I'm an intellectual counter-puncher. My big thinks and long writes usually happen when I think someone is wrong about something. But the people who I think are wrong are often very very good at what they do. Better than I am at what I do. They've provoked thought. Just my usual thought is "that isn't quite right."
That's the case with A Little Devil in America. It IS thought provoking. It is a very good read. I highly recommend it even though I think it's wrong about something.
I'm most impressed by the readability of this essay collection. Hanif Abdurraqib (HA) deals with some heavy topics, and takes some difficult to accept positions, but he doesn't hide any of that a a flurry of impenetrable gibberish. He writes plainly, enjoyably, about terrible things and imposing prospects.
The subtitle is "In Praise of Black Performance," and HA hits on some legends: Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Chappelle, Josephine Baker. He also hits on some lesser known but fascinating black performers: magician Ellen Armstrong, pianist Don Shirley, spades players, and, of course, himself.
HA is an avid consumer of pop culture--music, movies, books, chatter--and comes from a very different perspective (black, Muslim, Ohioan, millennial, poet) from me (prosaic, white, ethnic, Catholic, East Coaster, Gen X) that reading his experience of and analysis of cultural touchstones like Aretha Franklin is to experience the joy of commonality and that of difference.
His best moments, in my opinion, are his personal reflections. His memories of a life with again enough of the familiar that I can't help enjoy the feeling of kinship with my fellow city kid, but with enough differences--not just individual differences but differences of kind--to drive home the rift between our two lives. About as good are his immediate reactions to culture: to the sublimity of Aretha or the ephemera of TV commercials, it all gets woven in to a worldview that really lives on the page. Which I seldom see happening in cultural analyses I read.
HA's explicitly political writing here is, unfortunately, not on that level. All too often it's just predictable, unreflective, academic cultural politics.
His discussion of blackface is instructive. Here he dives into the history of Juba, a little-known African American dancer of the 1840s. Juba became famous through being written about by Charles Dickens on his American tour (he was sometimes marketed as Boz's Juba after, "Boz" being Dickens's pen name) and through winning a number of dance challenges, especially those with the Irish-American John Diamond.
The competitiveness of these matches and the amount of attention and betting action they drew resembled boxing matches.
HA is consistently derisory toward Diamond he "stole" African American dance moves, whereas Juba cleverly "mastered" and imitated the Diamond's moves. Juba is an artist. Diamond is a "clog dancer." The equivalent of calling Juba a "cakewalk man."
And of course 1840 being 1840, Diamond danced in blackface, and gets at least his due of abuse from HA for it. He never directly mentions that Juba also danced in blackface and with otherwise white minstrel acts. At least part os his motive was to play the Victor / Victoria game: An undercover black man playing a white man playing a black man.
HA attributes the fact that Diamond and Juba faced off on multiple occasions in the early 1840s to Diamond being foolish and mulish, for which he is repeatedly derided. HA never seems to consider that both dancers, their representatives, and various people involved with the betting action may have been making good money from these Diamond-Juba face-offs.
"There are a lot of things white people get wrong about blackface, but the one I think about is the way they slather the makeup on their faces, as if they've never seen a Black person before, usually pitch black and wildly uneven, or smeared haphazardly over the skin, with no attention to detail."
I can just imagine all the white folks at home taking careful note of this so as to improve the verisimilitude of their next appearance in blackface.
There's a lot of dispute as to the origins of minstrelsy. Some emphasizing connections to European folk theater. Some even pointing out possible African influences. But the strong recent consensus, arising more out of political exigency than historical evidence, figures minstrel performances almost exclusively as a response to contemporary American ideological social tensions.
Regardless of the origins of blackface, there's certainly a jarring quality to it that goes beyond the racial reference, something uncanny. Like Commedia dell'Arte can be. HA has a recurring dream where he is drowning/washing Al Jolson in a clawfoot tub. And I couldn't agree more. And not just because of the racial insensitivity. There's something else about the getup that's . . . repulsive, threatening, awful. (HA talks about this power as well, though he doesn't get much farther than I do in finding the key to it.)
And that's why the blackface is done unrealistically. The performer is not meant to look like a black person, the performer is meant to look like a white person portraying a black person, and doing so unrealistically re-enscribes the racial difference that is purportedly crossed in play. The lack of verisimilitude is a reassurance that this line really can't be crossed. You can only make a pathetic gesture of intent.
And also, the very inhumanness of the depiction presses those uncanny buttons that brings a power to depictions that as often as not lack for any other sort of power.
"This is what they think we look like," is how HA ends this subsection. But he's wrong. That is how we thought we could represent you. And there is an important difference there, not just in tenses.
HA also has a quick go at Rachel Dolezal, the head of the NAACP Spokane local who turned out to not actually be a colored person. HA writes "Most of the black people knew that woman was white from the moment we heard her stumbling through that interview." The whole point of which interview was to challenge her on her racial identity. So most of the black people HA knew knew that Rachel Dolezal wasn't black when they saw the social media post that was headlined with questions about her racial identity. Very precient of them. I'm sorry Hanif, but even white people know that when a member of the mainstream media is openly questioning your purported racial identity that that purported racial identity is false. It takes no special insight.
But the fact remains that a lot of black people HA didn't know apparently took Rachel Dolezal at her word, and elected her President of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some people DID NOT catch on in real time, in spite of how easy HA's friends say it should have been in hindsight. And that fact is far more interesting than the fact that HA's friends can quickly catch the drift of click-bait social media posts.
I'll stop here with picking apart Hanif Abdurraqib's faulty historical analyses. His gifts, really, lie elsewhere. Which I imagine he realizes as well. Most of the political positions he works toward just seem to have been adopted wholesale from the consensus of his social circle, the history, cultural and psychological observations, which he IS good at, all seem to be bent ex post facto to arrive at the political conclusions he has deemed to be safe and acceptable.
Art and culture, even the mere quotidia of getting by in life are all messy processes. which makes history a messy process. And it makes politics messy. All of which we should acknowledge rather than hide or elide or ignore all the mess in service of some cherished narrative that doesn't really stand up in the face of the mess.
Myth is important to A Little Devil in America. And the uses and misuses of myth are obviously apparent to HA.
HA writes about himself: "All of our love has its limits, and it should. I choose to love my people, and their people. But other times, I choose whatever keeps me safe, and that isn't necessarily hate, but it might be if it gives me a comfortable enough distance."
If he had written these words as a self-justification for a middle-class white person who sometimes finds he doesn't really mind a bit of "keeping the black folk down," he couldn't have done better.
He's right: There are limits to our fellow-feeling. There most certainly is a hell down the line from this, and we can't hope to go anywhere else if we combine this limitation with a free hand in editing reality to suit our prejudices. We have to acknowledge and own the mess in common; safety, solidarity, pride and political exigency be damned.
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