry.

DP: Well, I don’t speak that way, but…

OP: Well, how do you think it’s angry?

DP: Well, I think there’s still a lot of things that black people go through that other people don’t. I haven’t lived in a black neighborhood since I was a child, and I see, in the neighborhood in which I now live, that people live very differently than the way white people live. Even the black middle class is different from the white middle class, because the black middle class is based primarily on earnings rather than assets. And that’s a big difference when it comes to fragility, stability, and what you can pass onto your children.

MJ: And how you behave.

DP: These discrepancies and challenges are real.

OP: Absolutely. Blacks are as segregated now as they were in 1970. And black schools are slightly more segregated now than they were in 1970.

DP: But this is in the context of the entire school system falling apart.

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OP: Yes. And you haven’t said anything that I don’t fully agree with.

This is consistent with everything I said earlier, about the complexity of what we’re dealing with now. I don’t want to anticipate too much what I am going to say on Sunday, but we are agreeing on things. Everything you’ve said is perfectly true.

DP: I have to think of something else, then. No more Mr. Nice Guy. RB: There have been several references to James Baldwin—Thomas, Darryl, Orlando. And there’s a passage in one of Thomas’s writings in which he cites the Nigerian-American writer, Teju Cole, who—Thomas says—rejects what he interprets as James Baldwin’s self-abnegation in the face of European high culture: “what he loves does not love him in return.”

I’m interested in this—talking about whether there has been a significant alteration as we move from Baldwin’s moment to the moment of Teju Cole. “This is where,” writes Teju Cole, “I part company with Baldwin,” asserting that “I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt portrait.”

I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt portrait. And that may mark one significant change as we move from one very important black writer, James Baldwin, to Teju Cole.

MJ: And two very different generations.

RB: Exactly, that’s what I am trying to suggest. Thomas, do you want to talk a little about that?

TCW: This sense of not being alienated in the world is critically important.

For example, I take for granted that my father, who grew up in the Jim Crow South, no matter what changes materially in his life, can never feel what I do. That’s ingrained in him. I live in Paris, and I feel like all of this culture is just as accessible to me as for my wife—maybe even more so, as I’ve put in more work to access it. And I don’t think she can’t access John Coltrane because she’s white and French. The experiences that I’ve had don’t contradict the idea that anything human cannot be alien to me.

And my dad wanted something like that, but he would definitely fall into Baldwin’s category. What I think Orlando was getting at was that the shift

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we see in Teju Cole hasn’t happened for lots of black people. Or at least for some of them there’s a kind of dishonesty in denying that a change has occurred.

DP: Baldwin also said that he didn’t feel an affinity for Shakespeare. And he read all the time. It shocked Mary McCarthy how much Baldwin read.

But he said some very ignorant, or hostile, things about European culture in his time. The problem with quoting Baldwin is the same problem encountered when quoting Malcolm X: there’s so much of it, and you can always find the statement you need at a given moment.

RB: But would you agree, as you just said, that there is a very decided shift of perspective from Baldwin to Cole?

TCW: To your question, as well as to the earlier point about micro-aggressions, I want to mention a moment that I included in my book: It happened when I was a newlywed with my wife, who is Parisian, and we were at her grandmother’s country house in Normandy. Her grandmother is from a much older, wealthier generation that’s accustomed to much greater ease and mastery in the world that even my wife, as a white woman, doesn’t know at all. It’s not racial so much as generational and a matter of class, representative of a time before global competition and things like that.

Anyway, this woman has, on her coffee table, a porcelain head which, I realize when looking at it, is a slave head. And I think that counts as a micro-aggression: a visual representation of your inferiority in the room.

But she’s super nice, she loves me, she’s extremely kind to my father, who is clearly a black man. And, in reality, we are making a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-national, multi-linguistic family work, and we love each other. And I am trying to think through and gauge how mad I am supposed to be about this thing…

DP: Not at all…

TCW: Maybe not at all. My wife and her cousins would try to hide it when my grandmother-in-law wasn’t there, but sometimes there’s not a diplomatic way to do that, and the head would just be there, and everyone

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would be super uncomfortable. But my grandmother-in-law would have no idea that anyone could be uncomfortable…

DP: Is it a caricature, or…

TCW: It’s a big-lipped, super dark-skinned slave head. You open the top of the thing and you put bonbons and your keys inside. But the thing is, I would get angry about it, at first, and my wife and I could argue, and we could argue until we started laughing, because I realized at some point that I am playing a role, that that anger isn’t my own, that anger belongs to someone else, and that micro-aggression isn’t the realest aspect of my lived experience, not even of my black lived experience. My black lived experience is this: my family knows I’m black, and encounters me as an equal, and I think that they’re aware that I’m better-educated than they are…

DP: So you can accept them.

TCW: Exactly. So I can accept them. While trying not to be a total sellout, I have to ask myself: “Are you strong enough to get through that?” And everything about the way I was raised prepared me to get through that. It doesn’t debilitate me.

DP: Black people used to collect that type of thing.

TCW: I have black friends whose fathers used to collect that type of thing.

MJ: I have dolls in my house, yeah.

TCW: I mean, it’s different when her grandmother collects it than when you collect it.

DP: Everyone’s into it now. All these Venetian lamps that people used to be ashamed of have come down out of the attic. You can’t get anything for a bargain anymore if it’s black representation. It’s true! You used to be able to pick up this stuff at auctions. And you can’t anymore because everyone’s into it.

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TCW: The French love it. They never gave it up, and they never gave it away.

DP: They never hid it, either.

TCW: And it’s something that I don’t think is a good thing—I don’t think it’s a fine thing. But I don’t think that it means everything about my life or my experience, either. I have a lot more experiences that are more meaningful than this.

OP: There are all kinds of complexities here. We have to distinguish between conscious and unconscious micro-aggressions…and this complexity I’d rather leave to my literary colleagues.

MJ: Let’s go with deep versus shallow micro-aggressions.

TCW: But my understanding of micro-aggressions is that intent can never matter. I think that it can’t matter.

MJ: I’m not sure…There used to be a joke among black people that the only time the word “articulate” was used was when bourgeois white people were talking about an educated black person, particularly a news commentator. And this has changed. I hear the world “articulate” flutter around a lot now. But I also had a white friend say, “You know, it’s very interesting how often white people feel compelled to say the word ‘niggardly’ when they’re around a black person.” I swear to God, a white person who has mixed race children told me this. So, you know, the unconscious exists.

As does the subconscious.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: I’m uncomfortable with the notion that we might try to move beyond being a black person, as that’s a main part of my own experience. Or maybe I’m not so much uncomfortable as puzzled.

TCW: I can see why the idea might seem puzzling at first. I do think that we must try, collectively, to move beyond race. And we really can’t accomplish anything along those lines until white people give up being

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white, frankly. But I do think that black intellectuals might lead the way because ultimately, the idea of racial categories always implies a racial hierarchy. I don’t think that people have to give up feeling that they belong to each other, or to their communities, but I think the idea that there’s an essence that’s black or an essence that’s white has to be challenged and ultimately rejected.

OP: It’s impossible for me to dissociate myself from the fact that I grew up as a working-class Jamaican. It’s also impossible to dissociate myself from being a black person in America. What’s important is the degree of self-consciousness that I have about this. I would rather be someone who can simply be myself in a way which will express and reflect all of the things that went into my becoming who I am, and that will always involve my Jamaican-ness, and that will always involve my 50 years living here as a black person. It’s impossible to escape the reality of what you were, of how you grew up, of all the people you knew, of all the people who hated and loved you, and so on—most of whom, in my case, were black and Jamaican. There’s no way I can ever escape that. What we’re talking about is how self-conscious I’m going to be in defining that. Is it possible to live in a world in which I can just be myself? You know certain kinds of exaggerated self-consciousness can distort your sense of self. If I go around pretending to be a Jamaican nationalist, I’m being extremely unfaithful to myself, because I am not. If I go around insistently articulating my blackness as if that completely defined me that would be inauthentic.

That’s all we’re getting at here. Can you accept that?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: What if I feel like my most authentic self is holding onto being black? Is there a contradiction between being a black intellectual and yet holding on to black identity, insisting on it?

JM: One answer to that might be rage. Of course, you want to seek social justice, because racism and structural racism exist. What some of us might question is whether the feeling that you might have, in 2019, is rage—that you feel same way as the guy who my mother invited over to our house, fifty years ago. Because conditions have changed, that’s all. It’s not as if you needn’t be concerned. The whole issue about whether we want to

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get beyond race is a very local one. You might feel that you don’t want to think of yourself as not black, and that makes perfect sense. I don’t think of myself as not black, either. I’ll use myself as a litmus test: my wife is quite white. I have two daughters, and one of them is classic high yellow.

Here, in 2019, I find myself wondering whether or not my daughter is going to grow up to be “black,” by which I mean black-identifying. If it were twenty years ago or more, there would be no question at all. But in today’s world, and in the neighborhood that we live in, I think that she might not be thinking of herself as, if you will, “African-American.” She’s light, and in terms of cultural traits associated with being black, she may not develop any. And if you can hear that and not flinch, that’s what we mean by getting past race—that you let go of the idea that one drop means that you better know what color you are, especially because you’re going to have to think about how the cops are going to treat you, or whatever it is, in this context of talking about a young girl who’s light-skinned. It’s not as if we’re going to pretend that race doesn’t exist, but we’re going to let go of the balkanizing tendencies that frankly remind me of The Birth of a Nation. So, two things: 1) letting go of race doesn’t mean that you’re not black. It just means that we want to get beyond D.W. Griffith. 2) If you think that I’m crazy in questioning that you be enraged, hear this: the bit about the cops that’s been served to you is vastly distorted, and while I know that there are other things, the cops are central. And that’s the only thing I can think of that would evince rage in 2019.

DP: When we talk about black life and black history, it’s important to remember that we’re talking about American life and American history, since the destiny of the country has always been mixed with race and racial destiny. But I don’t think that black intellectuals do anything different from white intellectuals or anyone else. I think that when we talk about black lives, we’re forgetting about the universality of the lessons that can be gained. They’re not just for black people—they’re for everyone. There are many things that go into being a black intellectual that you cannot see, or do not know—it’s not just the things you write about. And every other black intellectual I know has many other interests. You can’t talk to someone more interested in classical dance than Margo Jefferson. There are lots of things that go into your identity as a black intellectual, many

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of them white and not immediately bearing on what you’re writing about, but your experience as a human being certainly informs what you think of historical and social questions. So, maybe it’s not rage you’re feeling, but simply the passion of being young and alive and looking for answers.

And it’s a wonderful place to be. Stay that way.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: You mentioned the cops, and the police, and the way that things have changed. And yet there is such a thing as trauma, and collective memory. The cops may not play so much a role in our present life, but there may be people in our families who have been impacted by cops and by mass incarceration. It may not necessarily be that a cop is going to take your life, or that you have to walk around wondering about that. And yet the cops exist, they can deprive you of all sorts of things.

JM: Of course. The question is whether black men are preyed upon and/ or killed by the cops disproportionately to their numbers in the population. They aren’t. The facts are in.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Sure, that’s a fact. But it’s worth considering what the state can do through law enforcement—not just taking one’s life, but depriving one of liberty.

JM: Sure. But the question is whether we should think of that as racialized. In 1965, yeah. In 1975, no doubt. But things do change. So yes, it’s traumatic if your father is up the river. But the question is whether that’s a black problem. And I thought it was, until about two years ago when I had a very interesting conversation with my constant interlocutor, Glenn Loury. What we’ve been fed is not true. I maintain that if we weren’t taught that particular message, then all of the other things that black people suffer—and racism has something to do with a lot of them—would not condition this idea that our responsibility is to have the same rage that Huey P. Newton did. And in terms of disproportionate incarceration, it’s complicated. Despite what Michele Alexander put forth—God bless her, I wish her well—it’s not a new Jim Crow. These issues are much more complex than they seem when you refer to people in positions of power not liking black people and deciding to lock us all up. That’s a good story,

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but that’s not how it works. Not anymore. And you can consult people like Michael Fortner, who are black and who grew up poor, to see how we got where we are today. I think that we are encouraged, as black intellectuals—if we are going to call it that—to oversimplify and claim that in our case, and only in our case, things really haven’t changed much. It won’t do. That’s all I’m saying. It’s not that I’m denying people’s pain, or that I’m denying what the cops were like not too terribly long ago, but this is the thing: thank God it’s changed. And yet notice how uncomfortable it makes all of us for me to say that. We feel like we’re supposed to not admit that it’s changed, no matter what the numbers say. I refuse. I will not allow that to be the way that America’s intelligentsia thinks, and boy, am I gonna catch hell for it.

DP: Yeah.

JM: But I’m gonna keep fighting because the numbers are crystal clear.

I am not just expressing an opinion.

DP: Right. The difference between what Michele Alexander says and what James Forman Jr. says is this: Forman is saying that black communities themselves supported tougher prison laws for drug offenses. But Alexander’s not making up the numbers of black men in prison. Nobody is. That comes from somewhere.

JM: But was it racism, either deliberate and face-to-face, or structural?

I think that that’s an oversimplified way of looking at how we got to this point. There are too many black men in prison and that needs to be fixed— and thank God the ice is breaking—but was the reason for that something that should make you enraged that white people aren’t good to black people? I don’t think so.

DP: Except that the policing of black men has been the experience of black people in this country since we got here. The plantation system was organized to police the population; immediately after the Civil War, vagrancy laws were passed in many southern states and used as a tool of controlling the men who were on the roads looking for their families who’d been sold away. This policing of the black population has been

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a part of social policy since we got here. Nobody made that up. It’s just been around for so long that we’re looking for other reasons.

JM: But Darryl, are you really supposing that I don’t know those things or am denying them? All of those things are very real, but my question is, what now? How should we feel right here, in 2019?

DP: Obama should have pardoned all the marijuana offenders.

JM: I agree with that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: A former colleague of mine has authorized me and several people to speak about this...and I wasn’t going to bring it up until the last several comments here. A professor at Skidmore College, who was not tenured, was living near Saratoga Hospital in a condominium complex. He was a single parent because his wife was in Uganda, and a few months ago, his toddler son got out of the apartment for just a moment, no more than a minute or two, and the neighbor called the cops and this man was arrested for endangering the welfare of his child.

He was called into the Dean’s office. Now, I realize that endangering the welfare of a child sounds alarming if you’re an administrator of a college, but what happened after that? The charges were ultimately dropped! And there was no real sensitivity towards this issue on the part of the college administration, even though we are publicly doing “everything we can” to fight the injustices of society at large. And even though the charges were dropped…

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: The expenses for the attorney come to $2,000. Not everyone has access to that kind of money.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: And ultimately the man’s contract was renewed, albeit with a line, “And if there’s anything else…” What do they mean, anything else? The charges were dismissed. There was no sensitivity. And when I raised this issue on the floor with the faculty, a lot of people acted as if they didn’t know about it, though I later found out that while he told

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a lot of people, there was simply no outrage. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s where we are now.

OP: Can I ask you something? In Saratoga Springs, if a white parent had allowed his or her child to run around in the street, are you saying the cops would not bring down charges of child endangerment?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: But he never actually got out of the building.

He actually just knocked on his neighbor’s door. It’s not as if the neighbor just came upon a neglected or abandoned child. And I don’t think there’s a chance that any of my white colleagues would be called on for that.

JM: They wouldn’t have. You’re right. Last summer, I wrote an article called “Starbucks and the Swimming Pool.” What that was about was that every week, something you just described happens—where you know that if it had been a white kid, the something wouldn’t have happened.

Every week, something like that happens to a black person: someone is barbequing on the side of a lake and someone calls the cops on them. That is real, and that is one of the things that I mean when I say that racism exists. Racist bias exists. And this is where, Margo, you and I might have a disagreement: I’m saying yes, that stuff is real, and I can even dredge up one thing that happened to me in my life, but I have a problem with the idea that those things—as opposed to the sorts of things that used to happen in the past—define your life, as well as the idea that those things constitute something that black America should be as enraged about as we were enraged before. I don’t mean this as hyperbole, and I’m getting a cold, so my voice sounds a little sharp, and I don’t mean for it to sound this way, but I’m going to say it: if any of you implies that one of those Starbucks or swimming pool incidents, or others like them, defines my life, and suggests that I should fall to pieces either in front of the person or when I go back to my apartment, I am insulted. I cannot think of any other group of human beings who are thought of as so delicate as that.

So, these things ought to be decried. One of the great things about social media is that we hear about them every week. All of this has been happening forever, but now we can hear about it, and so maybe there’ll be some

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movement on it. But does it mean that we aren’t at home in America and that something that happens to some guy in Oakland defines his entire 50-year life? No. I feel like I have to defend that man.

MJ: I would entirely agree with you that it does not define that man’s—or woman’s—life unless that happens to that man every day of his life, 24 hours a day. But again, I would say that this whole “You’re too damn delicate when you really get angry and really act up and act out”— black people are always charged with this, women are charged with this, gay people are charged with this. The fact is that I have no problem with rage. My question is, how do you proportion it, how do you sift through it, how do you channel it into action and thoughts that are useful, and that are not self-destructive? We need rage. But we need intelligent uses of rage and we need a sense of its historical space. There’s plenty to be angry about, and that anger does not have to define your life. It is one of the many aspects of what one makes of discrimination, sorrow, grief, depression—all of that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: I think what’s often missing in conversations like this is a reminder of developmental arcs, and the importance of what it was like to feel 18 versus what it’s like to feel 51. Sometimes, I’m as angry as I was when I was 18—not all the time, thankfully. It’s easier for me to let things wash off my back than it is for some of my students. And I guess what I regret sometimes is this culture that seems to be clicking its tongues at younger people who are angry. And there’s a way in which young people are rightfully angry. It’s part of what we go through to get to the other side. You want to hang onto some of that anger, but not be quite as angry as we were.

MJ: Or at least we want more pitches and tonalities to our anger.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: Exactly. I just want to remember ages 1821, college-age, is a very different time, particularly if you find yourself for the first time at a predominantly white institution, as a black person, or an openly gay person. These are moments punctuated by rage and the solidification of identity that seem important developmentally.

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AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: I recently visited the Legacy Museum and Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and then read Bryan Stevenson’s book [Just Mercy], where he talks a lot about the criminal justice system. And he went to Montgomery, to live there and to work on death row cases. What this young man [gesturing to Audience Member 1] talked about, regarding generations of incarceration, really speaks to what Bryan Stevenson is doing…

MJ: You’re talking about trauma studies, in part, as well.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: Yes, as well as the criminal justice system—and I don’t just mean arrests, but black incarceration and death-row incarceration. Stevenson’s book reads like a novel: he describes case after case, where people ended up on death row for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with what they did wrong, or what they didn’t do. And in terms of African American Civil Rights leaders, Bryan Stevenson is a major force. For the young folks here who aren’t familiar with his work, I suggest that you look at his book Just Mercy which is amazing, and go to the Legacy Museum which is really just one room that goes from slavery, to Jim Crow, to mass incarceration. And he lays out the history almost year by year. I just want to encourage people to go to the museum and take in the knowledge that he has amassed in a really radical way.

JM: This is the hardest thing. Those disproportions some people are referring to are real. They have to be changed. But those disproportions are not completely due to racist bias, are not even due to what we would call structural racism. And that’s hard to fasten upon. And I know it sounds like I’m some kind of naive denialist. But what we take from a disproportion of, say, black men on death row is, 1) we want to make sure that that stops, and 2) we have to realize that talking about how white people hold on to their privilege isn’t going to be what stops that. Because that’s not simply what created it, nor was it even 80% of what created it. It was more complicated than that. And you might disagree, but I just hope that we can be open to this kind of disagreement. It’s not that I don’t know the score, it’s not that I don’t read, it’s not that I don’t like black people, nor that I’m a Pollyanna. I’m a very pessimistic person. It’s that social history is many threaded. Whenever you read about these stories, it turns out to

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be more complicated. For example, what happened recently in Covington, Kentucky. You know, you see this picture of this sneering kid in front of this Native American. And then you look at the whole two hours and you see what a complicated business that whole thing was. That’s all that I mean. Yes, we need to read about death-row and the disproportionate number of black men on it. But, as a white person—and I’m sorry, here I’m putting myself in your head—I’m not sure that the white person is supposed to be looking at that and feel like “I’m complicit, it’s my fault, and that it’s all my race’s and all of my fellow white people’s racism that put that man there.” I think that you should have thought that in 1932, but I don’t think that that’s the way it is now.

TCW: I also think that one of the key words here is “affluent,” and I think that race, when it intersects with poverty or the cultural signifiers of such, is a very potent thing in our minds. But I can’t think of any instances or situations where someone like Darryl or John would have allowed them to define their lives completely. I certainly have never experienced that kind of impression in my life. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are many black experiences, even as we concede that many millions of black people are having experiences like mine, like John’s, never intersecting with the criminal justice system. I’ve never had a problem with the criminal justice system. And that’s still a real black life. And that doesn’t deracinate me. I think that a lot of times when we’re talking about race, culture, and ethnicity, we’re also really talking about class.

JM: It is our duty to know these histories and to be as informed as possible. 1932 is not that far back, so we need to understand those legacies and those emotional resonances.

OP: It’s our duty, also, to know just what the sociological and criminological facts are. There’s a lot of work done on death row and the death penalty.

We have a pretty good idea of what the biases are. The leading scholar of incarcerations, a former colleague of mine named Bruce Weston, was the editor of what is supposed to be the definitive work on incarceration put together by the American Academy of Sciences, a 500-page volume.

And there was not a single chapter in that volume on the question of vio-

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lence. Interestingly, Bruce and several other criminologists have recently stated that they must bring in an understanding of the issue of violence.

All studies I’m acquainted with show that the criminal justice system has profound racial biases, and that one of the main factors accounting for increasing incarceration is the fact that attorneys and prosecutors have a considerable amount of leeway in who they charge and who they don’t.

That has been emphasized as a critical factor. But one has to take account of the fact that the black homicide rate is eight times greater than the white homicide rate: an unpleasant fact. We have to allow for the possibility that there may be more people in prison of a certain group because they commit more crimes. Now, we have factored that in, but the proportions are still much greater than they should be. A lot of work has been done on this, and as John said, it’s not as simple as it first appears. Even a lot of the die-hard scholars have had to backtrack a bit, and are now saying that, while there’s a strong element of racism involved, we have to consider other aspects of the situation. You won’t get that from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who comes out with completely erroneous statements. He wrote a cover story in the Atlantic on the black family and incarceration. Afterwards, the Atlantic asked me to write a response to it. And after reading it, I just thought, no, absolutely not, because he hasn’t even taken the trouble to acquaint himself with the basic facts. It’s simply not true that incarceration is causing the decline of, or the problems within, the black family. It’s the other way around! And if you say that, you know what kind of response you’re going to get. Coates simply won’t acknowledge the obvious. Of course, a woman whose lover is in prison is having difficulties. But what does this tell us? To claim that the crisis of the black middle-class family is the result of incarceration, in the face of overwhelming sociological evidence to the contrary, is totally irresponsible.

DP: One of the things that bothers me about Coates and his species of Afro-pessimism or fatalism is that a large part of it is grounded in the idea that black people and black culture are not pathological, that this is not an expression of any pathology. That we are healthy and society is sick. I’m afraid that this can’t be true. Ruling out the possibility of looking at black life as having pathological aspects cuts us off from exploring problems and coming up with solutions. You can’t say, “We’re healthy, but the society’s

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not.” It doesn’t separate that way, for me. There’s a lot of suffering that we don’t face. And mass incarceration aside, there are more poor people who are white in the United States than poor people who are black, yet black people remain the face of poverty.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: Two-part question. The first part is somewhat open-ended. It seems to me that, over the course of your conversation—even just now—the subject of class has kind of risen up and skittered away. I would just like to invite more thinking about that conjunction between race and class, and how their intersection might open up some other pathways that don’t point towards rage. The second question is to put some pressure on the other identity category in the conference title, namely the word intellectuals. I want to ask whether being an intellectual is itself its own social and psychological identity position. I raise that because even before I knew that I was from a petit bourgeois family, or even before I knew that I was Italian-American, and even before I knew I was queer, I knew that I had some intellectual differences of some kind. And with all due respect to Gramsci, who says that every human being has the capacity for intellect and for being an intellectual, I knew from age 3, when I was beginning to read, that I was growing up in an anti-intellectual family, and that the culture was anti-intellectual. So, I wonder if thinking of such things substantially alters your perspective on the question you’ve been discussing.

DP: We have to go now.

JM: Black intellectuals don’t talk much about class because if you’re a middle-class black person, you are taught very firmly not to distinguish yourself from your poorer brothers and sisters. I was taught that. To think of yourself as belonging to a different class is to deny that the cops don’t like you either. I’m oversimplifying only slightly. So, I skitter away from talking about that because I feel that I would be interpreted as being snobbish, to say that there are any differences between me and poor black people. Those differences are there, they are profound, but I will never write about them, and I’m uncomfortable talking about it now. As far as Gramsci is concerned, the problem is that one is taught just as explicitly

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that to be a black intellectual is to pretend that you’re a black Gramsci.

The idea is that we’re suffering from the implacable kind of impression that Gramsci was writing about, believing that we must model all of our actions and positions as a kind of performance of politics. I think that the idea of that as the only valid or the most interesting way of being a black intellectual is anti-empirical, and also highly limiting of black endeavor, and I question it.

OP: There’s one exception to your impression, and that’s black sociologists. Because we do spend an awful lot of time talking about class.

Too much. Intersectionality is big, among sociologists—we invented the term, which takes in gender, class, race, and so on. Sometimes I feel like that’s all we ever talk about. But these are critical issues. There can be no doubt that a lot of what we’re attributing to race has a lot to do with class and poverty. And we can see that by simply making comparisons and seeing how other poor people behave. There are interesting studies contrasting the behavior of poor and working-class blacks and Latinos.

That’s intersectionality. Per your second question, it’s a hard thing, being an intellectual—spending all of your life thinking about thinking. It isn’t what most people do. We are odd, and we should always remember our oddity. I always get a funny feeling whenever a cleaning or landscaping person comes to my house and always sees me sitting down at my desk.

They must find me very weird. And I can understand that that’s the case.

This goes back to the first question raised here by a young and clearly budding intellectual. I spent a good deal of time studying black youth in Boston, and for the most part they don’t have your concerns. The interesting thing emerging in the sociology of black youth is that, if you ask them, “What do you think accounts for the fact that you’re in this really difficult situation?” in most cases, in over 90% of the cases, the answer is this: “I fucked up.” And when asked by the eager sociologist, with bated breath, “Well, what about race?” invariably, the answer is “Of course race is important. The police are pigs. I know all that. But that’s not why I’m in this shit.” And this has come up over and over again. And it presents quite a dilemma for sociologists. One of the funniest things is to see a sociologist who is reading his interviews and observations, and is trying to come to terms with the fact that his subjects are not cooperating with

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them by saying the standard thing: “Racism is what got me into this.”

Sociologists then say that they are too isolated to understand how structural racism was the cause, while their subjects tend to say simply that they dropped out of school and they shouldn’t have done that, along with other related mistakes. I describe this sort of thing in my 2015 book The Cultural Matrix. It’s patronizing, isn’t it, to deny people’s interpretation of their own situation. And once they start becoming intellectuals—and some of them do become intellectuals—they do start to realize that race is a central factor in their lives. And that’s true, structural racism is an important factor in the reality and the persistence of the ghetto. But I can also tell you that almost every sociological study of non-intellectual black youth comes across this dilemma, where people will not attribute their problems to racism. As intellectuals, of course, we are in a different situation. We know that this situation exists, that perception can be highly individualistic, in a way that can be annoying to sociologists.

MJ: I just wanted to say very quickly that I’m obsessed with writing about race…not race. Class, actually. I mean class. What an interesting slip. It’s what I call the secular trinity of race, class, and gender. It is difficult. Like John, I was brought up to feel solidarity with all black people. And in my world, I was also brought up to feel superior to most black people, as well as superior to most white people, but that doesn’t necessarily make it much better, does it? What are the verbs…you document, you dramatize, you reveal, you confess, you examine. It’s very difficult, and shameful in certain ways, because obviously race history demands race solidarity.

If we don’t have that, what do we have? On the other hand, there is that legacy, which is partly honorable, that is part of a black—I don’t like the word elite—privileged class that also did do some good things for the race. One is constantly negotiating that. I think that being an intellectual sets some of the same strains in motion: the pressure to be yourself in your work, to honor your mind and temperament and yet, as someone already said, the pressure also to be a black intellectual or a black woman intellectual and to honor those things with as much subtlety and directness as required. It’s very demanding. You were right, John, to divine that the pressures are acute, and Orlando’s right to say that the perceptions of an intellectual may be very different from anyone else’s.

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RB: There’s a terrific story by Danzy Senna. It’s called “Admission,”* and it has to do with a number of the issues we’ve been talking about. And as we’ve all read it, I thought we might use it as a way into questions of class and privilege. The story revolves around a middle-class black family and the headmistress of a private school who is desperate to enroll the child of that family.

DP: Let me say right away that it’s a comic story, and that the elite people in the story are at least slightly ridiculous. At the same time, deep in the story, there is a kind of pain about what to choose, what to do. And that’s part of the experience many people are confronting. Parents are going through this now; I have some friends who are just absolutely determined not to send their children to private school, but when I hear this from them, I want to say, “You live in three houses around the globe, so what’s the point of a public school if you want to protect them from class stupidities?”

The mother in Danzy’s story is genuinely torn and ambivalent, while the husband is determined not to send his kid to a posh school, even if it is reputed to be first-rate. The husband isn’t exactly the boss in that family, but he does get his way.

MJ: I was very interested in the handling of class and gender power hierarchies. I liked the way that diversity was marshalled and appropriated by this school as a form of privilege. “Do not come”—those classic conservative verbotens. “Do not come if”—ah—if you are “conservative” in any way. These are broad oppositions that Senna handled with, I thought, real emotional subtlety. For example, the way the husband, Duncan, who is privileged, and who has had the rewards of being an “iconoclast,” likes to slip into a kind of very simple, black-inflected lingo. It’s a power tool: “I’m black, I haven’t forgotten.” It’s part of a class critique that’s also a form of comedy, which allows us to see the ways in which people are driven by historical, psychological, interior forces that can really thwart logic or just plain sense. It’s both painful and funny to see the wife wrestling with her humiliating longings to have her child in an elite school, and feeling that she needs to learn the rituals and mores of the city’s elite. This came up *Danzy Senna’s story is from her collection, You Are Free, and is included as well in the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction

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earlier in our discussion—the rituals and mores of class status, of gender status, of being an intellectual, and of being an intellectual of color. How do you place yourself? How do you attempt to show that you embrace a so-called progressive agenda within the rituals and mores of an elite, which you must master in order to succeed? What can you afford to feel, do, act on, and what must you avoid?

DP: That class moment—do you go with this chance, or do you let it go so as to move…what exactly?

MJ: I myself have tried to be the umpire in family arguments about just this. Everybody’s childhood comes roaring to the surface as they pretend to be rational. In Senna’s story the mother’s anxieties relate to generations of rearing black children. The fear is if you make one mistake, you are off the path, no matter how much I am protecting you—there is no safety net for you, however privileged you are as a black person. That has changed, but that old fear is still clearly circulating, hovering over the story, and hovering over the mother Cassie more than the father Duncan.

TCW: Here I can’t help thinking of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s piece in the New York Times Magazine about consciously choosing to send her child to a working-class/poor public school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Her husband, I believe, is black, but African or Caribbean, and he was profoundly bothered by the decision of taking a young kid and putting him in a worse school situation than they have to be in. Whereas she works through the logic that for everyone’s kids to do better, educated parents have to put their kids in the local school—that if you take educated families out of those schools, innocent kids are suffering, deprived of a rich learning environment. I’ve thought about this as a parent, from every angle, and I don’t think that I could do that. My father is a very typical black person who grew up in the segregated south, and education was the only thing that could allow his family to have a better life, was the only way that he could get out of a situation where his people were domestic workers and menial laborers. He would kill me if I did something like what Hannah-Jones did, no matter how high-minded it was, and I think that’s a pretty typical reaction. I really relate to the narrator’s position in

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Senna’s story, because it takes an extraordinary degree of privilege to be as dismissive as the husband Duncan can be about privilege.

MJ: In fake black English…

TCW: In fake black English, from a family of doctors, no less. There’s lots of irony in Senna’s story, and a level of humor, but also a degree of realism that really resonates with the contemporary black experience.

It takes a lot of privilege to be able to not strive for bourgeois markers of success, access, network capital, and things that you need to actually achieve before you can be a bourgeois bohemian.

RB: The question of privilege has entered the mainstream—white and black—in unmistakable ways. This was brought home to me a few months ago in Anthony Appiah’s column “The Ethicist” for the New York Times.

There was a question put to him by a young white girl, of high-school age, who had been accepted to a privileged private school. She felt that this was somehow a bad thing, that she shouldn’t go. She was on the verge of saying no to the acceptance. Should or should she not say no?

And Anthony wrote a characteristically thoughtful response saying, of course you should go. You’re refusing to go when the alternative for you, as you’ve described it, is a far inferior school, which makes it very clear that you must not refuse. Your refusing won’t change the system—it won’t change anything—if you deprive yourself of this advantage. Call it by its rightful name, he says, it is a privilege—but take it. It was, for me, a sign that privilege is on many people’s minds, and that often it is not at all understood. It’s a term promiscuously employed, a sort of a noise-word which has sown more confusion than clarity.

DP: It’s such a Protestant issue, privilege. I find it bewildering that a people—who always believed that education was the way out of Egypt— should balk at these opportunities as though they were committing a kind of race treason. It doesn’t make any sense to me, especially as they were always told, education, education, education. People misunderstand privilege the way they misunderstood integration and affirmative action and thought of those things primarily as access to education. But they

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were never really about that, and yet education became the only thing that affirmative action was about. Presented with chances and advantages, it seems to me a privilege to turn them down, that it’s acting on, or acting out, a certain kind of cultural logic: “it’s better to be déclassé.” I don’t have kids, so I can’t put myself in a parent’s position, but it never seems to me a question—that of where someone should go to school. Saving the school system doesn’t start with my children going to a bad one. There are other things you can do first before you sacrifice your own child. Because people who are sending their kids to public or state schools are saying that to do otherwise is to support “the system,” but these are really broken schools that won’t be fixed in their child’s school career.

JM: The story exposes a number of things that people—the characters—are doing wrong, and so I really wanted the mother Cassie to tell the headmistress what’s really entailed in her obsession with landing another trophy black kid in that school. Sure I laughed at her, but if we take seriously what Danzy is saying—and I don’t know how she feels about it—then we must consider this: Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York wants to set aside 20% of slots in the top three high schools for brown students, with test scores not being an issue—the idea being that you must have not brown Indian faces, but brown, black, and Latino faces—so that standards have been changed, rather than making it so that students’ parents know of and have access to testing services that are available. And then you find out that Harvard is calling Asian students “boring people” and not letting them in, meanwhile letting in black and Latino students with substantially lower academic qualifications, talking about how “spunky” they are. You read this in the Times and you’re not supposed to shake your head and say, “That’s the way it’s supposed to be.” You’re supposed to not like it.

Because all of that comes from the same place as that headmistress calling the mother, this Cassie character, again and again and eventually showing up at her house, uninvited. And I have no idea how Danzy Senna feels about those issues. But if that passage is telling us something important, we are supposed to question the derailing of affirmative action from what it was originally intended to be. And I’m not sure we’re ready to do that.

So, I didn’t think most of this was very funny at all. I have dealt with that woman my whole life, and she wasn’t funny, and she never learned what she was doing wrong.

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MJ: I have seen that same scenario recently played out just as crudely.

I think that many of the parents who bring their kids—black parents, mixed-race parents, Latino parents—to these elite, private schools are told in a code very similar to the one in the story: we’re courting you; it’s “You’ve Been Accepted” day, and here’s what we have to offer you. The “progressive” values are always tucked in. The word “diversity” is used.

I don’t think you find out late. You know when you’re applying what your “credentials”—your race, class, economic status—are going to get you, or what you hope they’re going to get you.

OP: For me this is personal. I have a daughter who goes to one of the most selective schools in Massachusetts. The school in Senna’s story is a bit of a caricature, at least in my experience. That talk in the story that the school is all about art, and sculpting, and no mention of high academic standards…I don’t recognize that. The schools I know of are promoting high academic standards. Maybe I don’t know California well enough; perhaps New England is the other end of the spectrum. But I had to think hard about this, when putting my daughter in such a school. For us, we thought about the fact that this was the best and most intellectually—and academically—demanding school that there was. I remain concerned about the diversity of the school but, for me, the choice is stark and clear. Do you want to send your child to one of the most intellectually demanding schools in the state? Several factors come into play. One of the things that sociologists have shown, which comes from Pierre Bourdieu—though it’s become pretty well established—is that when you send a child to a school, you’re acquiring different kinds of capital: intellectual capital, especially. You’re also acquiring cultural capital, which is the declarative and procedural knowledge that you learn not from the teachers but from the other kids, the knowledge of being upper middle class. You’re also acquiring social capital, in terms of your interactions with people; these interactions are far from trivial. I think it’s a trade-off; I constantly think about it. There’s a simple solution, which is to make sure that your child has friends outside of the school. It is not a problem if you make an effort to get the kid to be involved in relationships.

But other challenges emerge as your child becomes a teenager, and we’re dealing with this right now. While the intellectual payoff has

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been great, the social and cultural factors become more important, and we are now struggling as to whether to send our daughter to the public high school, which is quite good, or on to a private high school. Do we want our daughter, in her teenage years, to think of herself as part of an elite?

Do we ourselves want to regard our family as a part of the ruling class?

It seems to me that there are two kinds of integration through which individuals can achieve the desired goal of a more diverse society: differential and integral diversity. The differential type is when we think of diversity as a large number of different people participating or involved in a particular community. That’s the way we often think about it although, while it works sometimes, most of the time it doesn’t work very well because it looks like this: each group in its own corner, doing its own thing. You may participate in Irish-American or Black history month, and so on, but we’re still a long way from genuine cultural interaction. The second way through which diversity is achieved is thanks to individuals who integrate within themselves all these different forms of cultural capital. Such individuals are very important. In a way, Obama was a bit like that: he integrates all these different styles and cultures—that is what was so attractive about him. As I think of my daughter, and of my older daughters, I think that they did achieve that, which is to say that they are the kind of Americans who could easily interact in almost any kind of setting. They have the cultural capital of both the elite and what I, as a Jamaican, brought to them. The country needs such people.

This is a complicated issue we’re struggling with in America. And really it’s too easy to mock successful elite schools—they do attempt to produce complex, integrated persons. But you know there are other factors, like the real differences between black boys and black girls. Something happens with black boys around the age of 13 or 14—it’s been written about a lot. At around that age, they struggle with identity issues, which makes it yet more difficult for parents faced with these decisions. There’s often a big fallout of black boys. Most of the girls continue to do well.

And what most annoyed me about the father in Senna’s story is that he’s viewing things in a very superficial way.

DP: The success of the story is that we’re arguing about this.

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OP: Of course! It’s a very good story.

TCW: One thing I wanted to briefly note is the way Senna handles power dynamics. I find her handling of it very accurate, especially in the way she complicates and emphasizes the power entailed in the “victim” position.

She really presents—shows, but doesn’t tell—that the narrator, by the end, is completely in control over the white institutional power, which is craving her presence. That speaks to not all of black life, but to a kind of black life. It’s also interesting to think about the disincentives to ever give up that kind of power once you’ve tasted it.

DP: But it’s not power.

TCW: It is a kind of power.

DP: It’s not power.

TCW: It’s a kind of power.

DP: “I reject you” is a power moment.

TCW: No, I’m not speaking of the rejection, the ability to say no, I won’t send my kid to your school. I’m speaking of the fact that her presence is desired because her family would satisfy the institution’s need for a kid like their child in that school. Harvard needs a certain number of kids like that to be there. The New Yorker needs some writers like that. And you become a powerful…

DP: Because the moment demands that they look a certain way.

TCW: It’s not just a moment. It’s a long moment.

DP: Twenty years ago, there were all these memoirs by black kids who were very tormented by the experience of going to very elite schools and then coming home, learning how to navigate being black, and so on. At the time, I thought about how different that was from the days of

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what used to be called “negro Firstism,” where the act of going off to these places was seen as something that everyone should be proud of, for everyone. Everyone should be proud that Suzie had been called to do this; you would expect her to change, and you would be disappointed if she didn’t change. You know, the intention of a work of fiction has to be what it is. Cassie’s own story is there, in a kind of private, closeted world.

Cassie and Duncan never have a talk regarding their respective school experiences. We don’t know anything about his background other than that it’s sort of bourgeois, middle-class, and that he has the confidence to not want traditional markers of success. But he is an elite himself. This is the question for many black intellectuals. You disguise your own class allegiance by holding on to the idea of the intellectual as the bohemian, as outside of things. That seems to be what’s at play here—a different definition of what is “elite.” But I don’t call that power.

TCW: The power is that the headmistress needs them. They do have an enormous amount of demand for the slots in that school, but they can’t all be filled with only white kids. She’s on the doorstep because they need Cassie’s family in there. You do have an actual kind of cultural capital, or power…

DP: Or is she instead saying, “This is what you really are.”

TCW: But she wouldn’t be on everybody’s doorstep that way, I gather.

Duncan alludes to this—they have over 600 applicants for 12 spots.

MJ: Duncan, the privileged husband, the man, gets to claim the power— “we’re too good for you.”

OP: I’ve lived here for over forty years, and I don’t know a single black middle-class person like Duncan.

TCW: I do!

OP: I don’t know a single black person who is so privileged that they can putter around as an artist…where is the money coming from?

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DP: We’re to think that somehow the husband is successful.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: There’s an actual answer: the husband has a teaching job.

RB: I mean, what could be a surer sign of privilege than that?

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Session Two: Exile and Return Opening remarks by Darryl Pinckney DARRYL PINCKNEY: Thirty years ago, West Berlin was a backwater, quiet as a provincial museum. Either an upstairs neighbor was having sex, or those were pigeons cooing on the windowsill. How humbling to be reading Heine. One lonely winter, I was living in a friend of a friend’s place in Kreuzberg, a working class and Turkish part of town. The sky was low and every day I went to the same Turkish place for takeout, usually wearing the clothes I’d slept in. The Berlin Wall was one block away, which made the streets around me dead ends. There was no telephone in this borrowed room, a painter’s storage space. Canvases lined the walls, and it surprised me that, with his highly flammable life’s work at risk, a small iron stove with a chimney stood in the middle of the room. All that winter I fed it all the lumps of black coal, and small, white rectangles of paraphin. I poked at the flames; I wouldn’t leave them alone. Even playing with the ash buildup fascinated me.

I said that my living abroad was a protest. I was getting away from the U.S. One creep of a president had been followed by another creepy president, and his campaign advertisement supported the death penalty because of a felon such as the black murderer who raped a white woman while out from prison. It is what black writers did: get away from battlefield America, and manage the guilt of not being there, then decide that they could take better aim at the enemy because of the distance. My father

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thought I was kidding myself. He said I was going to find that racism was everywhere, simply because the European slave trade had gone on for 400 years, dispersing Africans to South America and southeast Asia. Moreover, what did I know about the racism of the classical world? If racism was so forever, I once asked him, then what was the point of struggle? “To struggle, well, that’s what we were put on Earth for,” he said, and quoted Kipling, the poet of imperialism. This from a black man who had been on the way to his office by 7:30 the majority of his mornings of the past four decades, so that his son could sleep past noon in a foreign language.

West Berlin feared Germany’s past and I was sure, therefore, that my father was mistaken. “Be careful,” my mother said. “Mrs. Pierce said there are a lot of drugs and blacks in Berlin.” A U.S. passport was a shield, but nothing was safer, in its unreality, than Cold War fortress life. The walled city’s orchestra, opera, chamber music, jazz venues, rock clubs, gay bars, hip cinemas, and the famous cinema festival. Its newspapers, bookstores, universities, anarchists with their skinny dogs, the smattering of Lebanese, Indians, central Europeans, some Asians, black Americans, Palestinians, memorial Jewish population, together with the large Turkish population. All of that made the city seem cosmopolitan as a refuge. I was lucky. I found work as a text doctor for the American director Robert Wilson. Theatre in Berlin was exciting, something to get into fights about. And the actors were proud. Of course, they knew all their lines before rehearsals began. I adored hanging out with them.

When drunk, they recited Schiller and Schlegel, Goethe and more Goethe.

“Beer leads to Bismarck, and Bismarck leads to Beer,” the East German playwright Heiner Müller said to me one autumn, when he solved my homelessness problem. He lived in East Berlin, but offered me sanctuary with two actors beloved by their peers, in a large and crazy apartment he had at his disposal in a leafy part of West Berlin. I remember becoming ill from Heiner’s relentless cigar smoking, and how scathing he—always dressed in undertaker black—could be about German literature. I’d never met anyone who had hated Thomas Mann. Heiner was fifteen when World War II ended. He said that the happiest years of his life were from 1945 to 1949, when the German Democratic Republic was founded, because “there was no government, only jazz.” His plays had been banned in East Germany in the early 1960s, but became popular on U.S. campuses and

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in West Germany and France in the 1970s. His prominence in the West restored his status in the East. However, after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Heiner was harshly criticized as an artist who had enjoyed privileges under the Communist regime. Heiner died in 1995 of a broken heart. I don’t know why I said I understood what it meant when he said he was a nigger in Germany. I expected reforms after the fall of the Berlin Wall, not the collapse of the German Democratic Republic. The future had never competed with the past in the still scarred city. Berlin was supposed to be the tomb of what had already happened, but to deny the changes was futile.

Hungarians, Croats, Romanians, Russians, Germans from over there: The East Bloc had been coming to town even before the Wall fell. The traffic intensified. If there were tourists, then they were on missions. Berlin went cowboy, briefly. Departing Soviet soldiers were said to be selling their weapons. Suddenly, Berlin real estate had value. Big shots were flying in.

Architecture exhibitions were held in fields of mud. East-West subway systems were being integrated. They used to say that, like the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall was visible from space. That was, perhaps, the civic boastfulness of an edgy kind, that was easy to trace where the wall had been. The overwhelming fact was that it was gone physically, if not psychologically.

But in 1990, crowds were on their way to the reunification of Germany ceremonies at the Brandenburg Gate, avoiding the leaflet tables of the party of right-wing extremists. A period of hope was being inaugurated in Germany. For me, it was like being handed my coat and shown the door in a dream. I couldn’t hear what the short man who resembled Jimmy Durante was saying as he held the curtain aside. A whole society was asking about its future, making it near impossible not to question my own.

It didn’t matter where I was, so long as I wasn’t in the United States. I suspected that I was really in Berlin because it sounded cool.

“Where do you live?” Berlin was not the expected answer. It had a radical, ringing bell of defiance. A city famous for having been destroyed, not for its beauty. The mother of my best friend from junior high school was Polish. She and her mother had been in London on September 1, 1939.

They had not gone back to Poland that day because her mother had a cold and couldn’t fly. She told me she spent the war sitting in a hotel lobby,

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making up stories about passersby. When I came to Indianapolis to see my parents at Christmas, she never referred to the fact that I lived in Berlin.

I had to show up at Christmas. It was the unspoken deal between my mother and me. My antique word processor resembled a toy oven.

One time it blew a security testing fuse at the Berlin airport. To fly with my bizarre word processor on Pan Am after the Lockerbie bombing sometimes made me one of the last passengers to board the plane. But security officials had been pulling me out of airport lines ever since Munich.

My father held forth at the dinner table in the family room; my mother did not let us leave. It was the only thing she asked of us: our time.

I listened to what was the latest in the Black Freedom Struggle. There were things I had to understand. After all, I was the one calling myself a black writer. My father spoke to me as though the title had to be earned. It was also reliving my resistance, as a teenager, to his blackness tutorials. To correct me was his duty and his joy. His tone was adversarial. In order to talk about racism, he had to be arguing about it. My mother and my two sisters debated with him, but I kept quiet through his rebuttals, because I felt that they were addressed primarily to me. I owed him the respect his father never showed him, as a committed civil rights volunteer. Respect that my father did not have for his malicious, self-hating, Brown University, Harvard University father, as a result. Deflection of emotion in my family made the subject of politics, racism, or black history acceptable sources of anger, indignation, and rue. Occasions outside the self were handled as such. To talk about the black condition made conversation seem personal, but then, black history was personal, intimate. The history in the books my father referred to, over and over again, was real, on the ground, not up in the air. Most black families have lived every chapter of it. To talk about things black when home, in Indianapolis, Indiana, was a way of not talking about myself while seeming to. I used my being black as a way to hide from my black family.

My father said I reminded him of his Uncle Lloyd, a jazz pianist whom I can now see on YouTube playing with Noble Sissle’s orchestra at Ciro’s in London in 1930. He toured Europe until 1938, when Americans alarmed by fascism were going back across the ocean. I thought my father meant that we shared a wish to be expatriates. No, he said. His Uncle Lloyd couldn’t get himself together either. Uncle Lloyd, who died sometime in

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the 1970s, wrote his autobiography of 400 pages, single spaced, typed entirely in capital letters. He used no proper names, only initials, and it took a while for me to work out that he’d played with musicians such as Sidney Bechet and the prodigy Johnny Hodges.

In 1980, I found the two large spiral bindings containing the type script of his life story, wedged inside a vacuum cleaner bag, under my preacher grandfather’s bed. We never discovered how my grandfather got the only copy of his brother’s book. My father said he must have been hiding it for years. He suppressed it, my father insisted, not only because he considered his brother disreputable, but because he, too, had written an autobiography, published by his church in the mid-1960s, a pamphlet of family lore and reminiscences that my father was disinclined to trust.

For starters, our family did not originate in Norfolk, England, just because our so-called masters had. My father could have destroyed his little brother’s testimony but he didn’t. I hoped that Uncle Lloyd hadn’t considered himself disreputable or care what his family, or the black church, thought of him, the trained musician. There was a tradition of black artists either looking for, or finding, personal and professional freedom by escaping Jim Crow’s jurisdiction. It didn’t all go to Europe, but for most of the twentieth century, Europe was the big tent where you thought it was an accomplishment to be, or that having Europe too much on the mind was self-betrayal for a black person. I’d made promises to my parents while packing to go back to Berlin. I’d be conscious that I was fleeing my family, what they represented, as well as white America. Susan Sontag liked to remember Gertrude Stein asking, “What good are roots if you can’t take them with you?” I’d liked to leave mine behind, in the shelves, hanging in the closet. The last thing I wanted were roots. The rules of what would let down the ancestors watching over me in Indianapolis, Indiana, were severe. Achievement was self-sacrifice. You must not forget where you came from. You stood on the shoulders of the past; this was serious. You were one of the fortunate and therefore you had a historic destiny to help other black people. My black life was straight, and in my white life, I could be queer. I called it individualism. I blamed my high school German teacher who challenged us to imagine how far we would go to worship beauty. Can you find your complex in Frantz Fanon? Would you want to?

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The connection, in my mind, between expatriatism and freedom was very strong. It had a lot of fantasy and self-justification in it. My generation of expatriates in West Berlin had reveled in an atmosphere of being outlaws, and the city became preoccupied with the business of being the capital. Germany was asking Berlin to grow up, like a parent expecting maturity from members of the family when times were hard.

Nothing was asked of me. Mary McCarthy said that an expatriate was a hedonist delaying going home as long as possible.

In 1990, I didn’t feel like an expatriate. I wasn’t an immigrant, either. I was a boyfriend. Someone I’d fallen for had a garden in the English countryside. I know what it is to live in paradise. My history began long before my life, and maybe that was why I tended to keep score when I read English literature. Locke, Burke, and Hume gave themselves over to the pro-slavery side; William Beckford, that gothic queer, collected art and built houses as the beneficiary of enormous plantations in Jamaica. William Cobbett may have reflected majority opinion when he deplored blacks going into the king’s army. But enough English people and Americans considered the slave trade an offense to God. Addison, Defoe, and Edward Gibbon spoke up against slavery; Sterne tried to express the nobility of Africans in his work, was encouraged to write against the slave trade by his friend, Ignatius Sancho. Enslaved at birth, Sancho was educated in an aristocratic household where he was a butler. Eventually, he set himself up as a shopkeeper, and earned a reputation as a musician and a man of letters. Samuel Johnson did not think it enough to advise slave owners to be kind. Chatterton, Cooper, and Erasmus Darwin wrote anti-slavery verse.

Blake and Crabb showed sympathy for the black man in their poetry. The cause of freedom for black people mattered to the leading writers of the Romantic movement: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Hazlitt, de Quincey, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, who descended from West-Indian planters. Keats, given to other musings, is noticeably absent. “But there is no freedom, even for Masters,” Byron says in detached thoughts, adding that he wished he owned Africa. The Lord Chief Justice’s ruling in the Mansfield Judgment held that no man in England could be held in bondage. My father said something like, “That was 1772, and if they got a black person back to the Caribbean, then that person reverted to being a slave.” I understood why my father thought racism deep in the English

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psyche went back so far as when black people were brought to England in 1555 and Mary Tudor, persecutor of Protestants, refused to permit English participation in the guinea trade. However, the English slave trade began after her death, in 1662, and 300 Africans were kidnapped by an English captain and taken to the Caribbean. The trade expanded greatly after Restoration in 1660.

When I found myself living in England, I could not look at the wonderful Georgian architecture without thinking of the sugar plantations that provided the wealth. Edward Said’s analysis of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, in Culture and Imperialism, came to mind, as well. Heinemann’s African Writers Series led me, when I was a student, to Senghor, to Ngugi, founded in 1967. Clive Allison was white, but Margaret Busby was the first black woman publisher in the U.K. The Allison & Busby list included C.L.R. James, George Lamming, Roy Heath, Nuruddin Farah, and Ralph de Boissière. Literature in English had become an international literature—Walcott, Naipaul, Gordimer, Rushdie, Coetzee, Kincaid. And not every non-white writer was black. But I tended to view it as a literature of exile, because these were stories more about where the writers came from, and were, for the most part, written in an elsewhere.

We are now as far from modernism as modernism was from Romanticism, and I sometimes wonder what a later time will call this era. Zadie Smith, an expatriate, or commuter, herself, is right when she says that our time may be fragile in many ways, but a second black renaissance is going on, and it is international. Moreover, it is not happening in literature alone, but in art, and film, and music as well. The culture of the black diaspora has arrived, again. Maybe hip-hop led the way, and ceased control. This is the age of intellectual property rights enforcement, though Shakespeare is the wizard of appropriation. White editors accused of inhibiting black writers, acting as gatekeepers and censors. I am reminded of the fury of the Black Arts Movement fifty years ago, though these accusations are not coming from a militant fringe.

I look at Zadie, who hates Thomas Mann, and other black writers of her generation and younger, and think I know what Sterling Allen Brown would say: “let the light shine upon them.” Many of them are mixed-race, descended from, to me, exotic combinations. The range of blackness has expanded. But Sterling also really minded being thought

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of as a Harlem Renaissance poet in his youth, because he contended that it was certainly not a renaissance for most black people. I look at the young, and also experience a twinge, because I am not fluent in what they’re talking about, or don’t agree with what I think they’re saying. I spend so much time dwelling on the past that when I wake up and realize that the present is out there, it makes me anxious. Sterling Brown was a formidable presence. He seemed to know everything about black culture and black history. We were cousins, but alas, he hated me, and would hang up when I would say, yet again, that I didn’t know Allen Tate. Perhaps the most profound change in black culture, since his death thirty years ago, is that one person cannot know everything there is to know about black culture and black history any more. Someone told me to reflect on how Sterling reacted, knowing that a renaissance was going on around him, and sensing that he was not a part of it. “Be yourself until the end.”

I returned to Berlin, after several years away, for what became my own private observance of the 100th anniversary of the Armistice, with Alfred Döblin’s tetralogy, November 1918, very much on my mind.

I watched the sun come up over the gray, undulating rows of the Jewish Memorial; I turned away from the little stage in front of the Brandenberg Gate. The end of World War I meant trouble for Germany. It was not a day to be celebrated. Angela Merkel deserved praise for the refuge she offered Syrians fleeing war, whether Germany could afford to help or not. But I heard a woman say that it was dangerous for German women to have young, single, Arab men on German streets. She was not alone in her old-fashioned racial hysteria. The hope of thirty years ago has vanished. I noted that in the German History Museum, the chapter on German colonialism occupied a single glass case under some stairs. A wall of text acknowledged that the German army massacred thousands of the Herero people in the early twentieth century. I left the museum and walked the rainy streets, sat in places where I used to hang out for hours, and waited to feel something.

MJ: So many kinds of history being experienced, chronicled, pulled back from in those reflections, Darryl—those places where the narrator feels he has the right to pry and prod. And I loved that insight about how talking about race with your family can be a way of seeming to talk personally,

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a way of disguising a more particularized temperament. I think that’s so uncannily astute. And the parallel but never symmetrical interrogation, Germany asking itself questions, Darryl questioning. There’s a very interesting blend: the authority of your description and the refusal of total authority in the stance of the narrator. A multi-quest narrative.

RB: You say, Darryl, that one person cannot know everything there is to know about black culture any longer. When did you have the sense that that was so and then, presumably, not so?

MJ: Did Sterling Brown feel that he knew all there was to know?

DP: When you talked to him, you knew he knew everything. He just clearly knew everything. But I think that in the last five years, as new names come and spread out, it’s clear that no one can keep up. The secret of black intellectuals is that we have other interests. And I don’t follow social media, so there are a lot of names I don’t know. It’s all happening there and I’m out of it. What I need is from a longer piece largely about Claude McKay, when he came back after many years away; as for me, I’ve come back after decades away, with no idea of what’s going on.

RB: And yet, for us—and by “us,” I mean people who read you—the sense is that even though you can’t know everything that’s going on in black culture, in some ways, you are alerting many of us to the things we ought to know. You find yourself not only writing about black writers—you write about all sorts of things. You give yourself permission to write about Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker, and others. And for many of us, that’s our introduction to those artists and writers, ones we are going to want to go to the museum or gallery to see. When you wrote about the Kara Walker exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, that was an assignment to many of us. I’m going to turn this into a question. Does that seem, to you, in some fundamental way, your object or your mission as a black writer or black intellectual? You seem, to me, to perform that mission pretty consistently.

DP: Well, with Kerry James Marshall, for example, I didn’t know his work very well before that retrospective, and it was unbelievable. I just

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write about discoveries, in that way. The presence of black artists is so profound and noticeable today—representational art, at that. It’s not abstract. When I was young, there was a struggle among black artists against representation. The idea that African influences would be in the abstract. All those kinds of issues are gone now, and these artists today have no problem referring to European traditions, and to specific works from the European canon. This is very new and different, as compared to the structures under which people used to work, where you had to do something specifically black, with no reference to European standards or judgments. Things like that are very interesting for me. It comes back to what I’ve often said: many things I did not have in school, so I had a chance to learn about them as a writer.

TCW: You hit on something that seemed very authentic about the black experience, which I have lived for, off and on, about nine years—the idea that there was some sacrifice in an earlier generation, and now you’re sleeping until noon in a foreign country. For many years, I had to get over that feeling, whereas my wife never had that. I had to allow myself not to feel guilty for being in Paris, Berlin, or other places like that. The black expat experience is a long tradition, and it’s one of both liberation/ freedom and also guilt, a sense of having escaped or avoided something, which comes with its own cost.

DP: I think that people used to think of expatriatism like passing. It was an individual’s solution to the mass problem. Nobody knocked black jazz musicians for their lives abroad the way black writers were knocked. I was always very interested that both James Baldwin and Angela Davis gave their reasons for coming back in the same sort of language, which expressed not being able to be distant from the struggle. But no one asked that of Dexter Gordon or Miles Davis.

TCW: I always go back to something that Richard Wright said, which was that every week that you’re fighting for your freedom back home is a week that you’re not actually free. But in Paris, he experienced more freedom in a square block than in the entire United States of America.

Another example would be Paris Blues, with Sidney Poitier: should he

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have to go home, if the point is to be free, and he found a way to be free?

How does the individual reconcile the obligation to the group?

DP: Things also changed, because being away isn’t what being away used to be. People come back and forth a lot. To cut yourself off, you really have to make the effort.

TCW: You do have to make the effort to cut yourself off mentally, but I, living in Paris, walking through the streets, can go weeks without thinking about a police officer.

DP: They’re armed to the teeth there—what do you mean?

TCW: But they don’t regard me; I don’t exist.

DP: They don’t think you’re an Arab in Paris?

TCW: Sometimes in the airport, until I open my mouth. But my number one identity in France, which it never was in America, is my nationality.

And that’s a profoundly different experience. When Black Lives Matter was really getting going, and the names of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice started circulating, I saw all of my friends’ concerns on social media, but I was really outside of it, even though I was plugged in. It’s an odd feeling.

DP: Same thing for me. It’s always been strange that Europe was the refuge, for so long, to black Americans while being also the capital of the suffering of black Africans, given its history of colonialism. That’s always been difficult to navigate. Early on, Baldwin didn’t talk about Arabs, but later on in his life, he sort of Arab-ed up his Paris life, so to speak. And he would say that he noticed how, of course, he was treated very differently from how Arabs were treated. Now, if black Americans in Paris at the time were too outspoken about the Algerian War, they would risk deportation.

That’s why people like Richard Wright didn’t say too much, because he’d found this refuge. He’d left Greenwich Village because he couldn’t find a place to live with his Jewish wife and his kids.

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RB: Could I circle back to something you said, a little while ago, about Kerry James Marshall? I’m referring, in particular, to his exhibition at the Met Breuer that you wrote about. The exhibition was, of course, extraordinary and exhilarating. There was a strange feature to that exhibition, which you noted in your piece: an entire room, or gallery, set apart for a wide range of works selected by Marshall himself, from the Met Collection, some of which were from black artists, some from white artists, some quite recent, some ancient. That was something I’d never seen before in a major museum exhibition. It seemed, to me, an extraordinary statement, both by the artist himself and, in some ways, by the institution. Perhaps you might talk a little about that.

DP: For me, the subject of Marshall’s paintings is painting, and how difficult he could make it for himself, so I wasn’t surprised that he had this conversation with the collection in that way. It was very interesting what he was drawn to, though of course I can’t remember a single one right now.

MJ: It also seems to me that that is a kind of mode of educating viewers in the same way that one might do with a close reading or a deconstruction of a black writer, to make sure that readers understood that every literary allusion was not from another black writer. I’d love to know how that was arranged—did Marshall request it? did the museum offer?

DP: I think the curator suggested it.

MJ: For me, it was definitely an educating mode.

DP: It sort of fits, the allusions Marshall made to Invisible Man, since Ralph Ellison went out of the way to tell people how to read him and how to view him. That’s one thing that Toni Morrison did get from Ralph Ellison, as she told people how to read her, too.

MJ: And now, she’s taught as connected to Virginia Woolf, and Gabriel García Márquez. It also occurs to me that we’ve been talking so much about what’s taken for granted, or permitted, or to be challenged and scrutinized and perhaps punished in a black intellectual’s life and choices.

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The passages in which the narrator of Darryl’s story recounts moving to England and studying these white writers, and taking account of the ways in which they confronted slavery, in good or bad ways. Once upon a time, certainly from the mid-late 60s through the 70s, that would have been a passage that many would have responded to with vehemence: “That’s so pathetic that you people need white literature!”

DP: I think it went away with Derek Walcott’s poem, “The Schooner Flight.” He took this form, and wrote this poem, and that was, for me, the end of the debate on content and form. His European and aural, African influences. Masterful disposition.

JM: Why did people keep on calling that Marshall exhibit “exuberant?”

MJ: A version of “articulate”?

JM: Shades of that. This is a genuine question, and in art, I’m a faker, but still. I’m willing to be completely shot down here, but I can’t think of a white artist in that same room, or the one across town, where you would see their paintings and the adjective that would be used is “exuberant.” A word used in several reviews of the Marshall exhibition. Because it would seem a little bit simplistic. If it were Courbet, or even Stuart Davis, or Hopper, or Turner…these are people where you could see a certain exuberance. But such artists are not typically called “exuberant.” And ever since that exhibit has started—and I’m not calling anybody out, because I don’t have the authority—I’ve been thinking, did Marshall mean that work to be exuberant? I think of Marshall as somebody who probably wasn’t smiling when he painted and who has a remarkable technical ability. I am flying blind here, and I may be all wrong, but why exuberant?

RB: I hadn’t noticed “exuberant” in reviews of Marshall, but I too can’t think of him smiling when he painted the works that we’ve just seen. I used the word “exhilarating” rather than “exuberant” when speaking of how it felt to us to be there. I think that one of the effects of that exhibition was to introduce many of us to an artist we’d never seen before. I had never seen a single painting of Kerry James Marshall before that exhibition. I

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had seen his prints in a number of places, including one at the Met Breuer, but I had never seen an exhibition. So, that was an extraordinary event, because suddenly we felt we had been introduced to a major painter who was, I believe, already 61 years old at the time of the exhibition. That was, to many of us, truly amazing. We also read, in the material that we got at the museum at the time of that show, that he had been offered a show at the Met eight years prior, and had turned down the show because he didn’t think he was quite ready yet. That seemed extraordinary. It spoke of a certain kind of ambition, self-possession, and patience that seem, certainly to me, completely unusual. And so, the whole thing—the story, the narrative, and then, of course, the work—created, in many of us, that feeling that we rarely have when we go to a retrospective exhibition. By the way, I did feel that way in the 80s about Anselm Kiefer and wrote about the exhilaration many of us felt back then. When Kiefer broke upon the scene in the mid-1980s, in a show at the MoMA, that was a revelation.

Other people knew about him in the way that other people knew about Kerry James Marshall, but I think that most of us in New York had no idea who this was. That’s an anecdotal kind of answer to your question…

JM: But was Kiefer’s work called “exuberant” or were people exuberant to be there?

RB: I think that they were exhilarated by it. I wouldn’t say exuberant, but exhilarated.

DP: I agree with you that “exuberant” is not the right word, though “exhilarating” does describe what many people felt. I remember looking up reviews of Pop Art in the early 60s, and they would say, “Roy Lichtenstein and his exuberant blah-blah-blah…” They mean the paintings were playful.

JM: But these [Marshall’s] are different kinds of paintings.

DP: Yeah. They’re very dignified.

RB: I love “dignified” to describe Marshall’s work, though I’m not sure others would approve.

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OP: I want to return a bit to Darryl’s thoughts on exile, which say a lot to me. I spent most of my life in exile: exile in England, where I studied and taught for some years, and exile in America, where I’ve been for the past forty years. I remember in England, in the 60s, coming to reflect on the extraordinary variation in the black experience around the world. I listen to you [Darryl] talking about your exilic experience in Berlin, and what it meant to you, as an American, finding refuge there, along with the other black Americans before, who found refuge in Paris and other places.

I thought how different it was in my case, going to Britain at 22. I grew up in colonial Jamaica, and Britain was said to be the mother country, as one learned as a child in school. In fact, I went to Britain on a British passport, as a British subject, as a colonial. Once in Britain, you had to think about what the colonial experience meant, and what your own society meant to you in Britain. A lot of Caribbean writers reflect on the exilic experience. Perhaps the best-known example is George Lamming. The title of his first collection of essays was The Pleasures of Exile [1960]. But what exile meant for me was not the same thing as what exile meant for Aimé Césaire who, as a fellow Caribbean, was nonetheless in a different kind of exile. For Césaire, France always was the mother country. And his encounter with exile was underpinned by the relationship between France and his native Martinique.

The Times Literary Supplement once asked me to reflect on the concept of négritude in a long essay, and this was one of my early essays, during my literary days, actually. I was once a literary person; that’s when I used to write novels and stuff like that. The title of the TLS essay was “Twilight of a Dark Myth,” though you won’t find my name there because it was published during a time when British newspapers did not name the authors of such pieces. It was an important moment for me, comparing Senghor with Césaire and Lamming. The difference was that Senghor going back to Senegal was really a going back home, to Africa, the motherland. And, as you know, a lot of his poetry then developed on the theme of exile, which became problematic for him, developed into a poetry in which he then had to explain what it was like back home. That forced a kind of shift towards a concept of Africanity, of African essence, departing quite significantly from the exilic theme central to négritude.

When Césaire went back home to Martinique, he was still in exile. And

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that became the profound problem of West Indian intellectualism for a long time. Because the Caribbean was itself an exilic condition. It was kind of a double exile for Césaire to be in Paris in a way that it was not for Senghor. That experience of exile in Paris brought home the exilic nature of the experience of exile in the Caribbean, which was somewhat hidden from you in being part of the empire. The Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, the glorious poem of Césaire, is precisely about that.

Unlike Senghor’s native land, my native land was not my own. You had to think, then, about the slave trade, about the deracination, about the profound rupture that slavery was in a part of the world where perhaps the most brutal form of plantation slavery existed. But, unlike the black American existence, you were also the majority there. You were in exile in a country in which you were the majority, and I began to think about that quite a bit, and much of my earlier writing was about the experience of exile abroad and exile at home.

DP: I’d had no idea that you’d written on that.

OP: Well, that was another life, as Walcott would say. But I did want to add something about the dangers of extreme particularism, the dangers of seeing one’s experience in totally inward-looking terms. Because those experiences of exile force you to think of yourself as sort of set apart from something else. Césaire’s poem is all about that. But I still think that we’re immersed in the problem of particularism. In extreme cases, I see it in my students, 90% of whom are involved in a me-search. Ironically, so it seems to me, there’s a sense in which you can only ultimately find yourself in finding out what you’re not and what others are. You don’t get that when you’ve limited your sense of self to the me-search. My first novel—and I did publish three novels, though they’re not called “classics”—was about extreme poverty in the slums of Kingston. And what I felt I had to do, then, was to find a broader experience within which I could locate my particular experience. For me, an important text was Camus, and The Myth of Sisyphus, which I then used as an anchoring metaphor for the tragedy of what I experienced in Jamaica. The Sisyphean metaphor is very powerful for describing the conditions of living in utter turmoil, on a dump. How do you survive on a dump, on a mound? Sometimes you

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crawled up, and sometimes you fell down—just like Sisyphus. For me, that dialectic was a driving force. Looking at slavery in Jamaica—not just spending the rest of my life mourning my people’s slavery, but becoming curious as to what it was like, slavery for other peoples—led me down a long, long journey of looking into the nature of slavery, which then carried me to the roots of Western civilization, ancient Athens, which was the first slave society. And from that, I discovered that there was this peculiar relationship between Western civilization itself and slavery—that at all the high points of Western civilization, slavery was key. Athens was a slave society, and so was Rome, even more so. And, as historians are now discovering, capitalism itself rose on the backs of slaves. Slavery was not an oddity, an anomaly, antithetical to capitalism, as Adam Smith taught. On the contrary, capitalism rose on the backs of West-Indian and black American slavery. What does this all tell me? That, in fact, my experience was a crucial way of understanding the world, of understanding white people, of understanding Western civilization. And this is why I find me-search so disturbing—because I can’t get my students to think in these terms: not just about things beyond their experience but about their experience as reflected in the broader world in which they live. In every respect, one can see the ways in which your own personal experience is vital, and then the universalities of Western civilization are also essential if you hope to explain your own condition.

DP: The not-me takes in a lot of territory.

OP: It’s surprising how you come to see affinities and connections where you never imagined you would find them. As an example: The last long essay I wrote was on Leon Battista Alberti, the great Quattrocento Renaissance founder of architecture, whom Walcott described as the great genius of the Renaissance. You could say, “What could be further from the black experience than Leon Battista Alberti?” But because I was curious, I learned that the man was obsessed with slavery. In three of his later pieces, he imagined what it was like to be a slave. In one of the most powerful scenes, he described a moment in which slaves had arrived in Genoa, and were waiting to be shipped; Genoa was one of the great slave trading ports in the Renaissance. This perplexed me at first, but it led me

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to look into his life, and it turns out that it was not only very likely that he’d been brought up by a slave, but that he was illegitimate. And in Renaissance Florence, that was a condition of utter alienation, despite his upper-class status. That identification that he had with a slave was his way of describing his own illegitimacy and alienation. All of this is a way of expressing my frustration with the me-search—in forty years, I’ve never been able to get one of my black students to work on slavery, much less to explore that dialectic between the personal and the universal. Yet, contrary to what they may think, their experience resonates in powerful ways with the most fundamental aspects of civilization. In many ways, black Americans are in a position to understand some of the essential issues of Western civilization more than any other group of people, because they are so close to slavery, but also as the most Christian group of people.

The birth of freedom, of the social construction of freedom, grew out of the condition of slavery. So, in this way, I am able to tie myself to the very broadest elements of the not-me. Listening to you read, Darryl, I couldn’t help thinking of the extent to which your exilic experience was a way of universalizing, of generalizing, of getting away from the utter particularism which denies you this rich dimension of self-understanding.

DP: Henry Louis Gates pointed out that slave narratives in the United States were the first time in the history of the world that the slave population left documents about what it had been like to be a slave. The very existence of slave narratives reassured the reader, because it meant that the enslaved person had gotten away to a place where he/she could look back and reflect on what happened. I think of exile in the black literary tradition in a similar way, as this distance that helps you look back. It kind of stops time. The danger of expatriatism is that you think time is standing still, but actually, everything is going on without you. One of the things that happened to Richard Wright is that his voice sort of fell out of date; he sounded like a dime-store novel from the 1930s, in the 1950s.

It didn’t quite work. This is something that never happened to Baldwin, who always sounded like he was eighteen. It’s the magic of his prose that he never got old.

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Seneca warns people, “You could be a slave at any moment.

You may be fine now, but it could flip and your fortunes could worsen.”

But the problem, of course, was that New World slavery had never been imagined before. Everything about it had not been imagined before. And you’re quite right that in the Caribbean, it was more brutal than anywhere.

But this idea that slavery was an inherited, or permanent, condition…the ancient world didn’t have that.

OP: Oh, absolutely they did! It’s a great thing that Gates did to elevate the slave narratives to part of the coming of literary writing, but in fact, one of the great slave narratives is kind of hidden behind what is one of the great philosophical treatises in Western culture, and that is the Discourses of Epictetus [1535].

DP: Which I haven’t read.

OP: Epictetus was born a slave! He wasn’t just born a slave—he was a house slave, though he was eventually able to buy his freedom. And the Discourses are all about his reflection on the nature of this freedom that he had won and which profoundly disappointed him, in a way. I see this as a slave narrative by a philosopher reflecting on the nature of freedom for someone who was once a slave. So, the slavery of condition was a permanent one.

DP: And your children became slaves?

OP: Absolutely! That was permanent.

DP: I can’t believe he got that wrong.

OP: Oh, yes. Slavery was perpetual, though you inherited it from your mother, not your father. And if you were born the child of a slave-woman, you, too, were a slave. America just inherited their slave laws from Rome.

To bring us back to what is central, it’s essential to explore that dialectic between the particular and the general. There’s a model for that: much

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of the writing by Jews explores this dialectic. You’ll find it in Marx, in Freud. Don’t you think so?

RB: I have no reason to doubt what you say. But I see some hands of people who may feel otherwise.

AUDIENCE MEMBER ONE [Honor Moore]: As a teacher of creative nonfiction and memoir, I just want to say that there are a lot of students who begin by looking at their own very particular experience and then move outwards from there. I try to engage with that straw-man of the mesearch and the me-moir as often as I can because in the trenches, that’s not what I see happening. I guess that’s not so much a question as a comment.

RB: Margo, do you have that experience in your nonfiction classes?

MJ: I’m with Honor there. I won’t pretend that there aren’t manuscripts that come in and say, “I’m doing therapy on myself. This is a story that I have to tell that I haven’t worked out fully,” and that’s just it. But there are many other things. I teach a seminar called “Cultural Memoir,” where my students are looking at the selves, or the various selves, shaped by and in relationship to family, region, ethnicity, race, gender, aesthetics—all of that. Not the selves as separated from these cultural contexts. And I find that they respond to that in their writing as well as their reading. The nature of interesting, well-written memoir seems to be changing, moving towards a kind of memoir that is open to cultural criticism, which is what Darryl’s piece certainly demonstrates.

DP: My parents gave me so much trouble for going to Europe, because they were of that generation that didn’t want to go to World War II to fight for what they considered empires. That made me hunt for the black historical presence in Europe. There was this journalist from the 1920s to 1940s named J.A. Rogers, who wrote this mad work called Sex and Race.

He did all this bizarre, auto-didactic stuff throughout many volumes. And people thought he was nuts. He said that Bronzino painted a portrait of a black Medici…and everyone thought he was nuts. But it turned out to

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be true! They exhibited it at Princeton a few years ago. I remember that I would go to the Luxemburg to see Henry Ossawa Tanner’s “The Resurrection of Lazarus” and then talked a lot about it. They had no idea what I was talking about. All was very buried, but now it’s sort of coming out.

English people never ask themselves, “What happened to the black populations of 18th century Bristol and London?” People are running around with black ancestors and they don’t know it. There were so many black people in London in 1598 that Tudor wanted her Sheriff to promulgate an order expelling them. The debate is, did she want them gone because they were black or because they were, in her view, not Christian? Another example: There was a wood painting that, for many years, nobody could locate. It was a street scene. There were as many blacks as whites in it, in all stations of life, including a black knight. They finally realized it was Lisbon before the earthquake, 1554 or something like that.

JM: Darryl, can I ask you a question?

DP: Sure.

JM: This is something I could have asked Baldwin, or I could have asked Fitzgerald. I’ve realized over the past year that I’m just weird in having this as a question. I’m a nonfiction writer, but if I were going to write fiction, my immediate impulse would be to write not not-me, certainly because I would figure that I’m in me. Nor would I write about a reserved, middle-class black guy who grew up in Pittsburgh, and wound up writing in Los Angeles, and married another white person…I wouldn’t write that either. I just feel like, “Aren’t I supposed to create some other person?”

And I couldn’t, and therefore I will never write fiction. What is the payoff you get from when you artfully write about yourself? You do it so well.

But what happens after that?

DP: I don’t know how to answer that. You should write that story, about being this reserved guy who grows up in Pittsburgh.

JM: But I’m in me!

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DP: But the “you” on the page is not you. It’s a stand-in, or an approximation, or device, or anything to engage in whatever subject you’ve chosen.

I don’t know why I always prefer to write in the first-person. Maybe it’s because of the authority the first person gives you. It also gets you off the hook, in many ways. But I only mean this for myself; you could accept it or not. Because I’m not a social scientist or anything like that, I can’t write in another way.

JM: And what you do is beautiful. But after you’re done, finished writing, how do you feel?

DP: Like I’m finished.

AUDIENCE MEMBER TWO: I have a question for John, who has sometimes made the point that, however much we’re committed to conversation, we do also need to be committed to action. But am I wrong to hear in that some, I don’t know, some impatience with mere conversation? Why would we not say that we need conversation at least as much as action?

JM: Conversation is what we’re doing here, and it’s great, and I am really enjoying listening to what everybody has to say. But consider: You could go back in time fifty years—1969, no Internet yet, color TV is becoming universal, everybody smokes—and let’s say we’re on a campus, maybe in this room, and instead of the five of us, and Bob, it would be, I don’t know, Shirley Chisholm, and Ralph Ellison, and Claude Brown. So, early versions of all of us would be there, and a convener, who would be—back in 1969—Bob Boyers. That event happened. More or less. Bob can attest to that. We’re having the same conversation, and I’m not sure where it led, but too much of this ends up being just for itself. Bob knows I think this is a great event, but I know you understand my point, Bob. RB: I do. And though it wasn’t quite “the same conversation,” there were resemblances. No doubt about it.

JM: In 1969, we knew there was beginning to be a problem. In 1959, they were asking the questions, “What are we going to do? What are we going to go out and do? What are we going to say to Congress?” But after the

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Civil Rights Act, it became a matter of sitting and talking more, talking more, about where we’re going to go. And I just worry that we talk too much. That’s all. Of course we have to set the terms. But I wish it were more a matter of “Here’s what we’re going to do, politically, to change lives” rather than exploring how we feel. And maybe it’s just that I’m not a literateur, and so I figure, “Who cares how I feel?” So, in that, I’m a little bit more limited in thinking about this.

DP: I care.

JM: Thank you, Darryl.

TCW: I’m conflicted, because I’m young enough to have read everybody here and to have thought about the things you’ve been saying since I made the transition from being a student to being a professional, and then I’ve become friends with some of you, and with others of older generations.

And as I’ve read more, I’ve seen that Leon Wieseltier wrote, in the 90s, almost word-for-word a piece I wrote, without my having ever read his.

Some of Orlando Patterson’s writings inspired my first book. John’s book, Losing the Race [2000], inspired me.

JM: Orlando inspired me.

TCW: So I was young, barely 27, writing my first book, having something to say, and wanting badly to get involved in the cultural conversation.

Now that I’ve been in the game for ten years, I do start to worry that we’re just spinning around the same conversations indefinitely. It gives me some anxiety. I’ve almost never heard somebody say, in one of these situations, that we need pragmatic solutions. And so I ask Bob, do you feel any despair, or deep frustration, in the fact that you’re still having these same conversations, 20, 30, 40 years on?

OP: I’ve been a part of these conversations with Bob for thirty years, so I can’t wait to hear his answer.

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RB: Well, as Orlando says, we’ve been running conferences on race for many years now; this is the sixth one we’ve run. Not all had the word “race” in the title. We ran one on identity not long ago. Some years earlier, we ran one called “Race, Religion, & Nationalism.” And no. I don’t feel despair. Because I do agree, for one thing, that very substantial changes have occurred over the course of these years. I would never presume to say that they’ve occurred because of these conversations of ours, but because, in some degree, at least, many good people have been having important conversations over these years. At least, I think that for some of us who have been in academic life for a long time, the most disappointing aspect of academic life is that there are so many things that you’re not allowed to say—which is something you never, ever feel at a Salmagundi conference, where people can say all sorts of things, can disagree furiously with one another, and keep on talking. Darryl and Orlando can tell you of conferences on race that we’ve had in the past where people on the panel have stood up and walked out of the room. They’d come back after a while—sometimes an hour, or an hour and a half later.

OP: Sometimes driven to walk out after something I said. [Laughter.]

RB: But my sense is that these conversations are more than spinning our wheels. Of course, there are real conversations, and there are phony conversations. My sense is that out there, in what passes for “the real world,” often real things aren’t being talked about. And again, if you spend your life in academe, you know that many of the conversations that take place have nothing to do with what matters. One of the things that we’re trying to do is to create an environment in which it’s possible to have real talk, so that the next conversation will lead to what John called “action.”

TCW: I was also thinking that in some respects each generation has to relearn the same lessons or the same insights, which can become frustrating.

DP: It’s not the same. Everything changes.

MJ: The thought alters the language, which is huge. If there’s real thought, it will alter the thing itself.

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OP: We’re always changing. Let’s take the thing we call “America.” We are going to continue forever, without end, in discussing the nature of this thing. The same kind of conversation which Moynihan and Glazer had in 1970 in their book, Beyond the Melting Pot. Any group which has any vibrancy, any vitality, is going to be involved in endless conversations, and that’s good. What’s problematic is when you’re spinning your wheels.

That’s what is bothering John and Thomas, and that’s what sometimes bothers me: the sense that we are still swirling in, for example, the same black identity conversation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which gives the impression that the conversation hasn’t moved that much (even though there’s been undeniable change). That’s the danger.

AUDIENCE MEMBER THREE: Darryl, when you were talking about Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight,” you said that for you that ended the self-questioning about how much of Western civilization one was allowed to have as a black writer. In terms of where we are now, there’s something very pertinent, because when I taught the poem last year, I had many students—white and black—who were dumbfounded that Walcott was writing in pentameters, and felt that he was doing something wrong, and said so. Some said that he was being untrue to himself as a black writer, that he was being untrue to himself as a Caribbean writer…I had quite an uphill battle to persuade them that what freedom means for an artist is the freedom to do these things. A couple of them had gotten hold of Langston Hughes’s attacks on Claude McKay for writing sonnets, and so were re-rehearsing an argument from the Harlem Renaissance about whether black poets in America are allowed to write sonnets because they’re too “Anglo.”

DP: You’re kidding.

AUDIENCE MEMBER THREE: No! I’m not. And it was really interesting, and a little disconcerting. I hope I persuaded them. And to me, the essence of what you do as a writer, and what you’re doing as a self-recording and self-questioning intellectual, apart from those magnificent, lapidary sentences, is also this quiet insistence on freedom.

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DP: I find that really depressing, about the Walcott. It’s simply a great poem. And Claude McKay, who’s a writer I love, is a terrible poet. And Langston Hughes was my father’s favorite poet, but not mine.

AUDIENCE MEMBER FOUR: Just a small thought. People have been referring to the Civil Rights Movement, and the Voting Rights Act, and civil rights legislation from the 60s. And I think that once all of that passed, a lot of people felt as if they had done what they needed to do for black folks and minorities. And where we are now is trying to get the Voting Rights reversal reversed, and we’re trying to protect Roe v. Wade; we’re trying to protect a lot of the things that we got in the 60s and 70s. While we haven’t backslid into being the America of the 50s, we’ve backslid because of the evisceration of some of the laws that were so important, and have been so important. It’s pretty hard to think about an ambitious civil rights agenda because we’re just trying to convince the Supreme Court that there’s still racism. That’s part of the moment that we’re in.

There’s been a lot of backsliding, in terms of legislation, so it’s really hard to think about the next push for new acts.

DP: In 1969, as a kid, I can remember people impatiently saying, on repeat, “We’ve talked enough. Now we need to do something.”

OP: But it’s not either/or, not conversation or action. We can never talk enough. The question is rather whether we are talking about the same thing. In fact, the Supreme Court likes to justify its recent actions by saying, “Wait a minute, this hasn’t prevented black people from becoming a dominant part of the Democratic party, and there are more black congressman now than there were in the past, and those have far more power than they did before.” The conversation has got to not simply be “Oh, we’re back where we were.” We’ve seen significant movement, which some reactionary forces are trying to push back against. The conversation we’re going to have now is going to be different from the conversations which took place when we had no power at all. We need to distinguish between the two situations, to not get them confused. I want to make sure the conversation is about where we are now, and not an imagined situation in the past before we made any progress.

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JM: You’re completely right. What worries me is this: in 1972, there was the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, which was almost 50 years ago. I find it so poignant to look at the film—color film—of it and to look at the new coverage of it. I’m obsessed with that event. Because everybody got together, people were arguing for reparations, it was a newer argument then. Van Peebles’s music is being played out of big speakers, which was the equivalent of hip-hop for the time.

Everybody was very excited. At the end, a microphone is shoved in this guy’s face; the guy is wearing a very loud, smart jacket. “So, what was the purpose of the conference?” “We met; therefore, we’ve won.” Nothing came of that conference.

DP: That’s not true.

JM: Ok, you can tell me that I’m wrong after one sentence. I have always thought how good that must have felt to be there at the time, but I’d wished that they had planned to do a thing. That’s all. I just fear that we’re recapitulating that conversation.

DP: So much of what people talked about in 1972 eventually got into our national politics. That conference actually had a lot to say about electoral politics, which was unusual at the time because a lot of people had dismissed electoral politics. They didn’t let white people come. It was just this black gathering that went across the board. It wasn’t just militancy; everybody was there. Things did come from it. It’s just so far back—it’s like Seneca Falls or something.

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Session Three: Prescriptions and Prejudices Opening remarks by Margo Jefferson MJ: I started my writing life as a journalist/critic in the 1970s, and I would constantly ask myself, “Am I a critic, or a reviewer?” We all know that the difference between the two can generate gravitas anxiety. “You can be and you will be both,” I would pledge to myself over and over. In the larger world, I was also a cluster of adjectives and nouns that carried weighted meaning, from the traditionally prescriptive to the newly exhilarating. They marked what I chose to write, what I was assigned, what I refused as an assignment, and how others chose to read me. They offered possibilities and imposed pressures that were internal and external. I was a black critic; I was a woman critic; often, depending on the setting, I was the “first black,” “first woman,” and/or the “first black woman critic.” It gave me freedom to write and to think past the old canons. The designations could be used to confine and belittle me, too. It made me brood and struggle in ways that galvanized my writing, but also in ways that constrained my writing.

Nevertheless, when we choose to write in a certain form, we do inherit the traditions that form defines. The critical tradition had bequeathed me the construct of authority and the armature of published judgment. My race and gender markings could make that authority fluctuate; my armature varied according to the assumptions and needs of my readers but they provided me some protection and some rewards.

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After all, I had chosen this, and I wanted to wield my black woman’s version of that authority, and to push at its boundaries, especially in a culture that had so recently been pushed and prodded to grant a certain amount of authority to a small number of blacks, of women, of black women.

But time passed, and I began to tire of, and even resent, that authority. To illustrate why, I am going to appropriate and revise some words that Janet Malcolm wrote about being a reporter and journalist: “Every critic who is not too ignorant or full of herself to notice what is going on knows that what she does incites and promotes a dangerous form of omniscient narrator hubris.” Once I’d proven that I could be that “omniscient cultural narrator,” I began to chafe at its limits. I thought that I needed to figure out how to write with some form of authority and order from intellectual ambivalence, even from vulnerability. To write about the passion you feel for an artist, or art form, an idea that might feel like unrequited love. It leaves you so exposed and uncertain. So obsessed.

I tried to make room for these feelings and stances in my writing.

I needed to work with them in a book, so I decided to write about Michael Jackson. He was multiple personae and multiple traditions. He was this abyss, center, lightning rod—all of the above—for so many cultural, physical, racial, gender, pop-culture, mass culture, body dysmorphia, sexual transitioning obsessions. He would ingest styles and types, would flaunt tropes and threats. He was like a human lab of mutations, desires, demands, and perversities. And he wanted us to see all of them, but not to ask him questions about them. As such, I couldn’t approach Michael Jackson as a full authority.

About ten years ago, I began the process of beginning a memoir.

This was not a form I had ever been deeply committed to or fascinated by. I called it, in my mind, a “cultural memoir.” It really started with my wanting, with the tools that I had, to write a record, a combination of story, research, interpretation, dramatization, self, confession, analysis. I wanted to capture the world I’d grown up in which, even as I started to write about it, became this site of slippage, because the first thing you do when someone asks what you’re writing about, at least in my case, is to say, “I’m writing a book about, well, DuBois called it The Talented Tenth [1903]; previously it’s been called The Black Elite [Lois Benjamin, 1991],

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and The Black Bourgeoisie [Edward Franklin Frazier, 1955].” Already, the problematics are huge, and each one of those terms would make me try to gauge what the other person was thinking and to challenge myself. It was, fair enough, a version of what one might call me-search; I was very interested in the psychological, in the way that a group’s histories, facts, emotions, griefs, traumas, and injustices leave their mark on subsequent generations. I was very interested in the borders and limits of privilege, internal and external. I was interested in this mixing, in a certain time period, of race, class, and gender privileges, prejudices, and prescriptions.

(I stole “prescriptions and prejudices” from one of Frederick Douglass’s narratives.)

I called this memoir Negroland because I wanted “negro” to stand in for a whole nexus of historical facts. “Negro” was the word of choice among progressive, forward-looking colored people looking for respect; all this started in the late 19th and early 20th century. And then there was the fight to make “negro” capitalized, and that was a big fight; I think the Times didn’t capitalize it until something like 1943. I wanted that “-land” to signify not only the lands of segregated neighborhoods—I grew up in Chicago, and there was literally only one integrated neighborhood— but also to signify the historical search for a kind of homeland, as well as the sense of a group of people who, even if they have a land, lack historical prestige and power. Those borders are always being pressed upon. That was Negroland. There was some chronology, but I found that I was digressing a lot and changing between the first, second, and third person. This was not meant to be a cute literary trick, though we all like to be cute and literary sometimes. It seemed, to me, that part of this life was very much the construction of personae for different situations—for being at an all-black party, for being at an all-white school. It’s not that literally your behavior changes—I wasn’t changing languages—but the assumptions, inflections, and tiny little things that you said or held back from saying change according to those situations. At school, I might be very aware of certain things my parents did not want me to say in front of white people. At a hospital benefit, I would be very aware of not wanting to try to talk like the girl who was poor and rough, who lived down the street and who was also black, because I thought it was cute to sometimes talk black slang. You were always manipulating and maneuvering at the

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mercy of that.

I did a lot of historical research for Negroland, lest anyone think I was just remembering things, or like Gatsby, who says “It was just personal.” The whole second chapter was a long historical and sociological account of origins—albeit with a slightly snippy, narrative edge—and about the black bourgeoisie’s evolution. In any case, when that was done, I found that while I still wanted to do criticism, I didn’t want to do it full time. I wanted to keep examining this mutant, or hybrid, form in which the personal stuff of memoir, memory, and a singular life mingles with the sociological, the historical, the parental, as well as the aesthetic, and what happens when one encounters certain art objects. Negroland was obviously very focused on race as a kind of central way of viewing, but I was also interested in those moments in one’s life in which race doesn’t disappear, but isn’t the central lens ruling the experience. There were moments in Negroland in which I felt that I was cleaving a little too much to the notion of, “This is a life ruled by my black perceptions and consciousness.” And I wanted to get away from that. So, now, I’ve written a series of short pieces that range from vignette-like encounters with cultural objects and people, to longer literary and historical narratives.

Diaphoresis: A young novelist asked me: Why do you choose to write criticism?

I wanted to make my way to the center of American culture, claim it, and find ways to de-center it, I told her.

Why did you choose to write memoir? she asked.

I wanted to make my way to my own American center and find language for the fractures there, I answered.

1960. I stare at the album cover: BUD POWELL: JAZZ ORIGINAL. When I’m alone I take it out of the record cabinet and stare, whether or not I intend to play it. Sometimes I put it back, unplayed. And think on that face, that dark, sweating face.

The camera presumes to walk up and stare. He’s closed his

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eyes. His face is shadow and smoky light against a grey and muted-black night expanse. His hair and mustache are black.

There’s a patch of white shirt and striped tie, a patch of suit. He could be floating alone in a cosmos of his own design. His lips are parted. (Humming, breathing, as he sweats.) He’s possessed by his music. In a state of ecstatic—let us use the Greek word for sweat—diaphoresis.

Black people with ambitions need to be wary about their relationship to sweat. Sweat is a word for hard physical labor, sweat is for workers who have no choice but to labor by the sweat of their brows, the sweat in their armpits, the sweat that soaks through their clothing, making it stained and smelly. “Sweat Sweat Sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!”

Louis Armstrong, Satchmo the Great, dares to sweat before multitudes. He knows many of his white fans think it’s happy sweat. Smile and sweat, laugh and sweat, play music, sweat!

Onstage and on television he’s never without his white handkerchief, wiping the sweat from his face, wiping the spit and sweat from his trumpet valve. His African mask of a face (the beaming-grimace smile, the fixed popped eyes) makes this a ritual though not a necessity. His ritual of artistic diaphoresis.

I play Ella Fitzgerald’s records but I do not enjoy looking at her album covers. I am a teenage girl, I am a black teenage girl and I long to be physically impeccable. Even when she is posing sweat-free for a photographer, Ella Fitzgerald is without the sumptuous glamour of Billie Holiday, without the meticulous beauty of Lena Horne. And she sweats—in concert halls, in nightclubs, on national television shows. Sweat dots her brow and drips, even pours down her cheeks. Sweat dampens her pressed and curled hair. Sweat runs into the stones of her dangling earrings. Like Louis Armstrong, she uses a white handkerchief. But he wipes his sweat vigorously, proudly; she dabs at hers quickly, almost daintily. If one dabs at sweat it becomes more refined. It gentrifies into euphemism; it becomes “perspiration.” White women, even white ladies are permitted to perspire. But on television white women singers do not perspire. Which means that, even as she swings, scats, and soars, Ella Fitzgerald’s sweat threatens to drag

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her back into the maw of working class black female labor.

Does she perspire this much because of her size, her heft?

Do her fans, white and black and other, call her “big” or do they just go ahead and call her “fat”? Did she start to sweat like this when she entered menopause? Do her male musicians, black and white, joke about menopause behind her back—offstage, where she can’t control them with her ravishing diaphoretic musicianship?

Ella Fitzgerald, you worked hard for your sweat.

You earned your sweat like real musicians do. Like artists who must labor to be beautiful.

You sweated comme des garçons.

And those garçons should have begged for the elixir of your sweat.

I do.

I beg for it.

This next one was an experiment in wanting to get at the slight embarrassment of a relationship to a mediocre piece of art. Here I also look at how a young woman who is raised, as so many women are, to put a certain kind of decorum first begins to become a bit awakened to something more feral. I like Willa Cather, I do.

My Own Particular Song of the Lark I’m in my twenties; I’m standing in front of a painting with a friend I have known and loved, then liked with reservations, then loved again, since we were eleven and I signed my name in blue ink on the front of her red leather clutch bag, then crossed it out in black ink two weeks later when we quarreled. We’re quiet now, in green thought, green shade mode, as we gaze at “The Song of the Lark” by Jules Breton. What is it about this large painting which Willa Cather claimed for her ecstatic tale of solitary female genius, yet had to assure readers she understood was rather second-rate? What is it about this painting that, even

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now, stirs young women, again and again? Why does it matter to us that in 1854 France, a youthful peasant girl on her way to work in the fields, early morning, stops and looks up to listen to a lark?

Forgetting the harsh scythe in her hand, her dull, brown skirt, and her rough white blouse, the blue cotton apron, the pale, brown hair shut up in a scarf, she listens, lips parted, eyes skyward. The title was meant to suggest a young girl’s awakening to something beautiful, Willa Cather wrote, and she used that title to tell the story of a provincial girl, a peasant of the American Midwest, awakening to her own astounding gift for music. But she could not publish her book without assuring readers that she fully understood that the title alluded to a rather second-rate painting.

Now, we study it. “This picture gave me my first sense that I could have a separate life, even though I was young,” my friend says. “A life away from ceaseless queries, intuitions, mergings, and dispersals, feared and longed for.” This moves me.

“I think it’s even harder to live a life separate from a powerful older sister,” I tell her.

She tells me, “Margo, you’re so competitive you could be a twin.” And my heart soars, for I’d never thought of myself as competitive in that way, no, I strove to follow the counsel of my honorable father; I strove to compete only with the best in myself—my higher self. What did I do with unconscionable amounts of fear and envy when they seized hold of me? I did my best to redirect them to longing, resignation, appreciation for the plentiful gifts of others. Though what a revelation, this awakening to a force I hadn’t known I’d possessed. It had chosen me. It had slipped across my threshold like a small animal, driven and cunning. An animal I thought was too feral to thrive in my sheltered domicile.

RB: I think we’re all speechless. Anyone want to jump in? . . . Much that you say here is astoundingly beautiful and fresh, but I want to ask you about Ella. I was wondering whether you thought, in a way that you might not be able to say of any comparable performer, that for Ella Fitzgerald,

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race had virtually nothing to do with the effect that she had on generations of listeners. I may be totally wrong about this, but in my household (a working class Jewish household), Ella Fitzgerald was the queen, she was the thing that everyone wanted to listen to, and I don’t think that anyone had the slightest sense of her as a Negro singer.

JM: It’s because she didn’t sing all the words. Ella Fitzgerald had an incredible instrument, but part of the reason that she had such a crossover success—Marilyn Monroe loved her—was that the lyrics weren’t on her mind.

MJ: Sometimes they were.

JM: I don’t mean to criticize her as an artist. But Billie Holiday is the other extreme, so I think that was part of why Fitzgerald was so great in that 50s Wonder Bread living room.

MJ: But if you track her career back from the 30s, she always varied. She loved Connee Boswell; she loved Ethel Waters. But I would say that her Gershwin albums with Ellis Larkin, as well as some of the work she did with Ellington, are more felt. Here is where words like “ebullience” do work—for the young Ella Fitzgerald with that high, beautiful voice, and that lovely pitch, this wonderful sense of play, in the big band, when people were dancing. That was glorious. I think that Fitzgerald had several musical lives: the jazz singer who then went swing, then became sympathetic and responsive to Bach. By the way, she and Coleman Hawkins were about the only two of that generation to move into Bach. Then, she entered the all-American songbooks stage, with the big Nelson Riddle arrangement.

In that way, she had a number of careers. And what overlapped with that were her lives as a black singer. You must remember that in the generation from which she emerged, black style overlapped with what people later came to call white American style. But it did influence that side of things.

You didn’t have to sound like Muddy Waters, who’s great, don’t misunderstand me. You just didn’t have to sound like Bessie Smith—that was one version of black music. She was part of the generation of jazz singers who took from everything. And black audiences, our parents’ generation, loved them. So, she had a life as a black and as a white singer. She also took great pride in it.

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RB: Even in later years, when her voice wasn’t quite the instrument it had been before, she made a series of albums with Joe Pass, and those were just extraordinary. Her musicianship remained. In my experience, wherever you travel, anywhere in the world, you’re likely to go into a café with Ella Fitzgerald on the soundtrack.

MJ: Though I do have to say, because we’ve talked so much about generational gaps, I have had students, white and black, who, when I have taught Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, have said, “Oh, thank you for showing me that there was something other than the one track that plays in Starbucks.”

JM: I’ve had similar experiences with students under thirty. All like Billie Holiday, but they find Ella’s musical emphasis corny. And I can hear it through their ears.

MJ: Holiday was glamorous, too. She was a great artist, but she was tragic, glamorous, and sexy. Ella was not any of those things.

JM: Nor was Diana Ross.

MJ: There’s also a long history of these public and private distinctions between people of color and white people. Much of it was in that realm of rumor—you could tell someone was passing for white by the moons of their fingernails, for instance. And dresses weren’t being made to accommodate a fuller black behind. There were whole codes of skin color and what was needed to keep black skin going—the question of whether black feet were suitable for ballet, for instance—and I know that men felt this too, but female culture and ideologies being what they were, women were particularly attuned to some of these obsessive distinctions.

JM: Margo, help me. I’m going through my mind, pretending I’m watching TV before I was born, trying to find the people who sweat, and you’re right: Ella, Sarah Vaughan, and Sammy Davis sweated on TV. [And Louis Armstrong.] Yes, and Louis, right! They are the only four I can think of.

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MJ: Nat King Cole, never.

JM: Yeah, he never sweated on TV. Most people didn’t sweat.

MJ: Sweat could be embarrassing. You were always watching to see if Sarah Vaughan’s straightened hair would start going back if she was singing too hard. You were constantly chronicling these things.

DP: It’s one of the strange, magical things that you do. That you can take things that should make us cringe—that have made us cringe in the past—and created a way of talking about them in this new way, a beautiful and delicate way. The same is true of Negroland. The subject of the black upper-class is supposed to be slightly embarrassing. But yours is the most open and interesting book. I also like the way your language is so surprising; unlikely words come up for these subjects. The freedom of thought that you work from, or work towards, is mirrored in the form you use. The page is laid out in such an intriguing way. We move from mood to mood so quickly, and without knowing you’re taking us around.

You make us supply the transitions. Your leaps are like that of a poet.

It’s the most beautiful stuff. In something I’m doing now, I find myself consciously imitating Margo Jefferson. Even if it’s just to say, “This doesn’t have to be a paragraph.” Margo, you’re a whole new opening up of subjects that, while I understand what you’re writing about, have never been written about before in this way. It’s a woman’s contribution, if that’s not a weird thing to say.

MJ: I’ll take it.

DP: I don’t think a guy could do it, this kind of visual memory for movement and fabric.

MJ: Well, it’s for particular things. A guy might do it about...

DP: You’re not writing about trucks or things like that.

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JM: And that’s why I don’t want to write a memoir. “And I saw that truck go by…” Margo, I’ve always wanted to ask you something, and here you are. In Negroland, you’re writing about this world which I was not in. I have a woman friend who’s about the same age as you are, but she grew up in Pittsburgh. And she told me that she felt that 1968 was the year that everything changed in black America. She said this with her tongue in her cheek, but I said that “it always looked to me like that’s when everything was different”—when I was about three years old, it seems like that was the pivotal year. And she said that she agreed. She said this with great humor, but she said that it happened when the flavor of activism and what it meant to be black changed. She talks like you. She was at a party, and there were two black men who had not grown up like her, who teased her all night because she couldn’t say “motherfucker” properly. They were saying it in a certain, shall we say, savory way. And she could only say “mother fucker.”

MJ: And “savory.”

JM: And she was very humorous about all this—she didn’t walk out of it crying or anything like that—but she said that that was something that had never happened to her and she thought that the culture had kind of changed. Does that resonate with you at all, things changing around that time? Not necessarily with that word, but in general?

MJ: I think things started to change in 1966; for me, in 1967 or 1968. Absolutely pivotal. We ceased to be desirable role models. Instead, Negroes like me became race traitors in certain ways, and we were no longer relevant.

JM: And you could feel that.

MJ: Totally. With many of my friends, when we came out of the Civil Rights Movement, we were getting the first black studies courses, and forming our black student groups on campus. We were, and we considered ourselves, leftists. We were engaged in this, and we were taking what was dished out. One friend was told by someone that when the revolution really comes, she was going to be lined up against a wall and shot. At that,

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she wasn’t feeling the camaraderie. It was humiliating, and there were a lot of additional gender games played in all this. It was another aspect of that power. But you felt it was part of what you had to go through if you were going to be part of those changes.

DP: Angela Davis was the figure who made it okay to be bourgeois, and bookish, and still black.

MJ: And a lot of us would grow huge afros. We were wearing them anyway, but we would make them look as much like Angela Davis’s as possible, wearing our little mini-dresses, and hope that someone would mistake us for sister Angela.

JM: I’m so glad I asked that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER ONE: I know you wrote about hair in Negroland. I wonder whether you’re going to have a hair-related object in your next book.

MJ: I don’t yet. But that might change.

AUDIENCE MEMBER ONE: Well,—if it’s not putting you too much on the spot—would you talk about where black women are, at this moment, vis-à-vis hair.

DP: We went from afros to Beyoncé’s blonde hair.

MJ: I’m sure that everyone here observed this as much as I: It does seem true that afros had a very short shelf life, or glamour life. And then lots of black women were straightening their hair, and then coloring it. Beyoncé’s hair, and its fetishized glamour, is not surprising. Look at models—Beverley Johnson, Iman, and even very brown-skinned models like Naomi Campbell—they all had straight hair; either they were wearing wigs or they were straightening it. Now, I see women who are showing their frizzy hair and, more and more, I see naturals and afros again. There’s a lot more variety than there was in the 80s.

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RB: One aspect of Negroland, which I think strikes all of us, is the uncommon candor. I think of the passage when you talk of the use of the word “nappy” in the expression “nappy hair.” Or another place, where you talk about a friend of yours who discovered that Audrey Hepburn was much more important to her than Thurgood Marshall.

MJ: That’s so akin to my father and grandfather and Thurgood going through what they went through so we could sit around and sleep late in Paris.

DP: You always laugh, but everything is very deep. I think of the moment in Negroland where you’re talking about how black women are not permitted to be depressed, or to have breakdowns. I freaked out, because I had a sister who…well, you know. You have this tone that’s perfectly natural—so it seems—when you’re speaking of things that are very deep.

RB: Would you turn back to Michael Jackson, just for a second? I was wondering if you could tease out the relationship between post-racial and trans-racial.

MJ: When we say “post-” anything, what do we mean? We’re putting the concept in some form of quotation marks. But it’s supposed to mark that some further development of thought has happened. But “post-racial”—we never bought it. These other, more academic terms are supposed to signify something, I don’t know, deep, but “post-racial” just sounds…

DP: Like you don’t want to deal with it anymore.

MJ: Exactly, exactly.

AUDIENCE MEMBER ONE: Where did it come from? Didn’t we hear it three days after Obama?

TCW: But it was real for those three days.

OP: You’re so right, because 99% of the references to post-racial are people saying that there’s no such thing as post-racial America. So, I keep

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wondering: Who are the people who are saying “post-racial”? Maybe two or three white racists.

MJ: There was that moment after Obama came in that everybody was publishing pieces about how it looks like we’ve gone beyond…

JM: I wrote one. I openly admit it. I wrote one saying that “This proves that racism is no longer black America’s main problem.” And then I did my outline of what we needed to do. I did write that.

DP: I remember that.

JM: I didn’t mean that there was no more racism.

MJ: And you didn’t say “post-racial.”

JM: No, I never used that word, but it looked like it. So, I’ve been accused of being one of those people. Really, Orlando’s so right—the only reason we started bringing up the question of whether America is post-racial is to say that it wasn’t.

OP: Every time I see the word, it’s someone saying it doesn’t exist.

TCW: Of course, Touré had that book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now… JM: I didn’t like that. It bothered me.

OP: I reviewed that book on the front page of the Times.

JM: But he didn’t mean anything by it. Because his book didn’t have anything in it that Ta-Nehisi Coates wouldn’t agree with. He called it that because it was an attractive book title, I think. And it was his breakout book.

DP: I was just thinking about something I said about Negroland. Is saying “woman’s contribution” patronizing?

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MJ: Did you say that?

DP: I was thinking about having said “woman’s contribution.” Is that patronizing? I mean something that only a woman would, or could have written.

AUDIENCE MEMBER TWO: To that point, I was going to say that I think that you couldn’t have written Negroland as Negroland without having been a second-wave feminist.

MJ: I think that’s absolutely true. Anyway, Darryl, maybe it’s the word “contribution” you’re worried about, as that feels a little period. Perhaps “perception,” or “perspective”? I’m trying to think about why it worries you.

DP: I’m not sure. Maybe because Negroland is just one of those small books that really feels very large.

AUDIENCE MEMBER THREE: Margo, would you talk about how you grew up, and your family’s relationship to white people? I know you said that your family raised you to feel superior to most white people.

Can you add some texture to that, tease it out a little bit? Did you worry about what white people would think of you?

MJ: We were taught all of the prejudices. And “prejudice” really was the word in the 50s. We could talk about uglier things, but “prejudice”— AUDIENCE MEMBER FOUR: —was Gordon Allport’s word. Remember The Nature of Prejudice?

MJ: That was part of your education. You had to know what the worst kind of white people, and even mainstream white people, would think of you. You had to be armed against that, both internally and externally.

The arming was also both offense and defense; for example, the defense was that you were not going to speak super loudly and your diction was

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going to be perfect. We were working constantly to counter stereotypes.

I was going to a mostly white school, and it was as progressive as any white school— DP: It wasn’t just any school.

MJ: Well, it was a progressive, private white school.

DP: It was the University of Chicago Laboratory School.

MJ: Historically, the University of Chicago Lab Schools had no Jews, and then they let them in. It was World War II and the Holocaust that made the Lab School, and probably some other private schools, decide to accept a tiny little group of black people; it had to be voted on and discussed. What I’m still trying to get at, in that Lab School experience, is that many of my days there were just ordinary, fun school days. I liked being there. Yet there was this other life that was a racialized life. I find it hard to capture both of those things. After my book came out, some white classmates, who had been good friends of mine, told me that something felt off—because I hadn’t given that impression at the time. And I said, “Well, it was my job not to give that off,” by which I meant that I was going to be a perfectly integrated person. And I was, down to the egregious period girl-ness of being a cheerleader. But I also thought that the fact is that I didn’t always feel it, and I didn’t always want to feel it. I didn’t always need to feel it.

DP: In the early days of integration, most white students didn’t call attention to your being black, not as though it were a handicap, but as though it would be intrusive to do so. And your racial life was at home…

MJ: At church, with family and friends. Exactly.

DP: And your white school life was just Leave it to Beaver.

MJ: Though you could always pick up slight tensions between white and black parents, by which I don’t mean hostilities exactly, but a certain distance.

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DP: They were surprised that your parents were like them.

MJ: Yes.

OP: This is all very fascinating for someone who didn’t grow up in this society, but who grew up in a society that was 90% black. In the little village I grew up in, I don’t think I laid eyes on a white person until I was eight years old. We did have colorism in the Caribbean, so I was aware of the fact that the elites within my little town were the whites whom you never saw, the colonials, and that they ran the show. Then there were the colored groups. But one didn’t have to struggle with this. Even when I went to Kingston with my high school class, that was 90% black as well.

If I were to write a memoir, there’s nothing like your experience that I would be able to recall, until, that is, I went to England. I discovered blackness in exile. I discovered race and color in England, likely from the prejudice there, but also in looking back onto the Caribbean from an elsewhere. But color was, and remains, something else in the Caribbean. One of the biggest debates in Jamaica right now has to do with skin bleaching.

MJ: Skin bleaching?

OP: Yes! But people are defending it. It’s even more complex because the people who are doing it are the people I’d most associate with radical cultural expression. It’s coming from the dancehall queens who are the embodiment of Jamaican culture, a celebration of blackness. It’s also coming from men. About a year ago, a male reggae singer went to the university to defend the practice, insisting that this was his body, that he has a right to do with it as he pleases, and that it has nothing to do with race—that we’ve transcended that. That was his argument. None of the students believed him, but they listened politely. The women, too, are insisting that their bleaching has nothing to do with race. They are saying that it’s no different from tattooing your body; there’s also the argument that it’s no different from white people bleaching their hair. But I’m interested in something we haven’t yet touched on—which I was crucially aware of growing up in the Caribbean—and that’s the color question. You talk about it in Negroland, as I recall.

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MJ: Yes, it didn’t come up in what I read today, but I do talk about it a lot in Negroland—about the categories, the grades of hair, what different colors indicate and consequently permit. About how if you’re a certain shade of brown, there are certain loud colors that you’re not supposed to wear because that makes you look sluttish, and it also calls too much attention to your body. And this persists.

OP: Where are we with that?

MJ: I think that all of us have some experience with this. It’s still there, absolutely.

TCW: In the car, yesterday, I was telling Margo that at this point, my wife and I have produced two Swedish-looking children. And my dad comes from the segregated South. When my dad flew to meet my daughter after she was born, he was holding her when I asked, “What do you think?”

He said, “Oh, son, she’s just a Palomino.” I had to Google what that word was. And it’s a horse-breeding term that Southerners have; it’s like a pale white and golden horse in the Southwest U.S. My father said, “I had three girls like this in my segregated high school in Texas; this is nothing new.”

And then my friends from the Caribbean diaspora in Paris told me that she would be chapé, which is slang for échappé—escaped—and that there are 36 skin colors in Martinique and that the lightest color is chapé.

I’ve just finished a new book about the experience of having two children who have forced what I call “the fiction of race” into my life in a way that’s neither abstract nor theoretical, but which is lived. I’ve been thinking so much about skin gradations, as well as some things that do bother me within the black community and the white community. Blonde hair and blue eyes are so prized. My niece and nephew in my French family are brunette, dark brown eyes, and I can see how strangers on the street prioritize the blue eyes and the blonde hair that my daughter has.

We value these superficial traits so much.

DP: But they’re not superficial, I’m afraid. There’s still a kind of hierarchy of values.

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TCW: Yeah. And blacks value them too. I’ve had so many compliments on my daughter’s blue eyes from blacks.

OP: As an outsider in this respect, my sense is that there’s been great progress made in this regard among black Americans. I am not saying that we’ve transcended anything yet, but there’s been far more progress than in the Caribbean, for example.

JM: Orlando, in many circles, if you said that we had gotten beyond it, or had undergone major progress in colorism, you would be swatted down.

In certain quarters, it’s highly unpopular to say (what is a fact) that it’s not what it was 25 years ago.

One of my daughters is my color, and looks exactly like me; she has kind of generic, white girl brown hair. The other one is in-between my skin tone and Thomas’s, and she’s got kind of funky blonde, curly hair—kind of how Margo’s looks right now—and that’s how it came out, nobody knows why. On my side of the family, there are so many colors (unlike my wife’s family, which is just one color): there are many black colors, Latinos have married in, whites have married in. It’s just not an issue, and frankly, a lot of my cousins live in the ghetto, and even there, white people have married in—there are blondes and blue eyes. Fifty years ago, it would have been much more of an issue, but I don’t see it now.

But Orlando, many people would say, “McWhorter doesn’t have enough of a perspective.” So, I don’t know.

MJ: I think that we’re not completely past it everywhere, but these differences are huge.

TCW: Margo, is there still—only Margo has access to elite black America—is there still, in certain parts, the Brown Paper Bag Test?

MJ: Not that I know of. “Elite black America” now alludes to people with whom I no longer hang out, and to a group of people who, apart from work, still lead class- and race-segregated lives. None of the ones I still know would do anything with the Paper Bag Test except roll their eyes. Does that mean that they wouldn’t be pleased that they’re a lighter

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brown as compared to a browner brown? I don’t know. But it’s not embraced any more.

OP: In his memoir Colored People, Henry Louis Gates claims that he and this group once formally abolished the Paper Bag Test at the Yale dorms, so it was still around even as late as the 70s. This varied in terms of region, as well.

AUDIENCE MEMBER FIVE: I heard my students speculate that Meghan Markle wears dark colors to make herself look lighter. They deplore this.

Also, in bringing up Willa Cather, whose Song of the Lark (in a way, a portrait of the artist as a young woman) [1915] came out about the same year as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], Margo has supplied us with an addition to Darryl’s list of great conservative writers.

Maybe Darryl said that at the break, not in front of a microphone.

MJ: Actually, that is absolutely true. About Cather, and about the list.

JM: Women in Cather’s novels sweated, too. Those are some sweaty women.

MJ: I love her sweaty peasants!

DP: You can sweat on the farm.

PEG BOYERS: I’ve been thinking about my own family. My mother was Cuban, from an upper-class family, and she and my Irish-American father were in complete denial about their racial difference. When we came to this country, people would ask me if my mother was Chinese; she was olive-skinned, yellowish. One of my aunts was absolutely mulatta. And it was never talked about. We were absolutely unconscious of that as an issue. Later, after the revolution, my brother-in-law once had the temerity to say to my mother, “Isn’t it great that all black people in Cuba will now be literate?” And she said, “Cuba doesn’t have any black people.” That’s how in denial she and my father were. I don’t begin to understand it; I’ve been so unaware of my family’s racial complexities

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for most of my life. And I just wonder if you’ve ever come across this, and what your thoughts might be.

MJ: What’s interesting about this kind of denial is that it was maintained by adults, by grown-up people. It’s tricky, because there is the history of Cuba and other Caribbean countries. But I have a question for you: wasn’t there a sort of sotto voce conversation that you overheard at times?

DP: Were they from Havana?

PB: No, they were from Cárdenas.

AUDIENCE MEMBER TWO: I spent most of my adult life in Miami.

Did they believe they were Spanish?

PB: Yes, Spanish was very much part of the legend.

AUDIENCE MEMBER TWO: Because there is a very big divide in Cuba: are you Spanish or are you black? And being black is seen as bad.

DP: Eastern Cuba is very brown. And they always said that the revolution was good for the countryside, because the country people could go to school. Everyone always said that the Cuban revolution was a disaster for the middle class, but you have no idea how vast it was until you go to Havana and see these neighborhoods—villa, after villa, after villa, after villa. It was huge. Cuba was California for the people in Spain and Valencia. And Havana was very light-skinned, and the rest of Cuba was not. They never saw it if they never left Havana.

JM: I have a good friend about my age who came from Cuba, and she identifies very strongly as black. She thinks of herself as the same thing I am, and I’ve gotten used to that, and I accept it. I have another friend, a little older than myself, who is about the color of me and Orlando. And she does not identify as black. She’s from Panama, and she looks black to me, but I’ve had to learn that she identifies as Latina. Both of those women are very aware of racism, and of suffering, and have all the sympathies

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that you would expect. And it always makes me think how stupid our conceptions of it are, here, even though I myself have internalized them.

If Thomas wants to question whether one of his progeny is black, he gets yelled at on Twitter; at a party I had, where I asked, “Are my children black Americans?” I was told by very wise white friends of mine that I was out of my mind to even consider it. Something is wrong, but we have to decide what the real problems are. But I think we’re going to get laughed at, in one hundred years, for the way we educated Americans tend to think of these things. But we’re stuck in our own time.

DP: There was always the one-drop rule which determined where you were in the caste system. 1/16th, one drop, and if they found out, then you were sent back into being black. I was on a panel and a woman said that Obama was half-white, and I kind of laughed. I said, “he’s black.” And she said “no, he’s half white.” And I laughed and laughed. Afterwards, she asked, “You think I’m white, don’t you?” I said yes. And she said, “I’m William Grant Still’s granddaughter.”

RB: Wow. MJ: Oh my god.

DP: And I must say, she could have embarrassed me on the panel. But she waited till the event was over.

TCW: Going back to what you were saying: the one-drop rule is so interesting, but it really only exists in America. In Brazil, having any blood that’s not black makes you not black. The football star, Neymar, was asked if he experienced racism and he said, “No, it’s not like I’m black or anything like that.” His dad is a black Brazilian.

OP: But he got into a lot of trouble over that, and later retracted it.

MJ: I always thought it would have been really interesting if Obama could have run as both a black and a mixed-race president. Because in terms of American history, that’s what he is.

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TCW: Totally. The black community didn’t accept him at first. And Stanley Crouch—and many others agreed with him—wrote an article about how Obama wasn’t black because his dad was African. Yet the black community, at first, was big time behind Hillary Clinton.

JM: If he hadn’t been married to a tall, dark woman, I don’t know that the black community would have gotten behind him.

OP: My barber certainly would not have; he made it clear to me that that’s why he voted for Obama.

DP: One of his classmates said that in Hawaii, everyone is a mongrel.

And it didn’t matter. But when he got to L.A. and the cops treated him as a black youth, then he realized what his mother had been talking about.

OP: Can we go back to the Cuba conversation, since I teach Cuba and race? The simplistic way of saying it is that they have this system of color gradations, in which they recognize all these different categories in Spanish terms. Whereas in Brazil, there are over 133 Portuguese words for different color variations.

In Cuba, the lower down you go on the socio-economic ladder, you find whites and blacks just walking around together. The higher up you go, you eventually reach a certain point at which it becomes very white, exclusively white. It’s significant that there was a certain period after the revolution in which blacks were promoted a lot, and so on, but within 15-20 years, the Cuban political world was white.

I see America as almost the opposite. The lower down you go, the more segregated it gets—the more important whiteness becomes, positionally; for many in Appalachia, it’s all they have. America is different from Brazil in that the higher up you go, the more integrated things become (to the degree to which we have integration). There’s no counterpart anywhere else in the world—certainly not Brazil. In America, you have such a substantial number of middle- and upper middle-class black people.

51% of the Brazilian population self-identify as having African ancestry.

Yet there is, if not legal, actual segregation. And more crucially, the elite is almost exclusively white.

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There’s a little book of faux-pas of George W. Bush, and one of them happened when Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the sociologist-turned-president of Brazil, visited Bush. They were talking, and Cardoso mentioned that in Brazil, they were then in the process of adopting America’s affirmative action. And Bush looked at him in amazement and said, “You have blacks there, too?” That is a true story. And I like to finish by adding a little defense of Bush by saying that if his only relationship to Brazil was with an ambassadorial group, in Washington, then he had every reason to think that Brazil is a little white country.

And the same is true of the officer class. Over 10% in the officer class in the American army are black. That’s one of the incredible changes that we don’t talk much about. The military was the most segregated part of America until as late as the 60s. No country has come anywhere close to this; it’s one of the major achievements of integration. But in Brazil, in the ambassadorial classes, in the upper echelons of the civil service, and in business, a country which has over 50% of its population self-identifying as having black ancestry is very white.

DP: Brazil also has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan.

AUDIENCE MEMBER SEVEN: There’s a saying, “All skin folk aren’t your kinfolk.” And so I wonder how that might inform some of the critique, scrutiny, or skepticism that black Americans have towards the candidacy for president of Senator Booker or Senator Kamala Harris?

OP: Good question, my friend.

JM: You know what? Everybody forgets something very important about the year 2009—it wasn’t only when Obama took office. It was the year that it became, “Oh, you’re not on Twitter?” as opposed to “Are you on Twitter?” 2009 was also the year that “your mother” was on Facebook—it was the year that everyone joined Facebook. That year, which is now ten years ago, is the beginning of this: everybody has the Internet in their pocket all the time, and you can communicate with everybody in the world all the time. As clichéd as this is beginning to sound, that changes the world, in some good, though probably mostly bad, ways. One of the bad ones is that

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it focuses groups upon one another and reinforces negative, or positive, sentiments. Of course Obama’s blackness was going to matter to many people, but the internet focused and exacerbated a resentment of him that threw him for about a year. Then, social media elevated cop-killings of black men, and that became the thing we thought about more than anything else for a very long time. It took a certain attention away from Obama, even getting him roasted for supposedly saying the wrong things about it.

I think that Obama’s presidency ended up not being as galvanizing as we might think, because what people ended up thinking about race, instead, was Michael Brown and all those other people that got killed in that way.

Obviously, there was racial animus directed at Obama, and that persists among many of Trump’s supporters who think they want America to be great again. But Obama was elected twice, and there had to be some magic to get to that. Is there any magic in Cory Booker? He is a very interesting and earnest figure, but I’ve met him a few times and, I don’t know. And Kamala Harris is a great idea, but there already was a Kamala Harris and it was Barack Obama. There’s no novelty there. And the idea is going to settle that it won’t matter to have a black president anyway.

And that’s a damn shame.

DP: I don’t think we’ll have a black president again for a long time.

MJ: I don’t either.

AUDIENCE MEMBER SEVEN: Can you speak to the skepticism, or detachment, which is currently swirling within Newsfeeds and social media in the black community?

JM: Well, if people want to sit around being skeptical and disaffected, then Trump is going to win again. I hope that we don’t start wallowing in this wise skepticism, as if that’s the proper black way to be, and let that motherfucker wind up president again. I think we have to be very pragmatic and think about what could actually happen. Booker is deeply committed to prisoner re-entry. He was doing it in Newark, and is deeply committed to helping black America in pragmatic ways. Kamala Harris, I’m not sure. We have to think action.

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DP: I think that we shouldn’t buy into the populist disaffection for the political process. Because it’s too important for us. We don’t need “symbolic” candidates. The only symbol we need is victory.

OP: One interesting thing about Kamala Harris is that both of her parents are immigrants. Her dad is Jamaican—we actually graduated in the same class at the University of the West Indies—and her mom is Indian. Whether that generates even greater skepticism about her—she doesn’t have the “real roots”—I’m not sure.

DP: It used to be that the narrative of progress was that you were the child of immigrants, and now you were running for president. What happened to that? Is it because they’re brown immigrants? I guess so.

JM: Mark Lilla, philosopher and all-around genius at Columbia, writes a book saying that the left needs, at least temporarily, to suspend its focus on identity politics in order to do undramatic things like elect the right people into the state legislatures, which define who is allowed to vote.

That’s not as much fun as thinking who’s going to be president, but it’s absolutely crucial. But he got roasted by various well-meaning people, of all colors, as a white supremacist. That is our problem.

RB: You mean stupidity is our problem, yes?

JM: You’re right. But it also means we have to focus on more mundane things than how this person or that person feels about black people, including what Joe Biden did in terms of the crime bill at a certain point in the past—let it go. He would be better than what’s in the white house now.

DP: Not exactly the politics of hope.

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Session Four: Wokeness, Atonement and Change Opening remarks by John McWhorter JM: To summarize my thoughts about race, I want to say, quite simply, that the “struggle,” as my mother used to call it, has really gone off the rails in a way that, while understandable and predictable, is counterproductive and dangerous. I’m very interested in post-civil rights activism in that I would like to see poor black people be less poor, and be more able to realize themselves; there have been people left behind. I think that people like me—I grew up not rich, but very middle class—don’t need any particular help. It’s the people who were left behind after 1965 who need help; things need to be done, and a lot of it needs to be done by the government. And I’m afraid that what we think of today as the proper way to be “woke,” as they put it, doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with those people. It dismays me. The idea isn’t that anyone is being deliberately cynical, but history is complicated, and history is about gradual drift. And we have drifted into a ditch. These days, there is a problem with the way black people are taught to think about “the struggle,” and there’s a problem with the way non-black people, fellow travelers, are taught to think about the struggle. In both cases, you could have seen it coming.

You know, it isn’t talked about enough, what an unprecedented miracle the Civil Rights revolution was—where there was a people in power, and a people who were brought here as slaves and treated as such for another

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one hundred years, and then, within a dazzlingly small amount of time, suddenly the people in power—though often merely symbolically, but enough of them—realized the errors of their ways, and laws were passed to desegregate officially. Even more than that, it wasn’t just the Civil Rights Act of 1964; it wasn’t just the fair housing act of 1968. In the 1970s, the way that educated whites began to step away from bigotry and racism is something nobody could have imagined, even as recently as the 1950s.

Those of us of a certain age can recall the effect of the Norman Lear sitcoms at the time—All in the Family and Maude, to name two of them.

Think about those shows having been on when just ten years before you couldn’t have had them. Something really happened in the late sixties, and thank God it did, but it happened really quickly, and it left two problems.

I think that today, what is considered the proper way to think about black people among non-black people has become a religious creed rather than a political program, and the problem with that is that the religious creed doesn’t help any poor black people be less poor. Therefore, I am not with it. And when I say it’s a religious creed I don’t mean that it’s like a religion; I’m not saying that for rhetorical power. I am saying that it is a religion. Any Martian who anthropologized the way that a typical New Yorker reader thinks about race today would recognize it as no different, in any significant way, from a fundamentalist Christian faith. It’s exactly what I feel about Mormonism. A friend of mine who is black became— believe it or not—a Mormon at 14. I used to think, “How could you be in that brain and be that Christian?” I don’t wonder any more. Because I see it all the time in white Americans, especially educated white Americans, and take in what passes for “woke.” What I mean, very briefly, is this: “I have white privilege, I own up to my white privilege, and I know I can never get rid of it, but I must think about it every day.” That’s original sin.

It’s the same thing. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s not like it—it is it. Or, to say “America must come to terms with racism, and when it does—”… what would the coming to terms mean? What event are we referring to?

When would it be? What would it consist of? We don’t even think about it. It’s like saying “take for granted”—have you ever thought about that expression? What’s granted? “When America comes to terms with racism”—When? Which? What? Nobody thinks about it, and that is because when America “comes to terms” with racism, it’s through rapture. It’s

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Judgment day. It’s the exact same thing. When people say, “I think that’s problematic” they’re saying, as nicely as they can for the moment, that a blasphemy has been spoken. When you’re sitting around and having these discussions as to whether or not something is problematic—as if it’s that difficult—what you’re saying is, “is that blasphemous?” Is it against the anti-racism God? And you really do know that we’re talking about a religion.

Look, I was all for Black Lives Matter at the beginning. Because yes, there are grievous incidents in which a rogue, or an undertrained white cop, kills an innocent black man, or boy, for no justifiable reason.

But then, when you say, “Let us also consider that this same person who was killed was more likely to be killed by someone of his same color and demographic in his neighborhood, and we need to work on the level of violence in those neighborhoods,” as Orlando Patterson mentioned yesterday, then you’re considered a heretic—though nobody uses that word.

You’re not supposed to talk about it, everybody rolls their eyes, because the rogue cop is the racist, whereas what’s going on in the neighborhoods can’t be called racism, and therefore we don’t want to talk about it. That’s the exact equivalent of asking, “Why does God let such bad things happen?” Your priest says something not quite satisfying, and yet you’re not supposed to ask any more. You ask, “Why are we supposed to be more concerned about Darren Wilson in Ferguson than the high level of murder rates in urban neighborhoods?” Someone’s going to give an answer saying something along the lines of, “State power is different from individual power.” That’s not an answer! And if you’re a person with basic social graces in today’s American thinking culture about race, you know not to ask any further questions. This is a religion. And I know that the people who have the religion have the best of intentions and that some would even say, “I own it. That’s my religion.” But the problem is that it doesn’t address the problems that the supposed objects of this religion have. It’s inwardly focused; it’s about displaying your faith à la what Martin Luther called Protestants to do. It’s more about you than about the people. It’s not political activism. It’s something that wouldn’t have been recognized by the equivalents of non-black fellow travelers 50 years ago. Nobody decided or conspired to do this—it’s not malevolent. But it’s inert.

Here is the black problem: Because we were freed so quickly,

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and we’d been treated like animals for so long, it’s difficult to have a true sense of self-regard, of identity, of place, a true sense of our feet on the ground. As a result, it’s not surprising that black America would come out with a deep insecurity. One thing that we didn’t do—some people would say we could not have, but that’s a different issue—was crawl up from the bottom entirely by virtue of our own efforts, with the overlords never changing in any way. We can’t think about it the way that the Irish can, or the way that the Jews can. We got help, and that help was an unprecedented intellectual revolution. But it had an unpleasant byproduct, which is that we can’t say we did it only on our own initiative. And this isn’t to say that there weren’t a great many extremely heroic persons who died in order to create me sitting here in this sweater, talking about all this. Nevertheless, what was created was a massive revolution in laws and thought, and that had every bit as much to do with it as Martin Luther King. That’s what he fought to do. That means that you have these people—people like my parents—who were freed from segregation. (Of course, the world didn’t change overnight, but that was still a big deal.) After a while, these people freed from residential segregation, moved us—my parents did—from a ghetto to a very nice middle-class neighborhood as a direct result of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Was this in itself enough for us to have a true sense of our own self-worth? Maybe, because people like my parents had been beaten up for so long that self-worth wouldn’t come for a while.

What happens after that? One way that you might develop a sense of standing on your own two feet is by using, as a crutch, your experience as a noble victim (I am sure that psychologists could predict that this is the way it could be, and I hope that social psychologists don’t find this counter-intuitive). The idea is that what makes you important, legitimate, and okay, is that you are a survivor of a racism that is no longer what it was, but is always around. It’s always something that can be referred to.

You are a survivor, and you’re also concerned with helping your fellow victims. That doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t exist, but the question is this (this is also the reason I wrote a book about this in 2000): Why are we supposed to exaggerate? Yes, racism very much exists. If I wanted to stretch my talking here to another half hour, I would carefully give you about three stories of racism I’ve experienced over the past year. Yeah, it’s not overt—sometimes you have to think about it—but yes, it’s there.

I do know what structural racism is. I accept the term. Nowadays, we call

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it white supremacy, though I think that’s a barbaric distortion of the term.

But I do know what it refers to.

But we exaggerate. And we have to listen up when Orlando Patterson asks, “Why is it that a person sitting on a sofa in 1963 was radiantly upset, and now his grandson is just as upset at Harvard?” That’s a major and urgent question. I learned that in the early 90s when I was a grad student at Stanford; I learned that you’re supposed to exaggerate, as an enlightened black person—you’re supposed to pretend that no significant changes happened. You’ll say, “Oh, yeah, change has happened,” but you won’t believe it. And you’ll think that you’re really supposed to focus on a notion that my life, today, if I’m enlightened, is as grievously compromised as my father’s life was. Or, that the reason that poor black people are poor today is because of the same racism as that which existed before. All of us know that this is, quite simply, an exaggeration. It’s a distortion. Yes, racism exists, but if we are human beings with basic cognitive functions, we can deal with grays as well as, shall we say, blacks and whites. Why do we exaggerate? This whole white religion and the black victim complex feed into this exaggeration. They’re founded on it.

Right now, what I am saying sounds really sour, really unpleasant, and it doesn’t sit right. You’re thinking, Well, he’s making a certain kind of sense, but still, I don’t like it, he doesn’t sound nice, he doesn’t sound like he loves his people, he doesn’t sound like he thinks anything needs to be done. So, I’m going to tell you what I think needs to be done. I am not a conservative; I am not a Republican. I do know how racism works.

That’s not where this is coming from. I do not think that people need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps; I have never written such a thing. That’s not my message. This is my message: There are problems in the black community that can be solved. I’m thinking of ten, but I am going to give you three.

First, there needs to be no war on drugs, and the reason that we need to get rid of that is because if you’re an underserved black male, it is too tempting to jump into that black market, and that ruins the rest of your life. That is my main reason for it. I think that if there were no war on drugs, black America would turn upside down within about ten minutes. It’s as simple as that. I have fought for this, I have spoken before the NAACP three times about this. There should be no war on drugs because it would change black America. Everybody should lobby for that. Yes,

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you should be allowed to buy heroin at the drugstore. We can talk about the details. There should be no war on drugs. We should fight for that.

Second thing: all poor kids should be taught via phonics. Why in the world am I mentioning that? Because it is tragic to watch somebody from a bookless home—and too many black kids come from bookless homes; the Bible isn’t enough—to see teachers trying to teach them to read through a method that’s basically a matter of reading them nice stories and showing them pages with unicorns. And they’ll just pick it up. That will work for a kid in Scarsdale, New York—that’s the way I learned to read, sure. But that does not work for kids from different kinds of homes.

They need to be taught how to read via a method that is, frankly, a little harder, and a little tedious, but I did it with my daughter when I found out they weren’t going to be doing it in her school. It’s tedious teaching somebody how to sound things out. But it works. And that’s been shown again, and again, since 1963. And yet we hear all these things about how poor kids can’t be taught to read. If we’re going to solve our race crisis, this needs to be addressed. Part of the issue is that if you don’t learn to read, the rest of school doesn’t quite work. Phonics. One should agitate for it. One should agitate to the teachers’ unions; one should agitate in one’s school. This is an issue with a brown face on it.

Third thing: too many kids are born to people. This is no longer a race problem, but still, it disproportionately affects black women. Too many black people have children because they just happened rather than because they planned it. No one is deliberately having a lot of kids, but you can be in a situation where it just happens, and you might not want to have an abortion. So, then you have the child before you really are ready. You don’t have a job, you don’t have a partner. That can happen to a person. One thing to solve our problem is Long-Acting Removable Contraceptives (LARCs). We have the technology now. You can give somebody something, and for five years, you can have all the fun you want, but what comes out of it isn’t a child. That should be given, for free, to any woman who wants it. That is not true now, and it should be. It doesn’t mean that I am quietly suggesting that black women be sterilized, though there have been programs of that sort directed at poor black women. But women like LARCs. They like them very much, and have asked for more.

That’s civil rights.

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To conclude, three things: 1) get rid of the war on drugs; 2) use phonics; and 3) use LARCs, and you are 60% of the way there. That is a civil rights program. Notice how all of that can happen without there being any kind of unprecedented psychological revolution in the way white people think. We do not need to pretend that there’s going to be a time when all white people harbor no biases; we do not need to pretend that there’s going to be a time that any of us are ever going to live to see in which white people don’t for the most part have more privilege. What I mean is that that’s not needed. If I could wave a magic wand, I would create that world. But I don’t have one. Nor does anyone else. The issue is that none of that stuff is needed. And if I point it out to you, I think most of you see what I mean. “I own up to my white privilege”—good for you. But still, there are poor people whose lives could be changed without anybody owning up to the fact that they happen to be privileged. Or, to say to yourself as a black person, “I am a victim of a racism that you can’t quite smell or fear but it’s there, and therefore we must patrol the world looking for every hint of racist bias and make vague references to the past saying the past needs to be addressed.” None of that helps anybody who is poor. That isn’t what Martin Luther King meant, and I don’t think it’s necessary.

I think we need to change the way we talk about race. We need to say things that we mean, and we need to focus on action. Imagine somebody who says, “We need to focus on the legacy of racism in this country, and black people helped build the capital, and there was Jim Crow, and redlining didn’t end as soon as we think, and we need to focus on that. We need to acknowledge it.” Okay. Why? Yes, those things happened, and they are absolutely hideous. But what do you mean “focus on” and “acknowledge” it? If what you mean by that is that we need to have reparations for slavery, then say it. By “focus,” do you just mean “sit and talk about it?” I presume that the idea is that we need to address those things by giving black people something back. Now, if what you mean is that we need to have reparations for slavery, but you know that was discussed and rejected twenty years ago, and you know that if you say it straight it’s going to be shot down, are you okay with talking about it in a circumlocutory way? If you think it has that little chance of ever being taken up by the powers that be, then why talk about it? Why not get

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back to contraceptives, and phonics, and the war on drugs? Action is very important. You think that we need to have a conversation about race—what would that be about? Are we just going to mouth off? Because that seems to happen all the time. Don’t you really mean a conversion about race?

You mean a conversion about race. You mean that someone needs to be made to realize that there are many racists in the country, that we need to focus on what happened in the past. And if you want to address that, including the demand for reparations for slavery, and you know that has no chance of leading somewhere beneficial, why don’t we just let that go?

Or, maybe you don’t mean we need to have reparations for slavery, but you mean that all black misdeeds, if there are any, must be seen through a different moral lens than they would be for anybody else’s misdeeds? Do you mean that black people need to be put into schools with lower standards than others because of what happened in the past? Is that what you mean? Because if what you mean is that black people can’t be seen through the same moral lens as others, and if you mean that black performance is going to be credited until it amounts to just showing up, rather than doing as well as everybody else, why not just say that? And if you don’t want to own it, then just drop it.

Why, I’m asking, do we have to focus almost exclusively on things that went on in the past? By “why” I mean, “For what purpose?”— in terms of helping the black poor. Of course, we need black history. Of course, people need to understand that if there are black ghettos, and if it can be hard to find an equivalent white ghetto, the reasons for that, as my mother taught me, have to do with processions of historical factors which have legacies. We seem to keep mentioning Ta-Nehisi Coates. He has a great line in his piece about reparations: “I watch people scarfing their hot dogs on the fourth of July, not acknowledging the role of black people…” Okay. Why does everybody who is eating that hot dog have to understand black history that exquisitely? Again, when I ask why, I mean, for what purpose? What would it do if everybody eating those hot dogs, including Indian or Muslim immigrants, were thinking, “Hmm, well, the poor black people who created this landscaping in 1921…Mmm, this is good, but that man’s grandfather suffered…” What purpose would that actually serve? Why do we “call for” that sort of thing? We call for it because we don’t like ourselves. It’s not because it would actually serve any purpose.

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Many of you agree with the perspective I’ve been outlining, or, frankly, pretend to, because you feel that it’s what makes you good people, even though you know it doesn’t technically make sense that people shouldn’t enjoy their hot dogs without thinking about black people on the fourth of July. I’m a liberal Democrat who is supposed to be a linguist. I don’t study black English for a living, though I seem to have this second career as a race commentator who a lot of people hate because I am dedicated to making a real difference. Remember: I am not a conservative; I am not a Republican—nor am I an asshole. What I’m saying is that our civil rights perspective needs to be based on action for living people, in the here and now, in pragmatic ways. That involves changing the power structure in various ways, but it has nothing to do with ritual atonement, and it has nothing to do with fashioning oneself as a noble victim for reasons that have more to do with seeking a sense of fellowship than helping people who genuinely need help in their lives. Really helping is what we should be about. And we’re not doing it lately. And it scares me to death.

OP: As John knows, I agree with a lot of what he’s just said. I would perhaps express it differently, hiding behind the seal of sociological jargon, all the while saying much the same thing. But I do want to add something which might affect the way we talk about an idea like reparations. Think, just for a minute, about how the white poor made it out of poverty. A colleague of John’s who I greatly admire is a political scientist by the name of Ira Katznelson, who wrote a volume called When Affirmative Action was White [2005]. What Ira documented, in great detail, was how the white working-class, the white poor, did not make it by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. On the contrary, Ira showed that there was a systematic, highly funded government effort to help them. Over and over again. The GI Bill was white affirmative action, from which blacks were excluded. A good part of the shift towards suburbia, suburbanization— which was when a lot of the white poor and working-class made it into the middle-class—was overwhelmingly funded by our government. The whole idea that whites made it on their own is just a fiction. In fact, for most whites, it was a lot more complicated than that. There was heavy government subsidy for their movement into the middle-class.

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And why does that matter? Because that has implications. For one, it’s not because we suffered slavery and Jim Crow that we need some sort of reparation in the form of affirmative action. That’s not my story.

My story is that because the government used white affirmative action to promote the white middle-class, and given the fact that, for several hundred years, the state legitimized the oppression of blacks, there’s every reason why the state has major responsibility to promote programs to help blacks out of the horrendous dilemmas they now face. My justification is not reparation; my justification is that if they’ve done it for whites, they gotta do it for blacks, too. And the politicians have got to be persuaded.

I totally agree with John that calling for reparations isn’t going to work.

What does work is the logic of “You’ve done this already—the suburbs were your creation, including taxes paid by black people.” That’s why we need large-scale intervention. There is a moral responsibility, not to mention the fact that there were several hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow. We’re talking about billions and billions and billions of dollars that are going to be needed to do the things that John mentioned, and a few more we’ll be talking about here, which I believe to be essential in getting blacks out of the ghettos.

DP: A terribly nice woman on Fifth Avenue apologized to me for her white privilege, and I had to tell her, “You’re not the one who needs to make this apology just because you’re white.” What she’s really saying is that American history upsets her. And I don’t see anything particularly wrong with her saying that, it’s just that she didn’t have to. I think that most white people don’t think about social questions, or black people, at all. In the same way that I don’t think that most Americans read. And affirmative action works. The presidents of Princeton and Harvard published a book called The Shape of the River [1998] following a class of affirmative action beneficiaries and found that they were, for the most part, all very successful. Affirmative action works. Affirmative action began, formally, not for education but for jobs. In Alaska, there were no Inuit managers at a particular fish canning place, whereas the town had a large Inuit population. And that’s what affirmative action was—to hire to reflect the population. Same thing with desegregating the police forces, fire departments, that sort of thing. The educational aspect came later.

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Let’s remember that King spoke of American politics in very religious terms; the Civil Rights movement was a religious movement.

When I was growing up, you couldn’t tell the difference between a church service and a civil rights meeting. They were very much the same—they used the same language. This is also very American, as the foundational documents of America are all couched in these terms of “salvation,” “the city on the hill,” “realizing ourselves,” “closer to God,” and so on. This is in the American rhetorical character; I don’t know how else to say it.

But also central to the American rhetoric was talk about coalition politics. The reason there had to be changes in hearts and minds was that everything depended on coalition politics. This is what we’re always fighting to preserve. To discover common interests, common goals. One of the things we’ve lost is the sense that just because an idea or a strategy doesn’t pertain to you personally, doesn’t mean it’s not a viable thing to have, to be for, or to engage with. Your personal stake in things doesn’t always have to be the deciding factor. Ideas, feelings, passions, beliefs, and visions also have something to do with what we are and with what makes us engage, especially as people who read, and who are concerned with these kinds of issues. I had all these notes from when John was talking that I can’t read now, including that I think that Coates—even though I’m so tired of people talking about him—was invoking Frederick Douglass’s speech on the Fourth of July.

JM: But he was talking about hot dogs.

DP: I didn’t say he did it well. Also, I don’t think that being concerned with state power or the role of the police in representing state power, and being concerned with black-on-black violence, are exclusive. And I don’t think that one has been neglected at the expense of the other. It’s just that social media and the camera dramatize the stories we’d always heard. And we forget that Black Lives Matter was founded by young black women who looked to people like Ella Baker as their inspiration. They were very conscious of, and drew from, the Civil Rights Movement. History matters because we get our ideas from the past, not from the thin air of Now. History is sort of the sum of what we are; or we are the sum of our history. I don’t know.

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JM: I want to interject very quickly. Reparations is something I am very much for. I’ve written about this, and my point has always been that we had them. The Great Society was reparations. Affirmative action, which I’m for, is reparations. There were also a lot of reparations, like the Community Reinvestment Act, that weren’t called reparations. I almost wish that somebody had called it the Reparations Act. The question is whether there should be more reparations. For me, affirmative action is great until it becomes about diversity. I’m all for affirmative action in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. When it changes from “We’re going to give you a leg up because you grew up disadvantaged” to “We’re going to change standards so that your brown face gets in”—that starts especially in the late 80s—that’s where I lose my feeling for affirmative action.

DP: “Diversity” became the word once you couldn’t say “affirmative action” any more. “Diversity” became a code for affirmative action, and now it’s everywhere. But it still is affirmative action. Again, I go back to this idea of the culture of the poor. And in the U.S., the one thing you’re really ashamed of is being poor. Being poor is the hardest thing for whites, and now for blacks. Because television, and everything else, tells you that no one else is—just you. You’re not leading that life; you’re leading this sad, real life. The problem is how we talk about poverty and class. The struggle is ongoing. The sixties didn’t just start all that—it came from somewhere. There was this particular moment of American prosperity, the postwar culture of liberal institutions, and wanting to solve the world’s problems, that made people receptive to the idea of civil rights and equality.

The militancy of the late 60s freaked most people out, especially when it married with the anti-war movement.

JM: And it had an effect.

DP: Well, yes and no. The forces against equality, and this liberal vision of America, never stopped. And you can’t look at the court today, at what happened to the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and not know that they never stopped opposing these laws and these measures, and that in many places, they never got a chance to work. We had Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and where is the school system now? The Voting Rights Act in

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1965 had an immediate effect: in 1966, the number of black representatives skyrocketed. And that’s because a lot of organizations sent people into the South to show them how to vote. The thing about discrimination, segregation, and exclusion is that there are a lot of things that you don’t know how to do because you were never taught, or shown, or welcomed to do, or given the chance to do. I think that things are sort of ongoing, and a success here or here isn’t necessarily across the board.

And you know, regarding the victim thing…In writing classes, I always noted that white guys struggled because they felt they didn’t have a subject as good as the women or the minorities. People were, at last, interested for the first time in stories these women and minorities had to tell. The history of so many groups in America has been, Don’t talk about it; Shut up; Don’t say anything. And so we told these people, you should talk about it, even if you’re saying something wrong, or making a mistake, because you don’t find out what you think until you speak to others and have these sorts of discussions. There’s just been such a history of what you couldn’t say in this country, so that for me it’s always, chatter away, write what you’ve got.

JM: I don’t mean that people should avoid talking about obstacles the way a person probably would have in 1942. We do need to talk about power differentials.

DP: People didn’t talk that way in 1942.

JM: This is one of those “Where do you draw the lines?” situations. I think that we’re trained to exaggerate. That’s all. I think that you should talk about what actually happened to you and why it wasn’t fair, but, to say, for example, “Some white drunken idiot at a fraternity did something kind of icky one night, and therefore I am attending a racist institution” is exaggerating.

DP: That’s a slight caricature of what is said, isn’t it?

JM: No, it’s not. That is the sort of thing that happens all the time. This is important: Yes, children are young. Yes, there’s anger in children. But

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the powers that be encourage undergraduates to say things like that. And I think that we are abnegating responsibility in training them to exaggerate.

And no, people should not keep their problems to themselves. Yes, we should talk about things. Real things.

TCW: John—I don’t want to keep pushing the same point—but this exaggeration is where the power comes from. Power is the incentive to exaggerate. You get a lot out of it. As a writer, as a public intellectual, there’s a lot of incentive to exaggerate.

JM: Yeah, definitely.

DP: Well, it’s telling a story. Twain exaggerated. Everybody has a friend who can’t get in touch unless he or she has a crisis. Otherwise, that person doesn’t feel that they can ask for your attention or your time. And you want to say, “Come around when there’s nothing wrong, too. You’re just as welcome.” I think that’s part of it—that we can’t bring up race unless there’s a controversy. Another thing: in black history, we forget that for a long time, the shame of slavery hung over everything we did. When you think about how long New World slavery has defined the world—500 years—nothing is going away tomorrow.

JM: One quick thing. Remember how I said, “I could give you ten, but I’ll give you three?” Here’s another. One’s attitudes and opinions have to change over time. I used to resist this. But about five years ago, I changed my thoughts about the Voting Rights Act. There needs to be a renewal on it, and Shelby needs to be reversed because of what the Republicans are pulling. I think that it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say that what the Republicans are doing now is the same thing as what the Dixiecrats were doing fifty years ago, but maybe that’s just quibbling. What’s going on now is denying so many black people the vote. It needs to be fixed.

DP: They kind of were doing that fifty years ago…

JM: I think the motivation was different. Now, it’s a naked, nasty pragmatism.

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DP: It was nasty back then—and how is it different now?

JM: Do you really want to know? Because today, if you are a Republican, and you want fewer Democrats to vote, you might be enough of a jerk to think, “Well, since black people vote Democratic almost to a man we’re going to do everything to keep them from voting so that we—” DP: And get the Russians to help us.

JM: —So that we can win. It’s repulsive, but it’s different from someone telling somebody in 1950, “We don’t want you to vote because you’re less than a person, and if you do, we’re going to beat you up.”

DP: But they didn’t believe that in 1950, either. The problem is that everybody knows that racism is wrong; everybody knows that so-and-so is equal. It comes down to a kind of power—that somehow your having power diminishes my power. That any advance for anyone else—women, Latinos, and so on—diminishes their power.

JM: But—here’s the weird thing—the Dixiecrats were denying themselves power by not letting people vote often. A lot of those people would have voted Democratic anyway. They were telling these people, “You can’t vote because you’re an animal and you’re not supposed to be in control.”

I don’t know how one would measure the morality, but that is a different thing than someone saying, “Let’s keep Democrats from voting by focusing on black people.”

DP: I still think it amounts to the same thing. The founding of America has a central contradiction, which is the founding fathers’ terror of the popular will. That’s why we have the Senate and the Electoral College—people are afraid of direct democracy without the mediation of certain powerful interests. We still have that. You have the conservatives saying that voting is a privilege, and you have the progressives saying that voting is a right.

We are essentially acting out this generation’s version of that drama, which has been with America since our founding. Last thing: when white people are interested in minority stuff, they’re just recognizing that is American

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history; the way Americans treated the enslaved and indigenous population is American history. It’s sort of learning who you are.

OP: On the matter of the pernicious growing practice of reducing the Democratic vote by deliberately reducing the black vote, two things are happening. There is a racist element to it in the fact that I see almost no attempt at reducing the white poor vote even though most of them vote Democratic. And there are ways of reducing the vote of non-blacks. We saw a good example of that down in the South, in Kansas. Dodge City has some 19,000 people, the majority of whom are Hispanic. What they did was just to move the voting office out of town. There was no place for them to vote. There are many ways in which you can get Democrats in West Virginia not to vote.

DP: They do it already.

OP: I repeat: While the primary focus may be to reduce the Democratic vote, there is a racist element. I was discussing this the other night—what accounts for the Trump victory. At first, I was strongly persuaded by the economic argument as a reason for his being elected—the gutting of jobs, globalization, you know the story. People had voted twice for Obama, yet turned to Trump for economic reasons. But a growing body of evidence suggests that while that may be a factor, the primary factor was racial resentment. There were at least three major pieces in social science journals that examined that problem. What does that mean? It may well mean that those people were around all this time. An important dimension to the Trump vote, particularly in the Panhandle in Florida, were people who had never voted—that’s how Hillary lost Florida. And that was pure racial resentment; people were coming out, after Obama, and thinking, “What happened to our country? We lost our country! What happened to our freedom?” Race was critical. But is it a new resurgence of racism?

Is it a return to the pre-Civil Rights norms? I don’t think that’s true. This resentment, this strong hatred of Obama, was coming from people who were racist all along. An important part of the current debate is that, as John said, and I agree, the emerging story about how Civil Rights never happened is just bull.

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DP: One of the reasons that we’re so offended by the idea of a black conservative is that we expect black people to be on the side of progress, not just because he or she is black but because that’s what “black” means: it means freedom. One of the things that’s happened is that the constant right-wing attack on liberal culture—of which blacks are the chief representatives—comes from this kind of envy of liberal culture, because right-wing culture has never produced anything to match the achievements of liberal culture.

JM: What do you mean?

DP: What book can you think of by a right-wing person that matters to you? Think of one.

[Silence. Clutches microphone and says nothing.]

[Laughter.]

JM: It’s not because I can’t name them. I’m really surprised. If I name you some right-wing books, will you just say that they’re bad, so they don’t count?

DP: Mostly they will be bad.

JM: I find that a rather arbitrary judgment.

DP: I know, but it’s also true.

JM: Continue.

DP: Liberal culture is a minority culture. It’s the prestige of liberal ideas that the right-wing really resents, or hates, because it governs how we imagine America. The fight is getting over this inconvenient notion that the country should be about equality, fairness, and the chance for everyone to realize himself or herself. Instead of it just being about the way things were. What really drove people crazy about Obama was not that he was

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in the White House, but instead that he was a black guy in charge of the money, that this black man was at the top of the pinnacle of patronage, and this offended so many white guys who assume that the money is their inheritance, their legacy, their power.

JM: Wait a minute. There are, in fact, conservatives with worthy ideas. I just left my daughter, who is learning, by heart, the Declaration of Independence. There are lots of great ideas which came from conservatives.

The problem was that they restricted it to the white group. But a lot of Jefferson makes a lot of sense. Wouldn’t you say?

DP: The conservative liberal is not something that really translates across historical periods.

JM: Conservatism can be quite coherent and moral, even if you’re not a conservative.

OP: Let me give one example from a dear friend of mine who recently passed, the sociologist Daniel Bell. He was one of the founders of The Public Interest. Dan was quite explicit about this; he always said, “I’m a conservative on economic issues, but I’m quite radical on social issues.”

A lot of conservatives, either because of libertarianism or something else, are quite liberal on race, but are downright reactionary when it comes to economic issues. I think Dan was a great thinker; his work on culture was just wonderful. You have to distinguish between the conservative side of conservatives and what is sometimes liberal or even radical.

DP: For example, the Declaration of Independence and Notes on the State of Virginia.

OP: Exactly.

JM: Right now, on the New York Times Op-Ed page, the most brilliant person, as far as I’m concerned,—even though I agree with him maybe 1 out of 3 times—is Ross Douthat. Not Krugman, certainly not David Brooks. Ross Douthat makes a lot of sense within that bubble in which he writes. He’s the hardest thinker. And he’s very conservative.

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DP: I’ll sort of take it back for the sake of peace.

OP: I don’t want to go on the record defending conservatives. Strike my comment from the record.

RB: We’ll decide, when we’re assembling the Salmagundi issue built from this conference, what deserves to be taken seriously. We are, however, going to take some questions.

AUDIENCE MEMBER ONE: John, one of the things you said early on is that educated whites have more or less stepped away from bigotry and racism. And I agree with you that there have been changes, and still I wonder, do you really think we’ve gotten past bigotry and prejudice? I know you say it’s complicated, and I know that when we talk about white cops killing young black men, we should also note that there are black cops, brown cops, and women cops, killing young black men, too. Those are the facts. And yet we still have to ask—don’t we?—which prejudices are allowable? Should Jews in the Catskills be allowed to have all-Jewish resorts? Should Gentiles in New York have all-Gentile clubs? Should we have all-white country clubs, or all-black country clubs? Are those okay prejudices, and why?

JM: Here’s some classic conservatism—how good does it get, and how good could it get? In 1950, black people were considered by most white people, including educated white people, as a kind of lesser beings—think of the attitudes you see in the TV show Mad Men. In 1975, that same person wants to fight what was then called, more universally than it is now, “prejudice.” You’re not supposed to be what we call “racist” today, and you work against it as much as you can, and you wouldn’t have a bigot in your living room. There’s a notion that we have now that you can take this a third step further, and that you can cleanse white people’s psychologies of any kind of bias, of any kind of what you’re calling “prejudice,” a quieter feeling. I understand the idea that now we can and have to get rid of that altogether, though it seems to be a quixotic venture; it never seems to work. And I’m not sure how it could work other than through intense one-on-one sessions where one could conceivably change, though

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not eradicate, someone’s deep-seated bias (this has been shown, in some academic papers, to really happen). That’s never going to be imposed on all of the population. A month ago, I wrote a piece in the Atlantic that got a certain amount of attention, in which I said that the third wave that people are waiting for doesn’t seem like it’s going to work. In my view, I don’t care about that prejudice, those slight biases, because I figure that that’s the way life is. Life is not perfect; one way it’s not perfect is that we are programmed to be prejudiced. There will always be those biases.

I don’t mean this to be as hostile as it’s going to sound, but I don’t care if a white person looks down at me a little bit, because if I sense that they do, frankly I look right down on them. I get the feeling that that might just be me, that it might be an unusual way to be, because a lot of black people have heard me say that, and they think that I am unusual there.

But I don’t really think I am that special. Margo, my family raised us to think that we were superior, too. And my mother was classist against lower-class black people, which was surprising given that she was a social worker, though of course she didn’t put her prejudice in so many words.

My father was not prejudiced in that way, but we were definitely raised to think that we were better than whites. I was born in 1965, and we were perhaps the last generation to be raised with this sense that “You’re better than anybody.” About a year ago, I was teaching a philosophy mini-class to a group of older Columbia alums; one of them held it in his lawyerly offices in some Park Avenue tower. After work, I go down there, and I’m wearing a blazer, which I don’t like to do, but this is the outfit, and I’m also wearing an overcoat, which I only use about three times a year, and I’ve got this briefcase. I walk into the office, and a white woman—I would put her at about 30 or so—asks me, “Are you here to do tech?” And I knew that the only reason she thought that was because I’m black. Yet what I thought was not “Oh dear, she hurt my feelings, how am I going to go in and teach Kant now.” What I did think was, “You have a bias.”

And I didn’t think about it again for another six months. I wish all black people would be that way. I just don’t care about that woman.

AUDIENCE MEMBER ONE: I think that’s right. You can’t cleanse biases. What I’m suggesting, though, is that there are prejudices more dangerous than the one you just mentioned. Cops having images of

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black men that we know are racist, and are often a product of racism. But sometimes it’s not racism—sometimes it’s prejudice, which isn’t evil, but is often there. Those kinds of conversations need to happen; distinctions need to be made.

JM: Confronting prejudice in the cops would be crucial, and for years I said how scary a thing it is that for them to have this prejudice means that someone gets shot. What you never hear about—and you’re going to hear about it—is that for every Tamir Rice, for every Walter Scott, for every Michael Brown, there’s a white guy who you never hear about. And I’m not saying that the media has some conspiracy, but it happens to white people just as often, which suggests that the cops aren’t as “prejudiced” as we might think, which I resisted for years—they just are; we just know—but the data isn’t supporting it. If you had said this to me three years ago, I would have had a different answer. Yes, prejudice can be pernicious, and it worries me to an extent. But we have a distorted sense of the cop issue.

DP: But the precincts always know who the problem cop is, because he often comes with a past and a record from another precinct, where no one wants to work with him. The problem with cops are the people who become cops. The best ones are ex-military because they have some discipline; the others are people who want to play around with guns, and they play around with guns in neighborhoods where the most socially powerless are, and that includes certain kinds of whites as well as blacks. The real problem with cops are the people with guns, and how little training they have.

But, to respond in part to Orlando’s earlier comments about voter suppression, the poor white vote is suppressed. If you can’t get off work to vote, that’s voter suppression. If you’re afraid to register because you have fines, debts, or things like that, that’s voter suppression. And if you can get them to answer truthfully, that’s what a lot of white people state as their reason for not voting—the fear of getting in trouble. And that’s because of an existing relationship with the state that makes them feel afraid. I’m speaking, to be clear, of poor whites in general—both Republican and Democrat.

AUDIENCE MEMBER TWO: John, I loved your three suggestions for action. And you teased us, because you said there were ten, though I am

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not going to ask you for more. But I would like to ask where education fits into your action plan?

JM: It is absolutely crucial that schools of education, in particular, have a complete revolution in the way teachers are trained. It’s not as if I have some huge problem with teachers. If you get a degree—and I don’t know what goes on at Skidmore, so I hope I’m not stepping on someone’s toes—but what is promulgated as training in how to educate children, in all but a very few of the educational schools in America today, is a kind of social politics masquerading as training in pedagogy. And that does no good for almost any kid who is lower middle-class or below in a public school. I’m not sure how to change that; I can’t be glib about this. Even at Columbia, I am frightened by what people have “learned” at the Teachers College, which is considered elite. They have no idea how to teach children how to do anything. They just learned that people are oppressed and that they should just teach children that people are oppressed, which doesn’t help.

And if children aren’t learning anything, they have a way of fidgeting around and acting up. The next thing you know, you have all sorts of subcultures existing within the school, because people aren’t aware that they’re supposed to be there to learn. And so my action Thing #8— I’m pretending I have it numbered that carefully—concerns this new idea of keeping the miscreant in school because you don’t want to over-punish black kids. This is killing education for an awful lot of black kids. Three years ago, in New York City, it was decided that because more black kids get suspended (without talking about reasons why they get suspended more often), they were going to stop suspending them and keep them in the classroom, or were only going to suspend them for a day. And the performance plummeted in every school where that was applied. Nobody’s gonna tell you that in the New Yorker. That sort of thing is really a problem.

So there you have two responses about school: suspension policies, and the teaching of teachers.

AUDIENCE MEMBER THREE: This is a question for John. You drew a very emphatic line between structural racism and white supremacy. Can you unpack that a little bit?

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JM: Of course. “White supremacy” referred to 1865, or even to 1965.

That’s people hanging from trees. That’s someone like Richard Russell from Georgia, saying in full color on film strips, that segregation is forever. There’s a euphemism treadmill with words. I grew up with the word “prejudiced.” “You’re prejudiced”—now that sounds like somebody with sideburns. Then, it became “racist,” though now even that word is getting weaker because if you call someone racist, there’s the immediate pushback of “no I’m not.” The new rhetorical strategy is to say, “You’re a white supremacist.” That started about seven years ago. Frankly, in doing so, you’re recruiting a term that refers to something much more awful, so that you end up crying wolf by yelling “white supremacy” now. Basically, say what you mean. White supremacy is a useless euphemism. For example, I don’t think it’s white supremacy behind that woman seeing me and asking if I was there for tech. Perhaps semantically you could call it that, but it’s a bit much. That woman probably lives with a black man. These things are subtler than that. Actually, there’s a coda to that story. It turns out she lives in my neighborhood, and it was only about a month ago that I was coming home late, and went to the corner store to get some Jolly Ranchers, because that’s my favorite candy, and this white woman was looking at me with kind of shining eyes—meanwhile I was thinking, “Who is this?”

Finally, she said, “Oh, you’re from the Pan Am building, right?” and she seemed perfectly nice, there with her golden retriever. She wasn’t a white supremacist. She just slipped one night. I just think we have to be more honest in the ways we use our terminology.

MJ: And we can have a continuum of terms.

AUDIENCE MEMBER FOUR: Quick question for Darryl, which I’m asking you because you knew Elizabeth Hardwick better than anyone else. Hardwick wrote a review essay about some books on poverty. In the essay, Hardwick wrote about how when a young, poor woman becomes a mother, she acquires an importance she’s never had before, and if there’s any truth in that, I wonder what birth control could do, if it isn’t better to be a mother, and to be, in a way, important…

MJ: But if your birth control options are not very good, then that emotion may have a great deal to do with the fact that you became a mother! You

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did not have other options, and so it becomes a source of compensation and self-importance. I would also add, in addition to LARCs being widely accessible and free, that there are free and safe abortions.

DP: There’s also a class aspect to it. Orlando said earlier that he was surprised when he read that one of the main reasons these pathologies continue in young blacks is that they kind of give them status. What we would think of as undesirable choices are, in the world as many young blacks imagine it, things that give them status.

OP: It doesn’t even have to be something as extreme as being a gang member, or even with notably undesirable choices. Thinking of the enormous role blacks play in popular culture or in sports, I can see how important it is, for a kid from the inner city, that many of the celebrated figures in popular culture and in football or basketball are black, and are deeply admired by white kids, too. However, that can become a diversion.

The study I drew made it quite clear that they devote a great deal of time engaging with these heroes, which detracts from their academic pursuits.

That’s one of the great ironies of the situation here. I couldn’t believe that the kids on the football team were spending thirty hours a week in this extracurricular activity, so that of course they don’t have time to work on their studies. There is a real issue there. Among the educational reforms I’d like to see, altering the role of sports is one.

And John, I totally agree with you about education schools. In fact, several universities have ditched their schools of education, saying that rather than doing what they’re supposed to be doing, they’re doing secondhand social science. The University of Chicago did that. I often wonder what the hell goes on at the Harvard School of Education. It’s one of the best in the country, yet I still wonder, where’s the teaching of teaching? The most prestigious professors there are, in fact, social scientists. I can’t agree with you more on that. And if I can add something else, it’s that what works for middle class kids doesn’t work for inner city kids (white or black). We know, for example, that the number of words that a middle-class kid brings to school at age 5 is something like ten times more than what a lower class or inner-city kid does (sorry to use these terms).

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JM: 20,000 for middle class kids.

OP: You have to begin by acknowledging the deficiencies, and if the gap between the two groups of students is so large, then you’re obviously going to need a different kind of teaching strategy for kids who are so far behind in their vocabulary. What is considered virtuous in teachers—to self-righteously ignore the differences and make no pedagogical modifications—is, perhaps, the worst possible thing they can do. Of course, teachers should offer kids the same enrichment, but only when they’re ready for it.

JM: An essential point here: “you have to begin by acknowledging the deficiencies” and not ignore what’s obvious.

RB: And not censor yourself when you see it and want to say something about it.

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Session Five: Culture and Class Opening Remarks by Orlando Patterson OP: I want to begin by talking about real changes that have come to pass in recent years, changes that reflect race relations and a wide range of attitudes that inform our everyday lives. At least five Fortune 500 companies are headed by blacks, which is something unseen anywhere else, including in the Caribbean, where economic life is still dominated by non-black minorities at the top. I mentioned yesterday that America’s integration in the military is very important. I think that this is one of the areas that DuBois would have thought of immediately as having complete segregation; the idea that the military brass is, today, 12% black, would have surprised DuBois. As I said before, it’s the most integrated part of American life. One of the sociologists of the military pointed out that it’s the only part of American life in which blacks routinely command whites.

But then think of something very different: Imagine what the typical, white working Joe does with his day. He spends his day at work, but most of the remainder of his waking life is spent watching television, usually watching sports. And what he sees is the major presence of blacks in that arena, as in pretty much every other area of popular culture.

Blacks are now, also, a major force in the Democratic party, a fact noted several times in these discussions, and a fact, moreover, that reflects important changes in the standard attitudes of white people. The leading research organization of sociology, the General Social Survey (GSS), has been tracking this since 1972. The survey consists of a series

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of questions regarding whether home sellers can discriminate in their sales, the right to segregate neighborhoods, intermarriage, whether blacks should be in separate schools, and so on. Any readily available graph will show that the slope of change is precipitous. I think that intermarriage best reflects this change of attitudes, because it gets to the nitty-gritty of racism: blacks and whites “miscegenating”—that ugly word—was what drove Southerners crazy; the imagined assault on white women was the reason for most of the five thousand lynchings. The changing attitudes have been measured in various ways. The share of whites who would oppose the idea of a relative marrying a black person—that’s one of the standard questions. As late as 1992, 63% of white folks, from the North and the South, strongly opposed the idea of a relative marrying a black person. Today, that percentage is down to 14%. Of course, the question remains, what does that mean? This is always the dilemma with survey questions.

In practice, one way of testing this is to see the actual amount of intermarriage that actually takes place. This has been increasing quite substantially. For example, black men are now intermarrying at extraordinarily higher rates. In fact, some 30% of marriages of educated black men are intermarriages. At the same time, despite this public integration and, to some extent, these intellectual bourgeois marriages, there is still an extraordinary level of segregation in the private sphere. The saddest aspect of this is perhaps the segregation in housing and living conditions. The great majority of black Americans now live in segregated neighborhoods.

And this doesn’t apply solely to the ghettos. In fact, the great majority of middle-class blacks live in segregated communities.

Mary Pattillo-McCoy is an African-American sociologist who wrote a book called Black Picket Fences [1999]. Her book provides ethnographic detail to these statistics. In that work, she shows that the black middle class is still segregated. That may come as a surprise to many of us here, because I think all of us, on this panel, live in integrated neighborhoods.

I’ve never had any problem finding a place to live, and I don’t go around wearing a badge that says, “I’m a Harvard professor.” In fact, I usually play that down. There are too many odd responses when you tell people you’re a Harvard professor, like someone asking you if you’ve

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read this book that you’ve never heard of. So, I say that I teach “in the Cambridge area,” which satisfies most people.

Anyway, what’s going on right now is a puzzle and a major problem. In work, there is, again, a significant degree of segregation, despite the strides of affirmative action. Moreover, in terms of real, meaningful friendships, groups are still quite segregated. The question is, what is happening?

The Civil Rights Movement did achieve a lot: it reduced the income gap; it led to an increase in the middle classes. But there are things which it didn’t succeed in doing, and I want to emphasize this: it did not close the income or wealth gap. In 1970, the household income of black Americans was 65% of the household income of white Americans. In 2017, the household income of black Americans is 65% of the household income of white Americans. There’s been no change. The wealth gap is even greater. In 2017, the assets of whites come to about $171k; the assets of blacks to about $17k. If you break it down in terms of class groups, it becomes even more extraordinary. By the way, this wealth gap persists regardless of household education, marital status, age, or income. The median wealth of black households with a college degree equals about 70% of the median wealth of white households with a college degree. The recession wreaked havoc in all this. Of course, it reduced the wealth of everyone, but much more so among the black middle class.

There’s another dismal development which I find especially depressing. We often refer to the rise of the black middle class as one of the great achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. But here’s the bad news, and it’s really bad news: when we think of the middle class, we think of stable wealth; we think of passing one’s status, and standard of living, to one’s children. The really terrible news is that black Americans are not maintaining their middle-class status. There’s an extraordinary level of downward mobility among the black middle class.

Here’s one way of expressing this: White children in the top fifth of the income distribution have about a 41% chance of staying there. For blacks, there’s only an 18% chance that a middle-class person in the top fifth of the income distribution will have kids who would stay there. Here’s the even more disturbing news: when black middle-class kids move down, they don’t just move a little downwards—there’s almost an 80% chance that they move to the bottom fifth.

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This partly has to do with the wealth gap, because one of the ways in which we ensure that all kids maintain our status is through the assets we pass down to them. Owning a home is where you have most of your assets. Middle-class white kids will inherit their parents’ home. I live in an upper middle-class area of Cambridge, where property values are escalating, and when I meet my neighbors, we mourn the fact that our kids won’t be able to live in our area, given the rate at which the prices of our homes are going up. They’d be better off, we figure, selling the homes and living someplace else. And that’s the privilege of a middle-class status.

The final piece of bad news is that poverty rates remain very high, over 20%; it’s now at 21.2%. My last book was called The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth. The term being used now, by economists and sociologists alike, is “disconnection,” and what they are referring to here is a group of young people between 16 and 29 who are not in the labor force. It’s not just the case that they’re unemployed—they’re not in the labor force, they’re not looking for work. Secondly, they are not in school, so they are disconnected. And that figure averages about 23% of the youth group not in school. This figure goes as high as 28% in places like Detroit, and as low as 15% in Boston. Yet herein lies the paradox: black youth nonetheless dominate the popular culture. At the same time, the incarceration rate is incredibly high. Bruce Western, my former colleague and a leading scholar on incarceration, notes that there’s a 1/3 chance that black youth who drop out of school will end up in prison. It’s this major paradox that drove me to several years of research with colleagues on black youth.

That’s all the bad sociological news I have for you. Two questions remain: What explains it, and what can be done about it? There are various explanations. For one, the most popular explanation is various kinds of racism: attitudinal racism, or institutional racism. On the attitudinal level, we’ve seen that attitudes have changed quite substantially.

But if you ask the typical undergraduate or graduate student, attitude is the answer, despite the data. There are various ways of interpreting that now: attitudinal racism is interpreted as crude, old-fashioned racism, but what we now have are microaggressions. Microaggressions are a very slippery concept, as the question of what is and isn’t racial is problematic.

As John has pointed out, it is difficult to conclude that microaggressions can really explain the kinds of gaps I’ve noted.

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What is true is what I call “persisting Herrenvolk,” the German word that upholds the idea of a master race. Attitudinal racism didn’t start with Trump—there has always been a residual group who held firm to the old, Herrenvolk type of racism, the zero-sum type of racism in which there is a strong investment in whiteness. Whiteness is more negative than positive: whiteness is not being black, and any success of blacks is seen as something you’ve lost. That was always there. My estimate is that approximately 20% of whites persisted in this profound and chronic type of Herrenvolk racism. That’s what Trump tapped into.

But there is another, more sophisticated explanation for persisting, attitudinal racism (as opposed to institutional racism). The main advocate of this view is a colleague of mine named Lawrence D. Bobo; he’s now the Dean of Social Science at Harvard. He has a rather subtle take on how attitudinal racism persists, and he calls it laissez-faire racism. He argues that it involves the persistent negative stereotyping of African Americans, the resistance to meaningful policy efforts to ameliorate America’s racist social conditions and institutions, as well as the tendency to blame blacks themselves for the black/white gap in socio-economic standing. He points out that Jim Crow racism was at its zenith during an historical epoch when African Americans remained largely in the rural South, in the agricultural workforce. Bobo isn’t talking about when anti-black bias was formal state policy, nor when most white Americans comfortably accepted the idea that blacks were inherently inferior. Rather, his work has shown that these attitudes are declining. What he calls laissez-faire racism is crystallizing in the current period as a new American racial belief system, at a point when African Americans are heavily organized, nationally dispersed, and occupationally heterogeneous; at a point when state policies are formally race neutral and committed to anti-discrimination. That’s how he explains why you can find a decline in racial attitudes. But he claims that there exists this new form of laissez-faire racism, a shift towards explaining black disadvantage in terms of cultural attitudes. Bobo notes that most whites no longer hold the view that blacks are inherently inferior; instead, he argues that whites simply believe that they must defend their group interests. Overall, this seems to me a more sophisticated interpretation of the current situation.

For me, the most important factor in trying to understand the persistence of these inequalities and poverty is this: if 20% of black youth

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are out of school and out of work you have a serious problem, and even those who graduate from high school and don’t go to college are doomed to working-class jobs—and that’s if they’re lucky.

We all know that segregation and ghettoization are critical. So is the persisting educational gap. It’s sad that society remains so segregated, sadder yet that the most segregated parts of America are the most liberal parts of America. Among the most segregated cities are New York, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee. The irony is that the least segregated cities are in the Southwest. Places like Houston are far less segregated than good ole’ New York. A reason for this is the fact that these are relatively newer cities, which means they’re not dealing with long traditions of neighborhood segregation. This may partly explain something curious that’s been happening, which is a reverse migration of Black Americans back to the South.

But there is one other factor I want to mention, which I admit is a bit contentious. Let us remember that the great ideal of the Civil Rights movement, as expressed by Dr. King, was desegregation. But somewhere during the seventies, something happened, and desegregation, as well as getting out of the ghettos—which were once the primary challenges to be overcome—became less and less of a priority among black leaders. When Douglas S. Massey wrote what has become a classic work on segregation, American Apartheid [1993], he bemoaned the fact that sociologists and social scientists, as well as black leaders in general, weren’t taking segregation seriously. And it’s interesting to speculate why that was the case. There’s an element of black pride that is involved, but there’s also a sense that community ought to be cherished and developed, rather than fled. People like Nixon played on this direction—not to leave the ghetto, but to stay there and to “bring the jobs back.”

The point is that there was certainly a shift of priority in terms of seeing desegregation as less important, and I think that was a disastrous decision. Being in the ghetto is terrible. It’s toxic—not just socially and psychologically, but it’s literally toxic, chemically, which becomes incapacitating and is also linked to violence. All of this has been corroborated by numerous studies by economists and sociologists.

There’s good and bad news about education. The good news is that education accounts for the rise of the black middle class. The bad

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news is that reduction of the gap stops somewhere in the late 80s and is now getting worse. There’s a high level of non-performance and dropping out among black youth, especially inner-city black youth. One of the great hopes of education is for it to be a way of increasing social mobility. Yet what’s coming out of recent research is that education no longer reduces inequality. In fact, the best recent work indicates that education is one of the major ways of reproducing inequality. The irony of the idea of college education for all—which is what we’re hearing from younger Democrats—is that it doesn’t work for the simple reason that if you make college education free for all, it benefits mostly the upper middle class.

If you’re seriously interested in mobility, the best policy is to focus on education for the lower classes.

Then, finally, there are the cultural issues, which is where I’ve done most of my work. There’s often an extreme hostility towards any kind of cultural explanation, though cultural explanations don’t necessarily involve blaming the victim, which is what is often assumed. Another assumption is that black culture is an immutable, monolithic thing. All of this is wrong. Even in the ghettos, there’s a heterogeneity of black culture.

Therefore, the argument that to speak of culture is to blame the victim is nonsense.

What is true, however, is that there are aspects of African American culture and behaviors that are problematic. The most controversial factor—it’s controversial even to mention it—is the high proportion of poor single mothers. Between 70 and 72% of black children are being born to poor single mothers. That’s a disaster. One isn’t blaming the woman for this. But even if you’re the perfect mother, it’s very difficult to be poor, single, and a mother of one or more children. And the consequences have been thoroughly documented in sociology. One way in which you can deal with social and cultural issues is this: you can talk about it for a while, and then you can just forget about it. And that’s where we are right now. It’s like seeing the elephant in the room and pretending it’s not there; even worse, if you point out that the elephant is there, you’re accused of blaming the victim.

Clearly, to speak of these matters is not to reduce the responsibility of the state, which is another wrong assumption. We know that there are ways in which the state will have to intervene. We have to have

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ways of helping these women, in terms of pre-K education and in terms of income support. We know how to do it—the welfare states of Europe have shown us how. And despite the typical right-wing argument, the state has everything to do with it, for it is the state that has been complicit in this problem for hundreds of years. The state has a moral responsibility to change the situation.

DP: Thank you very much for that. Several things crossed my mind, though not in any particular order, so I’ll just ramble. At one point, I thought of Nella Larsen, a black writer from the 1920s. She was born in Chicago to a Danish mother and a black man from the Danish West Indies, and lived in Chicago around the turn of the 20th century. Her black father eventually disappeared, and her mother re-married a white Scandinavian. And the only place where they could find somewhere to live, as an integrated family, was in the red-light district of Chicago. They had previously been in another neighborhood, but the city authorities had actually forced white families to move, to leave black neighborhoods. Segregation is an artificial creation. There’s that.

I was also thinking about the tuition. In England, no tuition has made a great difference, culturally, especially when it comes to class mobility. It used to be that when you went off to Oxford or Cambridge, you came home and your accent hadn’t changed, and your family would be disappointed. You were supposed to go off and become different. Another thing that has vanished in England is working-class culture itself. In a way, the same thing has happened in the United States because people are ashamed of being poor. You have a kind of ethnicity that replaces the idea of working-class roots, or working-class culture. It’s rather gone.

I remember that we were saying—not long ago—that one of the problems in Ferguson was the disaffection of black youth, not just from electoral politics, but also from the existing institutions in black life, starting with the black church, which they were very disconnected from.

And in time, the black church filled in for the state when it came to social responsibilities, renewal, and group adhesiveness. I don’t want to always blame mass media, but there’s a certain kind of mainstream culture that has replaced these working-class or group cultures from place to place.

Lastly, I remember a 2012 poll: 43% of the black women polled said that they didn’t want to get married but they did want to have chil-

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dren. The interesting thing about the poll was that it crossed class lines.

Middle-class black women and professional black women were saying this. And it’s a change in America itself: now, 35% of the electorate are single mothers; it’s not confined solely to blacks. This has been on my mind since Professor McWhorter spoke yesterday about the need to end the war on drugs, and the great tragedy that we don’t have a kind of New Deal, and desperately need one because the infrastructure of the country is falling apart and it would employ everyone.

One of the things Orlando said made me remember the days when black people really resented Korean delis in New York, because the immigrants could get the loans to open businesses, whereas black people couldn’t. The resentment in Harlem for the current wave of gentrification stems, in part, from thirty years ago, when middle-class black people tried to buy homes in Harlem. You could get them very cheaply. But you couldn’t get bank loans for a new furnace, for example. You’re right—it comes down to money.

OP: Yes. Segregation is state-sponsored. That’s well-established. The British sociologists have a name for that: it’s sponsored mobility. But you know that there are so many ways to mistake what we’re seeing, like thinking that the ghetto is a sort of monolithic culture, or believing that, because most blacks who stop going to church at 17 or 18 haven’t been deeply affected by that experience—without which, in many cases, things would be much, much worse than they are.

With respect to single parenting, one new thing we are starting to hear is “Hey, look, white women are also becoming single mothers!”

And in fact the proportion of white women who are becoming single mothers is about the same as it was for blacks when Moynihan wrote his report in 1965. But this is simply a misconception—we are talking about apples and pineapples. The vast majority of white single women end up becoming single mothers after being married, as a result of divorce. And they can still depend upon the fathers of the children, either by court order or by the father’s choice; they know who the father is, and the father is still involved. Moreover, the fact that you have kids out of wedlock doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re headed for trouble. The great majority of kids in Iceland and in Sweden are born out of wedlock. The question is

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what happens afterwards, and it turns out that 90% of these single parents then end up in relationships, with two parents bringing up the child. It’s somewhat similar to the case of white women. In other words, they, too, have support. I have nothing against single mothers bringing up children.

A single mother can bring up a child quite well—that’s not the question.

The question is what kind of support she has. And the problem with black single mothers is that most of them remain single and poor and not having support. It is not true that blacks have a large network; that’s a sociological myth. In fact, it’s not true. Network studies have shown that blacks have the smallest network of people they can turn to.

I absolutely agree that we need a New Deal. Everything I’ve said indicates that. Any modern state has a responsibility to its poor. We don’t have to justify it historically. And if we spend over a trillion dollars fighting in a war that was based on a lie, in Iraq, well, a third of that money would solve all of the problems here. It’s thus a kind of racism that you will not support policies that will alleviate these problems, even if you “don’t mind” that your half-sister or your cousin marries a black person.

At the same time, you—even if you say you’re a liberal—will not allow re-zoning laws that will cut down on the size of land units in your suburbs.

But we can also say that black Americans must not only fight for the New Deal but also acknowledge that they have the responsibility to make behavioral changes. Because it’s their life. It’s a two-front strategy. That’s why I’m so very encouraged by a younger generation of politicians who are talking about socialism (though I wish they called it social democracy).

DP: We’re facing a future where we’ll have to give up a lot. And nobody wants to.

JM: I think, Orlando, that we’re in a situation where smart people are told that any negative cultural trait must be due to something going on in modern society—that there’s no such thing as a trait that takes on momentum of its own based on things that happened in the past. I think that this vision of how human culture works, which is kind of a Larry Bobo way of looking at it, is going to look like Phlogiston in a hundred years—that idea that if something is going on for people it must be because, for example, of the

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racism happening now. There is a cool pose culture. I live in New York, I ride the subway every day, and there’s a certain kind of mostly black or Latino man, who has a high school education, who is really hell-bent on showing society that he can do anything he wants, who works half-time and who’s uncivil, and you can tell that nothing is quite ever going to go right for this person. This person is not rare, and he’s not doing it because the cops don’t like him. He’s doing it because his big brother was like that, and he just grew up watching other people do it. That’s how human beings work. He’s not evil. My question is: How do you get to him? Like you say, of course the state has to help. But is there any way that you can change him?

OP: Good question. I agree with you entirely. We call him “disconnected”—that’s the term that sociologists and economists know. How do you get to them? You have to have a minimum education to survive in a post-industrial society. So how are we going to get them to stay in school?

And how do you get them to change their attitudes? There are policies that have worked: community programs aimed at getting black youth involved in education, and later in entry-level jobs, for example. One of these programs is run by the National Guard, surprisingly enough. In The Cultural Matrix, I studied one group that takes youth—half of whom have a prison record—and, in a crash course that spans eight weeks, teaches them how to change attitudes. And that had a moderate level of success.

One of the things the research shows, however, is that the problem isn’t job availability. Most of the people we studied had had jobs. The problem isn’t getting a job—it’s keeping a job. And this goes back to cultural attitudes, the notion of respect. There are volumes written on the importance and centrality of respect. If you’re in a job for which it’s important that you smile occasionally, or that you don’t get offended if the boss says something to you that you don’t like, it’s important that you don’t just walk away and give up.

JM: The guy I was describing will last, like, two weeks in that job.

OP: Yes, exactly. The problem, again, is not having the job, but staying in the job. Remember, again, that we’re talking about 20 to 28 percent of the

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black youth population. One of Obama’s last big policy initiatives was My Brother’s Keeper, with which I was involved. The term “disconnected” is appropriate here, because these boys are disconnected from everything that’s important. How does one get reconnected? The My Brother’s Keeper program is trying to do just that. This program emphasized community work, and was an initiative to expand opportunity for young men and boys of color.

There are several programs geared towards women, too. One program that has been surprisingly successful is called the Nurse-Family Partnership program, in which nurses enter the process when the women are still pregnant. For some reason, nurses are the best change agents: they help the mothers cope, and they give basic training. The nurses also stay with the mothers after the kids are born. That has been proven to be one of the most successful programs. So, we shouldn’t be pessimistic. We know that there are things that work.

DP: In the excerpt that Bob gave us to read from The Cultural Matrix, one of the things you say is that these guys behave this way because of the status it gives them, and they are admired for it, even among white youth. I was going to say that black cultural history also has in it black people who take these negative stereotypes against the group and turn them into virtues. The Harlem Renaissance took all attitudes such as “you’re too musical,” “you’re too emotional” and “you’re not rational,” et cetera, and made them virtues, which the white world was interested in after World War I and the slaughter that rational societies had visited upon one another. After World War II, you get the same thing with Norman Mailer and “The White Negro”—this idea of the black male as this disaffected rebel protesting, through the way he lived, against a square, unjust, or unfeeling American society. We have it again with hip-hop, the difference being, of course, that hip-hop has made it quite alright to make money. A lot of kids don’t want these entry-level, patient jobs—they want the kind of success that strikes like sainthood.

OP: I’m glad you mentioned that because I spent a lot of time looking at this, which I call the Dionysian syndrome that has come to affect black culture, especially black youth culture in advanced, industrial societies. An

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example of this would be suburban white youth going to hip-hop concerts, getting this Dionysian kick from this aspect of black youth culture. But for them, there’s the fact that they know when to opt for the SAT prep book.

The problem for black youth is that it reinforces a deep satisfaction that is, in the long term, problematic.

TCW: I have a comment and a question for you, Orlando. I love The Cultural Matrix, and I worked a discussion of your book into a long essay I wrote for the London Review of Books on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. I felt that Coates’s memoir described a black experience that was very comprehensible to me but which didn’t describe my black experience, nor found a way to articulate things I knew to be true about my generation’s experience. My first book is a memoir called Losing My Cool, about the kind of Dionysian pleasures of making these choices—not feeling that history was making these choices for me but instead liking being anti-intellectual, or at least pretending to like being anti-intellectual, because my father didn’t actually let me.

I have two examples of something that I think might relate to your other point about downward mobility. My high school girlfriend of four years, a daughter of two black parents, was materially better off than my family was: two cars in the driveway, a large home. But she never sat for the SAT—she just never took the test. I went off to college and we dated, long-distance, during my freshman year, and by the time I came home for summer break she was pregnant, moving in with a crack dealer in the housing projects in Newark, New Jersey—going from a black middle-class suburb to the housing projects. The guy was going to support the family dealing crack.

At Georgetown, there was a black classmate of mine who had gone to Milton, one of the good New England prep schools, played on the tennis team, and had a side life dealing drugs and carrying a gun. He eventually got busted and got expelled from school during the second semester of our senior year, right before graduation. You could say that white kids, at good schools, deal drugs all the time and don’t have the same experience with the criminal justice system, but the fact remains that he felt an urge like Robert Peace did—from The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace—an urge to live up to an authentic street pose that became

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you can make a meaningful middle-class income even if you don’t go to college. The decline of unions is one factor contributing to the growing inequality in America. Can we be optimistic about a revival of the union movement? I’m not at all sure about that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER THREE: I would like to thank you for bringing DuBois into these conversations. In 2003, there were a number of conferences focusing on DuBois because of his 1903 publication of The Souls of Black Folk, in which that phrase, “the color line,” became popularized.

One of the questions posed at these conferences was whether the problem of the 21st century would be the problem of colorblindness. Now, I wonder whether the problem of the 21st century isn’t something very different.

OP: A word on DuBois. About 2-3 months ago, we had a conference at Harvard that was devoted to the restoration of DuBois’s status as one of the founding scholars of sociology. Now, for a long time, he was neglected—not by people in the humanities, by the way—by the discipline to which he was so dedicated. Aldon Morris just wrote a wonderful book on DuBois called The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. DuBois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. DuBois’s work on slavery influenced me greatly. At the same time, there’s one aspect of DuBois that is very unpopular among students and scholars today: DuBois recognized not just the centuries of oppression, racism, and slavery as being critical, but he was probably the first scholar to emphasize what’s now called “the wages of whiteness,” as well as what I’m calling a zero-sum approach to race that operates on the belief that what benefits blacks detracts from oneself as a white person.

DuBois had this wonderful term, the “psychological wage” that whites got from being white. DuBois’s work is now being re-read, and is of great significance. White supremacy is not to be ignored, but we have to grapple with both the cultural language we use to describe our situation and the social/economic factors that explain the persistence of the many problems that black Americans face, in spite of the progress that has been made.

DP: It’s about power, and about acquiring power that can determine policy and direct social change. Power for black people in the United States will only come in coalitions with like interests. In some ways, the history of

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TCW: My white friends loved hip-hop as much as or more than many of us did. But I believe that they engaged with it ironically—it didn’t speak to their deepest sense of self, whereas we took our sense of self from the lyrics and models that we were trying to emulate. That was the key difference. Regarding Orlando’s point about the elephant in the room…

What I’ve noticed is that pointing out the elephant in the room becomes, or is interpreted as, giving in to respectability politics. You embrace Lil’ Kim or Cardi B as a real feminist, or something like that…and to point out that it’s problematic means that you’re a dupe of mainstream white respectability, that you’re trying to live up to false white standards… I like Cardi B, by the way.

MJ: Cardi B is, in some ways, showing a real political intelligence.

TCW: I hadn’t known that she was the political commentator I needed, but she is, actually.

RB: I want to briefly underline, and ask a little bit more about, one aspect of this that Orlando mentioned, which was that at a certain point, black leaders seemed no longer to be interested in the idea of desegregation.

And when you said that, I couldn’t help but think about a piece I read in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. It was about the development of Afro-centric schools in Bedford-Stuyvesant. In the story, a number of people who were excited about these Afro-centric schools said that the schools their children had previously attended weren’t doing a hell of a lot to help them. And these Afro-centric schools are being supported by the city of New York. I’m wondering what you all have to say about this story.

JM: There’s no record of that working. That’s an old story; the Times writes it every five years. What really helps kids from poor homes, in terms of doing well in school, is being taught how to read with phonics. And that doesn’t make as good a story, so they don’t write about it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER ONE: I’m thinking about the possibility of Medicare For All being an issue for the upcoming presidential election, and about how ready most of us are to think that even practicable solutions are out of reach. Would you say something about that, John?

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JM: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is my Congress person and eight months ago, no one thought she was going to win. And now, here she is. I had no idea that Medicare For All was going to be on the table, as it is now. I hadn’t even processed it yet, that we might think of that as part of a civil rights platform, but obviously there’s an idea that might solve a lot of life problems. I didn’t think that it was practical…I’m not a leftist, and I generally think that things don’t happen that quickly. But lately, some things kind of are. So, when things like this happen, I have to re-adjust.

But yes, definitely. I am a liberal—I always think things are going to happen slowly. And all of a sudden, we’re talking about Medicare For All. Yes. It sounds great.

OP: She has the full support of the social science community behind her, because the overwhelming conclusion from numerous studies is that the best way you can spend public money is through healthcare for mothers, pre-K education, and infant education. Economists and others have worked on this, and the returns for every dollar you spend is greater than anything else you can do.

AUDIENCE MEMBER TWO: Not you nor anyone else on the panel, John, has mentioned the role of organized labor, or unionism. I’m wondering if that’s a dead duck in terms of considering solutions for the plight you describe. And I have a second question: Yesterday, you had me sold on your severance between white supremacism and structural racism.

But when I listen to you today, talking about the role of the Herrenvolk idea in imposing the racialized vision that’s created the drastic situation you describe, I wonder about the validity of that separation—if white supremacism, period, is not precisely the term for what’s happening now…

JM: I could say that the term is applicable to an extent, but I would still question whether white supremacy is why that poor guy on the subway— that guy who’s mad, who’s never going to have a good job—is in the condition that he’s in. He’s an innocent, but I don’t think that it’s white supremacy that we need to talk about in order to help him. So yes, there will be what we might call white supremacy—some of this is just semantics—and I can allow that, because this Herrenvolk idea does imply white

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supremacy, that whites are on top and should stay on top. Certainly, there are people who feel that way. But there’s that guy, and how are we going to help him? I worry that if we talk about our guilt over white supremacy and how terrible white supremacy is, we might forget that what’s going to help that guy will involve something very different. On labor, yes—it’s just kind of early. I want those guys and those women to have the sorts of jobs where that would even be an issue. But in the organizations that Orlando is talking about, the union is not the point. The idea is teaching people to stick with a job. There’s a whole literature that doesn’t get talked about, about how hard it is for a certain kind of guy to keep a job, and you have these candid interviews with the people who hire them, you have black sociologists interviewing the men, and we see that in the main there’s no coded racism. It’s that it’s hard for them to stay in a job. The union part would come later—let’s talk about that in twenty years, once people have their feet in. But that’s why I’ve never said much about the labor aspect of things.

OP: Many studies confirm that the great majority of whites are not white supremacists. John is right that we can’t attribute, under normal circumstances, the problems of black Americans to white supremacy. But we have to acknowledge the twenty percent of whites who remain white supremacists with a zero-sum view of race and freedom were themselves responsible for Donald Trump. Until Trump was elected, my too optimistic view was that this 20% wouldn’t have much of an effect on the other 80% of whites, that they were a declining group…

JM: I thought that, too.

OP: Clearly, I was wrong in that, because that twenty percent did make a difference, and the difference they made was Trump.

As for unionization, sure. One path towards working class success is getting good union jobs. The unions have a peculiar history here. And we know that it’s because of the decline of union power that the income of working class people has declined—there’s no doubt about that. But we also hope that unions will become more progressive in the incorporation of blacks in skilled jobs, because that’s one of the few ways in which

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you can make a meaningful middle-class income even if you don’t go to college. The decline of unions is one factor contributing to the growing inequality in America. Can we be optimistic about a revival of the union movement? I’m not at all sure about that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER THREE: I would like to thank you for bringing DuBois into these conversations. In 2003, there were a number of conferences focusing on DuBois because of his 1903 publication of The Souls of Black Folk, in which that phrase, “the color line,” became popularized.

One of the questions posed at these conferences was whether the problem of the 21st century would be the problem of colorblindness. Now, I wonder whether the problem of the 21st century isn’t something very different.

OP: A word on DuBois. About 2-3 months ago, we had a conference at Harvard that was devoted to the restoration of DuBois’s status as one of the founding scholars of sociology. Now, for a long time, he was neglected—not by people in the humanities, by the way—by the discipline to which he was so dedicated. Aldon Morris just wrote a wonderful book on DuBois called The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. DuBois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. DuBois’s work on slavery influenced me greatly. At the same time, there’s one aspect of DuBois that is very unpopular among students and scholars today: DuBois recognized not just the centuries of oppression, racism, and slavery as being critical, but he was probably the first scholar to emphasize what’s now called “the wages of whiteness,” as well as what I’m calling a zero-sum approach to race that operates on the belief that what benefits blacks detracts from oneself as a white person.

DuBois had this wonderful term, the “psychological wage” that whites got from being white. DuBois’s work is now being re-read, and is of great significance. White supremacy is not to be ignored, but we have to grapple with both the cultural language we use to describe our situation and the social/economic factors that explain the persistence of the many problems that black Americans face, in spite of the progress that has been made.

DP: It’s about power, and about acquiring power that can determine policy and direct social change. Power for black people in the United States will only come in coalitions with the interests. In some ways, the history of

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lynching somewhat disguises the fact that it was a form of class warfare against black middle-class men and women. There’s a very interesting book called White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South by Martha Hodes that went in and described a lot of these relationships as consensual and voluntary, but the guys accused happened to be newspaper editors, business owners whose businesses whites coveted, and things like that. Lynching, as well as the accusations of rape, often went with displacing men of property. I just think it’s about power. And if you have power, then you don’t have to care what someone thinks. I’m not interested in reforming racism or white supremacism. I’m interested in creating a society in which their views are not governing my life.

AUDIENCE MEMBER FOUR: Yesterday, Darryl spoke of a canon of writers from Africa, which is to say of writers we should have already read. Is this canon important to black writers in this country? Should it be? Are there names and books you regard as essential?

DP: No, I mean, we all hear “You should read this,” or “you should read that,” or “you should pay attention to it.” Some people I know say that Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is a wonderful novel to read. So you listen, accept recommendations, or not, and try. There’s no way to read or know everything. Not any more. You’re just open to various books that people you trust are talking about.

MJ: Yaa Gyasi is Guinean, and I’m sure you’re at least somewhat aware of the writers that are coming from Nigeria: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [Americanah] is the best-known, but there’s also Oyinkan Braithwaite, who wrote My Sister, the Serial Killer, as well as Helen Oyeyemi, who wrote Gingerbread. There are others whom I can’t name, but whose books are in my head. It’s now part of a global literature in the way that we first saw with South American literature, and then with South Asian literature.

There are works entering the current canon, and most of us will have a hard time keeping up with that.

TCW: I don’t know if everybody would agree with me, but I’m from a kind of Black American cultural tradition that’s quite distinct from Africa.

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My father was kind of a Southern black guy. So, I’m interested in Teju Cole and other writers, but I don’t really connect reading African literature to my identity any more than I do reading German literature.

MJ: I’m sure we could all give lists of black American writers that we haven’t kept up with, whom we know are on the list, or whose books are in our houses…

DP: And there’s so much from the past that I’ve not read, that I’m more interested in reading. In the time I have left, I want to read those things I’ve always meant to read. I’ve never read all the way through Proust, and I think I’ll do that before I read Homegoing.

RB: Margo used the expression “global literature,” and there is the sense—which, I think, many of us have had for quite a long time—that global literature, no matter where it comes from, is apt to be as compelling to students as books that they think they should be reading because of an ethnic connection. Of course black students in my classes on the political novel are deeply interested in books by Achebe or more contemporary African writers, but they’re also very much taken with a book by an Algerian writer named Kamel Daoud (The Meursault Investigation) or Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost—or, for that matter, with Russell Banks’ novel The Darling.

DP: But it’s a good thing for us all to be reading things from all over. An essence of freedom is to have many choices.

TCW: James Baldwin has a wonderful essay called “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown,” about when he went to Paris and met Senghor.

And it was through this encounter that he realized he was black, and that something happened over the course of 400 years: the collision of Europe and Africa, and much that followed, and though it’s not exactly the same thing, I kind of feel that way. I am an American living in France. And I meet Africans and Europeans and feel that I’m neither of those things.

I’m a Black American.

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AUDIENCE MEMBER FIVE: I know you like talking about writers and books when you get the chance, but indulge me: I’m curious as to what your opinions are regarding whether the black community is better or worse off because of hip-hop culture. Especially interested here in what Thomas has to say about this.

TCW: Ten years ago, as I’ve mentioned before, I wrote a memoir [Losing My Cool] about the enormous influence that hip-hop, as a culture and as a secular religion, seemed to wield over blacks born in the civil-rights era, known as the hip-hop era. My father is 81 years old—he’s old enough to be my grandfather—and he had a very different black experience. My generation had very different concerns than his. The main argument of my book was that in the hip-hop era, black culture had been narrowed, or reduced, to a kind of cool-posed, black street culture that had been mainstreamed and largely sold to people from a variety of black backgrounds. At the time, I felt it was extraordinarily detrimental. Ten years later, I think that this critique still holds—certainly so, when I think about my own life—but there seems also to have been a certain empowerment that’s come through hip-hop culture, as well as the economy it created, that can’t be denied.

It’s a mixed bag. I think that a lot of my friends really derailed their own lives through choices that were largely inspired by trying to live up to a kind of street authenticity that hip-hop glorifies. But that’s not the entire story. And I think that the older I get, the more I realize that a lot of it is more complicated than that.

OP: Those are the right words, aren’t they, Bob, for wrapping up a conference like this? “A lot of it is more complicated than that.”

RB: Thanks to all of you for allowing us to arrive there, without thinking there’s nothing more left to say.

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Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors ROBERT BOYERS’s latest book is The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy and the Hunt for Political Heresies. He founded Salmagundi in 1965 and continues to edit the magazine and to direct The New York State Summer Writers Institute.

KEVIN BROWN is author of Malcolm X: His Life & Legacy as well as Romare Bearden: Artist. He was also a contributing editor to the New York Public Library African-American Desk Reference. His articles, essay-reviews, interviews and translations have appeared in American Book Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fiction International, The Georgia Review, The Nation, The Threepenny Review, Times Literary Supplement, Washington Post Bookworld, among others.

MARK EDMUNDSON is University Professor at the University of Virginia and author of many works of criticism including, Why Write?, Self and Soul, Why Teach?, The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll, The Death of Sigmund Freud, Why Read?, Nightmare on Main Street, Literature Against Philosophy, Wild Orchids and Trotsky, Towards Reading Freud and, most recently, The Heart of the Humanities: Reading, Writing, Teaching. He writes often for Salmagundi.

TODD GITLIN is Professor of Journalism and Sociology, and Chair of the PhD program in Communications at Columbia University. He has published 16 books of non-fiction, fiction and poetry and recently completed a novel, The Opposition, set in the 1960s.

BARRY GOLDENSOHN's books of poems include The Hundred Yard Dash Man: New and Selected Poems, St. Venus Eve, Uncarving the Block, The Marrano, Dance Music, East Long Pond (with Lorrie Goldensohn), The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music and, most recently, Snake in the Spine, Wolf in the Heart. He divides his time between Cabot, Vermont and New York City.

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JAN C. GROSSMAN’s poems have appeared in Poetry East, The Midwest Quarterly, American Arts Quarterly, Atlanta Review and many others.

SADAF HALAI has published poems in Ploughshares, Granta, Granta Online, Vallum and the Journal of Postcolonial Literature.

DAVID HERMAN is a freelance writer based in London. His work regularly appears in The Jewish Quarterly, The Guardian, The Independent, Salmagundi and Prospect, where he is a contributing editor.

MARTIN JAY has been a Salmagundi columnist for more than thirty years and has long been a Professor of History at The University of California-Berkeley. His many books include The Dialectical Imagination, Adorno, Fin de Siecle Socialism, Essays From The Edge and Reason After Its Eclipse.

MARGO JEFFERSON is author of Negroland, On Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson: On the Wall and Ripping Off Black Music. She is currently Professor of Professional Practice in Writing at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

ADRIE KUSSEROW is a cultural anthropologist teaching at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. She is author of two books of poems, Hunting Down the Monk and Refuge.

JOHN MCWHORTER is Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and other national publications. His books include Word on the Street, Losing The Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, Authentically Black, Winning The Race, All About The Beat and The Language Hoax. He also hosts Slate’s “Lexicon Valley” podcast.

JEFFREY MEYERS is author of biographies of Hemingway, Edgar Alan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Johnson, Gary Cooper, Modigliani, T.E. Lawrence, Robert Frost and many others. His most recent studies include Robert Lowell in Love and Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy.

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DAVID MIKICS is Moores Professor of Honors and English at the University of Houston and author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age, Bellow's People, The Annotated Emerson, and other works. He is also a columnist for Tablet magazine.

ORLANDO PATTERSON is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and author, most recently, of a book about Jamaica, The Confounding Island as well as editor of The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth. His earlier works include Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, Slavery & Social Death, The Ordeal of Integration and Rituals of Blood. He is a frequent contributor to the op-ed page of the New York Times and is a regular contributor to this magazine where he has been a central participant in ten previous Salmagundi conferences.

DARRYL PINCKNEY is author of two novels, High Cotton and Black Deutschland. His nonfiction works include Sold and Gone: African American Literature & US Society, Blackballed: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature and, most recently, Busted in New York and Other Essays. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

SPENCER REECE is an Episcopal priest and author of two books of poems, A Clerk's Tale and The Road to Emmaus as well as a forthcoming memoir, Devotions. In 2017 he edited a book of poems, Counting Time Like People Count Stars, by the abandoned girls of Our Little Roses, the only all girl orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

JENNIFER STOCK is at work on an essay collection about the resonance of inherited objects, and these essays have appeared in the Iowa Review, the New England Review, the Georgia Review, Hotel Amerika, and the Normal School.

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS is author of Self-Portrait in Black and White and Losing My Cool: Love, Literature and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd. He is a contributing editor for the New York Times.

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