Busted in New York and Other Essays

by Darryl Pinckney

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For Priscilla Roth

  Every existence has its idiom.

  —Whitman

  FOREWORD: THUS FAR ON THE WAY

  ZADIE SMITH

  Each summer, in London, I speak to a group of teens participating in Target Oxbridge, a program that encourages black students to apply to university. They ask me about my college experience and wonder what their own might be. One persistent anxiety trumps all: Will this make me less black? From here, the conversation expands into existential territory, as they describe the many behaviors and traits they fear will place their blackness—in the eyes of others—in jeopardy. Things like reading or writing too much, wearing certain clothes, speaking a particular way, having been to private school, living in the countryside. Sometimes I ask them to imagine a group of white students sitting there in our stead. What dangers could we conjure up that might put their whiteness in jeopardy? But we can only ever think of one—extreme poverty—and even then, it would likely not be their existential whiteness they’d consider endangered but only the privileges that may have once attended it. The imagined white students vanish. We sit together in our blackness and wonder: Can blackness really be so fragile an edifice that even a pair of narrow jeans may threaten it?

  In Darryl Pinckney’s life and work blackness is not so easily revoked. In his essays, blackness is as much in a black man’s possession at a British pro-fox-hunting demonstration as it is at the Million Man March—or while reporting on the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. He will retain it while writing operas in Berlin or falling in love (with a white, male poet) in Paris or reading Nancy Mitford. His blackness remains his even as he ponders the historical fact (alongside James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates) that race is, in the final analysis, a social and political construction:

  In his writings, Baldwin stressed that the Negro problem, like whiteness, existed mostly in white minds, and in Between the World and Me (2015), Coates wants his son, to whom he addresses himself, to know this, that white people are a modern invention. “Race is the child of racism, not the father.”

  As a piece of rhetoric this has become increasingly easy to assert, and many say it, but it is Pinckney’s habit always to dig behind rhetoric to the historical record, where things are somewhat more difficult to say but no less true; for example, that blackness, too, must therefore be an equally modern invention, for white and black as categories are coeval, the creation of the first necessitating the other:

  Colonial law quickly made a distinction between indentured servants and slaves and in so doing invented whiteness in America. It may have been possible for a free African or mixed-race person to own slaves, but it was not possible for a European to be taken into slavery. The distinction helped keep blacks and poor whites from seeking common cause.

  Pinckney’s emphasis on the interpolation of class and race can make him appear closer to the leftist Afro-Caribbean tradition of race theorists—exemplified by thinkers like Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall—who reject mythical or essentialist theories of racism (from the Curse of Ham to an inexplicable primordial hatred and horror of “black bodies”) in favor of a concrete economic analysis, in which racial distinctions have been created and maintained primarily for the sake of capitalist exploitation. For Pinckney, blackness is not an essential quality found in the blood, the spirit, or even the genes (“I’ve never liked that way of assigning to whole nations or groups innate behavioral characteristics. The work of every serious social scientist militated against it”) but a conceptual framework subject to history, like everything else: “People were Jewish or Welsh before they were white. The Irish used to be black socially, meaning at the bottom. The gift of being white helped subdue class antagonism.”

  Of course, just because something is constructed, it does not follow that it isn’t meaningful. As Coates himself puts it with poetic succinctness: “They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.” And it is to the history of this people that Darryl Pinckney attends. The legislation to which we have been subject; the economic and social exclusion we have suffered; the experiences, both personal and public, that we have shared; our joys, our pains. But because he has a truly encyclopedic knowledge of black history—stretching far beyond America to every corner of the globe—the question of who and what this “we” contains remains at the forefront of Pinckney’s inquiry. What exactly do “we” share? How do “we” diverge? From the concluding lines of his essay on Coates, “The Afro-Pessimist Temptation”: “Black life is about the group … this remains a fundamental paradox in the organization of everyday life for a black person.” Reading these lines, I thought of those students in London, never quite sure as to how or where they should draw the Venn diagram between the selves they feel so strongly and the “we” to which they no less profoundly belong. Can a diaspora be a monolith? Should it be?

  * * *

  In “Slouching Toward Washington,” Pinckney’s account of attending the 1995 Million Man March, this question is no thought experiment but a pressing problem: “Everyone seemed in a prescriptive frame of mind, willing to go on record about what black men and therefore black people needed to do.”

  As anyone who has been on a march knows, you find yourself on such occasions shoulder to shoulder with ideological brothers, cousins, and strangers, and as moved as Pinckney is by the huge crowd, by the solemn courtesy each man shows the other as they move through the throng—“Excuse me, brother … Excuse me, black man”—not every speech he heard that day spoke to him, and not every voice lifted was the song he wanted to sing. He hears “a troubling capitulation in the exhortations that black men accept responsibility for their families” (he hears the same capitulation thirteen years later when Obama makes a similar cri de coeur) and wonders why all the men on the Mall that day should have to “swear as black men not to beat their wives, promise as black men not to abuse their children … as if domestic violence and poverty were not also white problems.” Pinckney is the inconvenient scholar who knows, when Louis Farrakhan stands up and purports to quote a letter of 1612, written by one Willie Lynch, slave master, that this letter is a fraud, written in language that in no way belongs to the early seventeenth century—and yet there is nothing vituperative in his style, and he’s never out for anybody’s blood. (“No doubt [Farrakhan] assumed that everyone understood the letter was apocryphal, a parable about fear, envy, and distrust, the means by which blacks are kept disunited.”) Still, the truth matters. “An invented past can never be used,” argued Baldwin, and Pinckney’s historical precision reminds us that there is more than sufficient systemic oppression in the black past and the black present not to require any added fictionalization. Instead of Farrakhan’s murky “conspiracy of whites against blacks,” we might consider that in the first quarter of the nineteenth century Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North and South Carolina, and Vi
rginia passed anti-literacy laws, some of which included prison time for anyone who taught a slave to read and write,1 while as Farrakhan speechified, there existed a perfectly nonfictional, racially biased criminal justice system that destroyed the lives of far more than a million black men.

  When, in the title essay, Pinckney finds himself briefly incarcerated (for smoking a joint in the East Village), he recognizes at once his own distance, despite appearances, from his fellow (all black or Hispanic) inmates, a difference marked not by color but by class (“The irony, for me, was that an all-black gathering usually meant a special event, a stirring occasion”). Raised in the black bourgeoisie of the early 1960s—the world of NAACP meetings and black-owned newspapers, of prestigious black colleges and “Negro History Week”—he is attentive to the hierarchies of black struggle, even as the struggle itself renders his own experience invisible:

  Back then, as now, what constituted authentic blackness was determined by the plight of the majority, which meant the poorest.… Being of the black middle class could make you defensive. You were accused of trying to act white, of not knowing who you were. You were warned that one day soon it would be proven to you that you were black.… In the late 1960s, the black bourgeoisie was synonymous with Uncle Tom … depicted as light-skinned, clubbish, collaborationist, materialistic; and, yes, there was too much of that.

  This image has also “obscured the historical truth of a sector of the black population that defined itself more by political and social objectives than income.… The old black middle class knew more than it wanted to about the front line. There was no refuge in success. A cousin of my mother’s, a student at Atlanta University, was lynched in 1931.”

  It is this awareness of threat, the deadly patrimony of the African-American, that Pinckney takes with him as a journalist to Ferguson, listening to the testimony of the people he finds there, bearing witness:

  The hip-hop artist T-Dubb-O said that black males throughout the St. Louis area know how old they are from the tone of the police. “When you’re eight or nine, it’s ‘Yo, where are you going?’ and when it’s ‘Get down on the ground,’ you know you’ve turned fifteen.”

  Embedded with members of Black Lives Matter and the Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, an activist pastor from St. Louis, Pinckney finds himself far from his usual habitat—the Schomburg Center—hiding in the dark in a parking lot, listening to the sound of gunfire as “buildings burned on either side of us.” In Ferguson, too, he experiences a new generation’s disappointment with the same president the old men in Pinckney’s barbershop had heralded with the joy of a prize long deferred: “Black youth are fed up with being branded criminals at birth. Ferguson was the country stepping back in time, or exposing the fact that change hasn’t happened where most needed, that most of us don’t live in the age of Obama.”

  Pinckney does not share Sekou’s contempt for that president (“I wanted to say that Clarence Thomas is the race traitor, not Obama”), but he understands that whatever future Obama symbolized was—to paraphrase William Gibson—at the very least unevenly distributed, and he pays tribute to those citizens whose work on the ground is transforming the present: “Instead of calling 911, black America now pulls out its smartphones in order to document the actions of the death squads that dialing 911 can summon.”

  * * *

  Such a schizophrenic reality, in which black power—in the form of a president—and black powerlessness, in the form of state violence and oppression, can coexist, would surely bring out the Afro-pessimist in any reasonable man. “Which is better,” Pinckney asks himself, while considering the evident despair to be found in our present race debates, “to believe that blacks will achieve full equality in American society or to realize that white racism is so deep that meaningful integration can never happen, so make other plans?” It is a question he does not answer as much as historicize:

  In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois argued that the influence of three main attitudes could be traced throughout the history of black Americans in response to their condition: “a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite environing opinion.

  And this insistence on historicization allows him to take the long view on many present pains that may otherwise seem confounding to young people experiencing them for the first time. Instead of adjudicating that painful public spat between Cornel and Ta-Nehisi, for example, Pinckney places it within a tradition, a long and glorious history of contention within black letters, in which “everyone accused everyone else of running a con”:

  In later years, Ellison remembered Wright, six years his senior, as a father figure whom he had quickly outgrown. But Wright’s example inspired the young James Baldwin to move to Paris in 1948. Wright was hurt when Baldwin declared his independence from the protest tradition by denouncing Native Son. Baldwin later defended his criticisms, arguing in part that Wright’s concentration on defining his main character by the force of his circumstances sacrificed that character’s humanity. Baldwin’s turn would come.

  In his essay collection Home (1966), LeRoi Jones “sneered at Baldwin” for being popular on the “white liberal cocktail party circuit.” Worse was in store for Baldwin, the understanding queer in a time of narrow macho militancy.

  That LeRoi Jones, even after he became Amiri Baraka, remained popular on the white liberal cocktail circuit, that Baldwin also sometimes sacrificed a character’s humanity for a force of circumstance—into these weeds Pinckney does not go, recognizing instead that this oedipal battle between fathers and forefathers is practically a black intellectual’s rite of passage. He is not interested in separating good black from bad, nor in discovering who is the “realest.” His focus is black history itself, its twists, its turns, its debates, its triumphs and self-negations:

  The conflict between national and racial identity has had political expression—integrationist/separatist—as well as psychological meaning: good black/bad black, masked black self/real black self. “Free your mind, and your ass will follow,” Funkadelic sang in 1970, by which time the authentic black was always assumed to be militant.

  For Pinckney, separatism is an old song come around again, although this time appearing mainly as “a rhetorical strategy of the tradition,” divorced from the kind of black-focused organization and political interventions represented by the Panthers or, much earlier, in the founding of the historically black colleges and incorporated black towns. In the new language of Twitter militancy “we just can’t” with white people anymore … and yet here we are and here they are, so what is to be done? As Pinckney points out, a despair cannot be total if someone has taken the time to write it out, for even “to address an audience beyond black people is to be still attempting to communicate and enlighten.” One recurring pattern in militancy is that one man’s militant is another’s Uncle Tom: “The reinvigoration of the marketplace of discussion about that invention, race, has always depended on the passing of the torch, on another generation coming along as a corrective to the one before it, the assumption being that the next generation will be more real and finally tell it like it is.”

  If Pinckney is suspicious of the old/new black authenticity contest, it may be because he exists himself at the intersection, as the young folks say, of several identities—black, gay, bougie—and so is familiar with how quickly a “we” can become a “you” and an “us.” One of the most striking moments in this book occurs when, while reporting on Hurricane Katrina, Pinckney finds himself in a black New Orleans that seems to welcome him with open arms, which he confesses comes as a surprise to a man who, out of habit and long experience, is used to “bracing myself for the anti-Tom vibe or the anti-queer vibe.” He is, that day, not “you” but “we,” fully included in a black space at a time of black tragedy, an event that was widely interpreted as a bitter example of the fact that white and black Americans were exp
licitly not “in this together.” Katrina seemed to confirm that what Coates has called “King’s gauzy dream” of multiracial solidarity had been, as Pinckney puts it, “replaced by the reality of an America of competing groups, with blacks tired of being the weakest of the lot.” Still, within this “weakest” group Pinckney wants us to remember there is difference and divergence—and plenty of it. Interested as we all were, for example, in the saga of “Skip” Gates, the cop, and the president, Pinckney casts an unusually caustic eye over The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America by Charles Ogletree, in which Ogletree interviews upper-middle-class black men, many of them Harvard educated, as they offer similar encounters of mistaken identity. Given that everyone approached for the book was of the privileged class, Pinckney wonders, is the unspoken assumption that the real offense is wounded class pride?

  One quickly understands the irritation of the black working poor with the outrage of black professionals at the social indignities they encounter. There are worse things than not having one’s high social status acknowledged by whites.

  Maybe the point is that no black person should have to stomach any bigotry, but the resentment Ogletree’s men … express at having been taken for a servant or menial by whites could make one wonder if their parents ever told them that they themselves ought not to judge a black man by the work he was able to find.

  We are prompted to ask ourselves why Gates’s tale of high-status humiliation was so much more compelling, at that moment, in America, than the undisguised systemic racism that continued, throughout the Obama years, to put more working-class black men in jail than in college.