Skilled hosts steer the conversation toward topics that will draw out their guests. So when I read Touré’s Do Not Pass essay in yesterday’s NY Times Book Review I knew he was only nominally addressing a general audience.
Really, he was talking to me.
Okay, Touré, okay. I got the hint. I’ve got the Jewish angle on the topic right here. I’ll get to it in a minute.
First, I agree with you that blacks who cross the color line are “on the lam from themselves and their histories, cut off from their families.”
That’s well put. And while it’s obviously derived from Saul Bellow’s formulation of the price paid for Jewish assimilation — “If we dismiss the life that is waiting for us at birth, we will find ourselves in a void.” — you’ve changed it around enough so that it barely rings a bell. Nice job.
And that was a good overview of the unhappy fates that befell the real and fictional characters who did cross over to pass as white. But don’t even try to convince me you weren’t thinking of our conversations about Jews of that same ilk in Geoffrey Wolff’s Duke of Deception, Nicholas Dawidoff’s The Catcher Was a Spy, Masson’s My Father’s Guru, Tom Reiss’ The Orientalist, Harriet Murav’s Identity Theft, and Saul Bellow’s fascination with Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen and Yellow Kid Weil. I saw you taking notes!
Granted, I couldn’t stop talking that day. But it’s clear now that you were egging me on, flattering me, just to get me to spill the beans.
Anyway, you obviously weren’t paying close enough attention.
How could you be so glib about how much you “love blackness” and then go on and prove with historical and literary examples that racism did in fact make it a great burden for so many? You could have been a little more modest, a bit more grateful for living in a time that eased the burden, instead of giving yourself all the credit.
I confessed to you that I might have opted for Bellow’s void in another time and place that made Jewishness much less tolerable. Bellow himself recognized the pressure to take that path. “Many have tried to rid themselves in one way or another of this dreadful historic load by assimilation or other means.” And while he said he wasn’t tempted to do the same, he made it clear that he had the great good luck to find himself in America.
In other words, history did some of the heavy lifting for him. And me. And you.
And I thought we talked about this Afrocentric stuff? “Jesus (another black man who became white, but that’s a different story).”
I’m almost done, I’m almost done. All of a sudden you’re in a hurry?
You closed your essay by asking, “Why aren’t more white people trying to pass as black?” given that whites are “entranced by blackness and drool over how exciting and dangerous and sexy blacks seem.”
I thought you said you read those Seymour Krim articles I sent you. Caught you, didn’t I? Well go home and read them now. No, they’re not going to be easy. They’re rough. Krim doesn’t pull any punches about his take on the Harlem he knew in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But that’s why James Baldwin’s 1961 review said Krim was “almost the only writer of my generation who has managed to release himself from the necessity of being either romantic or defensive about Negroes.”
Anyway, Krim in 1957 recorded the phenomena that had apparently only recently begun and still hasn’t stopped: whites trying to pass as black. “But think now, if you will, of the many white people one knows who use Negro expressions, talk the language of jazz.” That’s from “Anti-Jazz,” by the way, so you don’t have to go madly looking all over for it. (I know how you get.)
The piece is practically a tutorial in whites passing as blacks. Krim even mentions Mezz Mezzrow’s autobiographical Really the Blues, which ends with the Jewish Mezzrow defiantly declaring that he is black. The prison guards look him over. Jewfro? Check. Olive complexion? Check. Alright. Fine. You’re black. And when he gets out he moves to Harlem, marries a black woman and lives as a black man.
Anyway, you didn’t need to read Krim on this. We discussed Norman Mailer’s The White Negro many times. Having selective amnesia? No, you can’t blame it on that fly ball that landed on your head when you were in grade school. And I remember you giggling when we saw the first Blues Brothers movie. “They’ll never make it, but oh my how they try,” was how you put it. Do I even have to mention all the white kids buying hip hop, dressing hip hop? (That’s alright. You can laugh at my clumsy deployment of slang. I’m getting old, I admit it.)
Okay, that’s it. Be well. Cool web site, by the way.
Comments
Reading Mark Cohen I sense my sluggish brain come alive. The wit, the astonishing speed, the pacing. the humor. can’t get enough.
Hi Jere,
As Jack Benny would say, “Now cut that out.”
But thank you.