The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  At the same time, I encountered a social and economic reality that is deeply troubled, deeply conflicted, by race, a reality in which race codes for class. Perhaps Nascimento is right that for decades, Afro-Brazilians of every hue have lived, and perhaps suffered, in the shadow of a myth. Their country told them that racial democracy had made, or would make, everything racial all right and that there was no need to fight for equal rights. But today’s Brazil is a very long way from becoming a racial paradise, and any sensible black Brazilian—and white Brazilian—knows that. Half a millennium of slavery and anti-black racism can’t be wiped away with a slogan, no matter how eloquently wrought that slogan is. Nevertheless, I had seen a great deal that made me hopeful, most notably the fact that black consciousness is clearly establishing itself as a political force throughout the society in various ways, ways that compel the larger society to listen. And perhaps Brazil’s experiment with affirmative action in higher education—no matter how it is modified, as it will be—will begin to accomplish in the twenty-first century the sort of equality of opportunity that has proved to be so elusive in Brazil for so very long, a Brazil richly and impressively “African” and black in its cultural diversity yet always already economically dominated by the white descendants of the masters and the descendants of post-emancipation white immigrants. I hoped, as my plane took off, that I was witnessing the realization of Abdias do Nascimento’s invocation to the god Exú that Brazil’s black community at long last find its political voice as forcefully and as resonantly as it had long before found its artistic voice and that, in so doing, Brazil might experience a new kind of social revolution, a revolution that could lead to the creation of the world’s first racial democracy.

  SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black in Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

  PART VII

  CULTURE AND POLITICS

  THIS SECTION BEGINS with the essay that put Gates on the cultural map. “2 Live Crew, Decoded” is a defense of a rap group whose lyrics were deemed obscene. Gates wrote in favor of singer Luther Campbell’s first amendment rights, of course, but not just in favor of those rights; he also wrote a careful explication of the black vernacular and of black forms of conversation that, to untrained white ears, sounded simply obscene. But for Gates, it is always necessary to go back to the culture from which a writer takes his language and his diction, and this reaching back has remained a constant in Gates’s own writing.

  There are amusing details within these pieces (the placement of “hip-hop” in quotes shows precisely where that musical form was, or was not, on the mainstream radar in 1990), and there are some hard pronouncements (“Ending the Slavery Blame-Game” continues to attract heated reactions for its calling out of African slave traders). In all of these selections, published in the mainstream media, we see Gates’s capacity to distill complex academic concepts into highly readable prose, a skill that has kept him at the fore of public intellectual life for more than two decades.

  Abby Wolf

  2 LIVE CREW, DECODED

  THE RAP GROUP 2 Live Crew and their controversial hit recording “As Nasty As They Wanna Be” may well earn a signal place in the history of First Amendment rights. But just as important is how these lyrics will be interpreted and by whom.

  For centuries, African-Americans have been forced to develop coded ways of communicating to protect themselves from danger. Allegories and double meanings, words redefined to mean their opposites (“bad” meaning “good,” for instance), even neologisms (bodacious) have enabled blacks to share messages only the initiated understood.

  HEAVY-HANDED PARODY

  Many blacks were amused by the transcripts of Marion Barry’s sting operation, which reveal that he used the traditional black expression: one’s “nose being opened.” This referred to a love affair and not, as Mr. Barry’s prosecutors have suggested, to the inhalation of drugs. Understanding this phrase could very well spell the difference (for the mayor) between prison and freedom.

  2 Live Crew is engaged in heavy-handed parody, turning the stereotypes of black and white American culture on their heads. These young artists are acting out, to lively dance music, a parodic exaggeration of the age-old stereotypes of the oversexed black female and male. Their exuberant use of hyperbole (phantasmagoric sexual organs, for example) undermines—for anyone fluent in black cultural codes—a too literal-minded hearing of the lyrics.

  This is the street tradition called “signifying” or “playing the dozens,” which has generally been risqué, and where the best signifier or “rapper” is the one who invents the most extravagant images, the biggest “lies,” as the culture says. (H. “Rap” Brown earned his nickname in just this way.) In the face of racist stereotypes about black sexuality, you can do one of two things: disavow them or explode them with exaggeration.

  2 Live Crew, like many “hip-hop” groups, is engaged in sexual carnivalesque. Parody reigns supreme, from a takeoff of standard blues to a spoof of the black power movement; their off-color nursery rhymes are part of a venerable Western tradition. The group even satirizes the culture of commerce when it appropriates popular advertising slogans (“Tastes great!” “Less filling!”) and puts them in a bawdy context.

  2 Live Crew must be interpreted within the context of black culture generally and of signifying specifically. Their novelty, and that of other adventuresome rap groups, is that their defiant rejection of euphemism now voices for the mainstream what before existed largely in the “race record” market.

  Rock songs have always been about sex but have used elaborate subterfuges to convey that fact. 2 Live Crew uses Anglo-Saxon words and is self-conscious about it: A parody of a white voice in one song refers to “private personal parts,” as a coy counterpart to the group’s bluntness.

  Much more troubling than its so-called obscenity is the group’s overt sexism. Their sexism is so flagrant, however, that it almost cancels itself out in a hyperbolic war between the sexes. In this, it recalls the intersexual jousting in Zora Neale Hurston’s novels. Still, many of us look toward the emergence of more female rappers to redress sexual stereotypes. And we must not allow ourselves to sentimentalize street culture: The appreciation of verbal virtuosity does not lessen one’s obligation to critique bigotry in all of its pernicious forms.

  MUST FIRST UNDERSTAND

  Is 2 Live Crew more “obscene” than, say, the comic Andrew Dice Clay?

  Clearly, this rap group is seen as more threatening than others that are just as sexually explicit. Can this be completely unrelated to the specter of the young black male as a figure of sexual and social disruption, the very stereotypes 2 Live Crew seems determined to undermine?

  This question—and the very large question of obscenity and the First Amendment—cannot even be addressed until those who would answer them become literate in the vernacular traditions of African-Americans. To do less is to censor through the equivalent of intellectual prior restraint—and censorship is to art what lynching is to justice.

  SOURCE: The New York Times, June 19, 1990.

  “AUTHENTICITY,” OR THE LESSON OF LITTLE TREE

  IT’S A PERENNIAL question: Can you really tell? The great black jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge once made a wager with the critic Leonard Feather that he could distinguish white musicians from black ones—blindfolded. Mr. Feather duly dropped the needle onto a variety of record albums whose titles and soloists were concealed from the trumpeter. More than half the time, Eldridge guessed wrong.

  Mr. Feather’s blindfold test is one that literary critics would do well to ponder, for the belief that we can “read” a person’s racial or ethnic identity from his or her writing runs surprisingly deep. There is an assumption that we could fill a room with the world’s great literature, train a Martian to analyze these books, and then expect that Martian to categorize each by the citizenship or ethnicity or gender of its author. “Passing” and “impersonation” may sound like quaint terms of a bygone era, but they continue
to inform the way we read. Our literary judgments, in short, remain hostage to the ideology of authenticity.

  And while black Americans have long boasted of their ability to spot “one of our own,” no matter how fair the skin, straight the hair, or aquiline the nose—and while the nineteenth-century legal system in this country went to absurd lengths to demarcate even octoroons and demioctoroons from their white sisters and brothers—authentic racial and ethnic differences have always been difficult to define. It’s not just a black thing, either.

  The very idea of a literary tradition is itself bound up in suppositions—dating back at least to an eighteenth-century theorist of nationalism, Johann Gottfried Herder—that ethnic or national identity finds unique expression in literary forms. Such assumptions hold sway even after we think we have discarded them. After the much ballyhooed “death of the author” pronounced by two decades of literary theory, the author is very much back in the saddle. As the literary historian John Guillory observes, today’s “battle of the books” is really not so much about books as it is about authors, authors who can be categorized according to race, gender, ethnicity, and so on, standing in as delegates of a social constituency.

  And the assumption that the works they create transparently convey the authentic, unmediated experience of their social identities—though officially renounced—has crept quietly in through the back door. Like any dispensation, it raises some works and buries others. Thus Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God has prospered, while her Seraph on the Suwanee, a novel whose main characters are white, remains in limbo. Our Nig, recently identified as the work of a black woman, almost immediately went from obscurity to required reading in black and women’s literature courses.

  The case of Forrest Carter, the author of the best-selling The Education of Little Tree, provided yet another occasion to reflect on the troublesome role of authenticity. Billed as a true story, Carter’s book was written as the autobiography of Little Tree, orphaned at the age of ten, who learns the ways of Indians from his Cherokee grandparents in Tennessee. The Education of Little Tree, which has sold more than 600,000 copies, received an award from the American Booksellers Association as the title booksellers most enjoyed selling. It was sold on the gift tables of Indian reservations and assigned as supplementary reading for courses on Native American literature. Major studios vied for movie rights.

  And the critics loved it. Booklist praised its “natural approach to life.” A reviewer for the Chattanooga Times pronounced it “deeply felt.” One poet and storyteller of Abenaki descent hailed it as a masterpiece—“one of the finest American autobiographies ever written”—that captured the unique vision of Native American culture. It was, he wrote blissfully, “like a Cherokee basket, woven out of the materials given by nature, simple and strong in its design, capable of carrying a great deal.” A critic in The (Santa Fe) New Mexican told his readers: “I have come on something that is good, so good I want to shout ‘Read this! It’s beautiful. It’s real.’”

  Or was it?

  To the embarrassment of the book’s admirers, Dan T. Carter, a history professor at Emory University, unmasked “Forrest Carter” as a pseudonym for the late Asa Earl Carter, whom he described as “a Ku Klux Klan terrorist, right wing radio announcer, home grown American fascist and anti-Semite, rabble-rousing demagogue and secret author of the famous 1963 speech by Gov. George Wallace of Alabama: ‘Segregation now . . . Segregation tomorrow . . . Segregation forever.’” Forget Pee-wee Herman—try explaining this one to the kids.

  This is only the latest embarrassment to beset the literary ideologues of authenticity, and its political stakes are relatively trivial. It was not always such. The authorship of slave narratives published between 1760 and 1865 was also fraught with controversy. To give credence to their claims about the horrors of slavery, American abolitionists urgently needed a cadre of ex-slaves who could compellingly indict their masters with first-person accounts of their bondage. For this tactic to succeed, the ex-slaves had to be authentic, their narratives full of convincing, painstaking verisimilitude.

  So popular did these become, however, that two forms of imitators soon arose: white writers, adopting a first-person black narrative persona, gave birth to the pseudoslave narrative; and black authors, some of whom had never even seen the South, a plantation or a whipping post, became literary lions virtually overnight.

  Generic confusion was rife in those days. The 1836 slave narrative of Archy Moore turned out to have been a novel written by a white historian, Richard Hildreth; and the gripping Autobiography of a Female Slave (1857) was also a novel, written by a white woman, Mattie Griffith. Perhaps the most embarrassing of these publishing events, however, involved one James Williams, an American slave—the subtitle of his narrative asserts—“who was for several years a driver on a cotton plantation in Alabama.” Having escaped to the North (or so he claimed), Williams sought out members of the Anti-Slavery Society, and told a remarkably well-structured story about the brutal treatment of the slaves in the South and of his own miraculous escape, using the literacy he had secretly acquired to forge the necessary documents.

  So compelling, so gripping, so useful was his tale that the abolitionists decided to publish it immediately. Williams arrived in New York on New Year’s Day, 1838. By January 24, he had dictated his complete narrative to John Greenleaf Whittier. By February 15, it was in print, and was also being serialized in the abolitionist newspaper The Anti-Slavery Examiner. Even before Williams’s book was published, rumors spread in New York that slave catchers were on his heels, and so his new friends shipped him off to Liverpool—where, it seems, he was never heard from again. Once the book was published, the abolitionists distributed it widely, sending copies to every state and to every Congressman.

  Alas, Williams’s stirring narrative was not authentic at all, as outraged Southern slaveholders were quick to charge and as his abolitionist friends reluctantly had to concede. It was a work of fiction, the production, one commentator put it, “purely of the Negro imagination”—as, no doubt, were the slave catchers who were in hot pursuit, and whose purported existence earned Williams a free trip to England and a new life.

  Ersatz slave narratives had an even rougher time of it a century later, and one has to wonder how William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner—a novel that aroused the strenuous ire of much of the black intelligentsia when it was published in 1976—might have been received had it been published by James Baldwin. “Hands off our history,” we roared at Mr. Styron, the white Southern interloper, as we shopped around our list of literary demands. It was the real thing we wanted, and we wouldn’t be taken in by imitators.

  The real black writer, accordingly, could claim the full authority of experience denied Mr. Styron. Indeed, the late 1960s and early ’70s were a time in which the notion of ethnic literature began to be consolidated and, in some measure, institutionalized. That meant policing the boundaries, telling true from false. But it was hard to play this game without a cheat sheet. When Dan McCall published The Man Says Yes in 1969, a novel about a young black teacher who comes up against the eccentric president of a black college, many critics assumed the author was black, too. The reviewer for The Amsterdam News, for example, referred to him throughout as “Brother McCall.” Similar assumptions were occasionally made about Shane Stevens when he published the gritty bildungsroman Way Uptown in Another World in 1971, which detailed the brutal misadventures of its hero from Harlem, Marcus Garvey Black. In this case, the new voice from the ghetto belonged to a white graduate student at Columbia.

  But the ethnic claim to its own experience cut two ways. For if many of their readers imagined a black face behind the prose, many avid readers of Frank Yerby’s historical romances or Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction novels are taken aback when they learn that these authors are black. And James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, arguably his most accomplished novel, is seldom taught in black literature courses because its characters
are white and gay.

  Cultural commentators have talked about the “cult of ethnicity” in postwar America. You could dismiss it as a version of what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.” But you also see it as a salutary reaction to a regional Anglo-American culture that has declared itself as universal. For too long, “race” was something that blacks had, “ethnicity” was what “ethnics” had. In mid-century America, Norman Podhoretz reflected in Making It, his literary memoirs, “to write fiction out of the experience of big-city immigrant Jewish life was to feel oneself, and to be felt by others, to be writing exotica at best; nor did there exist a respectably certified narrative style in English which was anything but facsimile-WASP. Writing was hard enough but to have to write with only that part of one’s being which had been formed by the acculturation-minded public schools and by the blindly ethnicizing English departments of the colleges was like being asked to compete in a race with a leg cut off at the thigh.”

  All this changed with the novelistic triumphs of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth—and yet a correlative disability was entered in the ledger, too. In the same year that Mr. Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner, Philip Roth published When She Was Good, a novel set in the rural heartland of gentile middle America and infused with the chilly humorlessness of its small-town inhabitants. This was, to say the least, a departure. Would critics who admired Mr. Roth as the author of Goodbye, Columbus accept him as a chronicler of the Protestant Corn Belt?

  Richard Gilman, in The New Republic, compared Mr. Roth to a “naturalist on safari to a region unfamiliar to him” and declared himself unable to “account for the novel’s existence, so lacking is it in any true literary interest.” Maureen Howard in Partisan Review said she felt “the presence of a persona rather than a personal voice.” To Jonathan Baumbach, writing in Commonweal, the book suggested “Zero Mostel doing an extended imitation of Jimmy Stewart.” “He captures the rhythms of his characters’ speech,” Mr. Baumbach says of Mr. Roth, “but not, I feel, what makes them human.” If the book was written partly in defiance of the strictures of ethnic literature, those very strictures were undoubtedly what made the book anathema to so many reviewers.