Source of book: I own this.
This book is one of my official choices for Black History Month this year. (You can see the entire list on this page.) The other book I chose this year was The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison - you can read my review of that one here.
Over the last few years, I have been collecting Library of America hardbacks for my own library. Most of these I have found used at library sales, used bookstores, and online. But some of them never seem to come available at a reasonable discount from the cost of a new book (which is not much more than a trade hardback, honestly.) In these cases, I have used my credit card rewards as my “mad money” and purchased a few select volumes new. This is one of those books. It hasn’t been in print for very long (2016), and it is likely purchased by people who actually want to read and own the book, not casual readers, so I suspect most of them have kept their copies rather than reselling.
Albert Murray is one of those names you can’t help but hear from time to time if you are a musician or hang out with them. He was the kind of music critic that was respected across the musical spectrum, from Classical nerds like me, to jazz aficionados, to rock and pop and blues and…well, anyone who took music seriously and cared about its relationship to culture and politics and thought. He was that kind of erudite, thoughtful, perceptive, opinionated, and fascinating writers that you wanted to read whether you agreed with him or not. It didn’t hurt his reputation that he lived for nearly a century, and wrote for so many decades that he felt an integral part of the 20th Century.
Born in 1916, he graduated from Tuskegee along with Ralph Ellison, served in World War Two, and returned to a career of writing and teaching. He wrote everything from novels to political essays to musical criticism. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in 1996, “This is Albert Murray’s century; we just live in it.”
The book I have contains the major essay collections and a few other things. I decided to start with The Omni-Americans because it was the first one (and his first big hit), and also because it seemed to be a good fit for Black History Month.
I did not realize going in that it was an essay collection, not a unified work, so I found it a bit disconnected at first, until I realized that it had been written at different times and with different subjects. It does have a central idea running through it, which will be a recurring idea in this post as well.
I also found myself a bit disoriented at first, simply because it was written to specifically address issues of its time. Published in 1970, soon after the passage of the Civil Rights laws, and during the height of the Black Separatist Movement, it dropped quite a few names and targeted some very specific ideas and people. Since I wasn’t born until later, I didn’t have the visceral understanding of what he was talking about, and had to both stick with the book until things became clearer, and look up some context.
Specifically, I had a jolt when Murray started in on “white liberals” and “social scientists.” Because these white liberals sure sounded more like the white conservatives of my own childhood (1980s) and the social scientists didn’t sound like any social science of any recent date. It took a while to remember that this was written when Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was fairly new, that the Democrats were still pivoting…slowly…in the direction of support for racial justice. And Reagan was still a decade away. This isn’t to say that condescending white liberals don’t exist. But there is certainly a difference between now and 50 years ago.
Social science, too, has come a long way since 1970 - more than half a century ago - and is currently more inclined toward antiracist ideas than justifying segregation the way it used to.
Eventually, I started to understand what he was saying, and realized that he actually sounded a lot like Ibram X. Kendi, and definitely not like, say, Candace Owen. In particular, Murray is pushing back against the Moynihan Report, which blamed black poverty, not on the lack of good jobs available to black men, but on black culture, which it claimed was not patriarchal enough. (Insert laugh track here.) This work of supposed social science has indeed influenced public policy dramatically over the last half century, and can be reliably quoted by literally every smug white male Republican in every discussion of race.
Murray pushes back at this idea in various ways, but essentially with the idea that African-American culture is actually no more pathological than white culture - in fact, it better embodies core American values. The denigration of black culture is just another manifestation of white supremacy, one that sees whiteness as the default, the norm, and everything else as a deviation. Thus, any individual bad outcomes in white culture are dismissed as individual problems, while the same issues outside of white communities are considered the result of the culture. (And yes, this is pretty much the exact same point that Ibram X. Kendi makes in How to be an Antiracist.
There are other targets in the book, some of which were unexpected, and therefore particularly fascinating. Murray was no fan of the Black Separatist Movement. For one thing, he felt that it essentially did the white supremacists’ work for them - it segregated. For another, he pointed out - and he is absolutely right about this - black Americans are Americans. Full stop. There really isn’t such thing as white and black in the racial or genetic sense. Most black Americans have a lot of European heritage in their DNA, and a lot of “white” Americans have DNA showing African roots. America isn’t black and white, but just a bunch of shades of brown and beige. (He quotes Duke Ellington’s work for that one.)
Just to illustrate this, my ancestors came to North America in the late 1800s. Which is literally a couple hundred years after Murray’s ancestors came here. He is twice as “American” as I am, if roots to the land count at all. I am the newcomer, who should have to defend whether I have the right to be here. (Murray points out that white immigrants, even recent ones, haven’t had to defend their place in our society. It’s really all about skin color, not heritage, genetics, or time here in America.)
Murray also takes on “protest fiction,” even some of the works of James Baldwin and Richard Wright. This too was unexpected, although his criticism is nuanced and his general respect for both of those authors is included in his criticism. He is less generous to a few now-forgotten authors, who he accuses of writing minstrel shows for white folks to laugh at.
Along the way, Murray makes a passionate case for the idea that American culture is inseparable from black culture. Particularly in music, but also in folklore, in courage, in the longing for freedom, and the resourcefulness we admire. While music is not the focus of this book, the way he writes about the blues makes me eager to read his other books on that subject.
I’ll also mention his subtitle, which I think explains what he is trying to do throughout the book:
The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy.
I enjoyed reading this enough that I wrote down nearly two pages of notes. I’ll try to do justice to the book, but I really recommend reading it for yourself. And perhaps supporting the Library of America’s project of keeping the works of notable American authors in print for posterity.
The introduction has some real gems.
But the United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. There are white Americans and black Americans. But any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another. Thus the title The Omni-Americans is among other things an attempt to restate the problem formulated by the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders by suggesting that the present domestic conflict and upheaval grows out of the fact that in spite of their common destiny and deeper interests, the people of the United States are being misled by misinformation to insist on exaggerating their ethnic differences. The problem is not the existence of ethnic differences, as is so often assumed, but the intrusion of such differences into areas where they do not belong. Ethnic differences are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity.
The first essay itself starts off with a reference to Thomas Mann (he is showing up in a lot of books I have read lately, for some reason), about how history is a mythology - we decide where it “begins” and what matters to us. (Hence the furor over the 1619 Project - it challenges a certain white supremacist myth.) Murray insists that most of the “origin” dates for the United States miss the foundations of national character, which he believes draw from the indigenous peoples of North America and the enslaved every much as from any white source.
In other words, how far back into the past one goes in order to establish the beginnings of one’s own tradition or cultural idiom is not only relative but even at best is also, on close inspection, very likely to be downright arbitrary and quite in accordance with some specific functional combination of desirable skills and attitudes in terms of which one wishes to project oneself.
This essay mentions Constance Rourke quite a bit as well, and favorably. As Murray notes, she did not confuse the national character with the myths of white supremacy.
Quite the contrary, her image of The American is a composite that is part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro.
The core argument of this particular essay is that black Americans more fully embody the American spirit than white heroes. Murray lists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass as particularly meritorious - and quintessentially American. I have to agree with that. He also points out that white immigrants have, by virtue of their color, been able to become “American” in the sense of acceptance by bigots. And many in my experience, unfortunately, turned right around and became bigots themselves. (Seriously, the children of Greek and Italian immigrants are some of the most xenophobic people I know.)
No one can deny that in the process many somewhat white immigrants who were so unjustly despised elsewhere not only discover a social, political, and economic value in white skin that they were never able to enjoy before but also become color-poisoned bigots.
And also this:
White Anglo-Saxon Protestants do in fact dominate the power mechanisms of the United States. Nevertheless, no American whose involvement with the question of identity goes beyond the sterile category of race can afford to overlook another fact that is no less essential to his fundamental sense of nationality no matter how much white folklore is concocted to obscure it: Identity is best defined in terms of culture, and the culture of the nation over which the white Anglo-Saxon power elite exercises such exclusive political, economic, and social control is not all-white by any measurement ever devised. American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other. And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society.
The next section takes on the Moynihan Report. I already mentioned this, but did want to quote a couple of lines.
It charts Negro unemployment, but not once does it suggest national action to crack down on discrimination against Negroes by labor unions. Instead, it insists that massive federal action must be initiated to correct the matriarchal structure of the Negro family!
Yeah, don’t look at the systemic racism. Just blame the family structure. Murray goes on:
Even if one takes this point at face value, nowhere does Moynihan explain what is innately detrimental about matriarchies. In point of fact, there is nothing anywhere in the report that indicates that Moynihan knows anything at all either about matriarchies in general or about the actual texture of Negro family relationships in particular. And if his sophomoric theories about father figures were not being applied to black people, they would no doubt be laughed out of any snap course in undergraduate psychology. They most certainly would be questioned by any reasonably alert student of history and literature. Was Elizabethan or Victorian England a matriarchy? What about the Israel of Golda Meir? No father figure ranks above that of epic hero, and yet how many epic heroes issue from conventional families?
Indeed. And yet this patronizing tripe dominates the thinking of so many whites - particularly conservatives, but liberals too. I could quote the whole essay, but here is some more:
As for Moynihan’s glib but predictably popular notions about the emasculation of the Negro male, not only do they have all the earmarks of the white American male’s well-known historical trait of castrating black males by any means but the report’s own statistics on illegitimate births among Negroes would seem to contradict any neat theories about the cycle of black female dominance at the very outset. For if males are generally emasculated and the women are well-established matriarchs, it is very curious, to say the least, that it is the women who get stuck with the illegitimate children and most of the problems of raising them while the men run loose. There was a time when you could bag Negro males for being diseased rapists. Moynihan now represents them in terms of complete emasculation and, as his figures on child-birth show, prodigious promiscuity at the same time.
The fact of the matter is that Moynihan’s figures provide for more evidence of male exploitation of females than of females henpecking males.
And there’s more:
But then if Negro males were as thoroughly emasculated as the Moynihan consensus insists they are, there would be no current racial crisis. White people would not feel so hysterically insecure about the resentment of those whom they are convinced have lost their manhood. White men would not feel that they needed a lynch mob to take revenge on one uppity Negro. White policemen would not go berserk at the slightest sign of black resistance. White teachers in Harlem would be able to handle Negro pupils at least as well as the great majority of Negro teachers have always handled them elsewhere. Nor would white people ever have felt the need to enact or defend any laws against interracial marriages.
I would love to quote more. Murray expands his argument to social scientists who follow the same route, giving a “scientific” veneer to white supremacist myths. He sees social science misused this way to be more dangerous than open bigotry - the scientist sees him or herself as “free of bias.”
Nor should his lack of concern with consequences be mistaken for scientific objectivity. When the technician undertakes any research project without having become thoroughly familiar with its practical context and with the implications of his underlying thesis, his action does not represent the spirit of scientific inquiry at all. It is the very embodiment of traditional piety. And it permits him to substantiate the insidious speculations and malevolent preconceptions of the white status quo as readily as it allows him to do anything else.
And then he goes for the jugular. Murray is, obviously, well read, and he starts going down a list of significant works of literature of the 20th Century - American and European - that point out the moral bankruptcy of contemporary white culture. The lauded giants of literature have no issue tearing the mask off. But then everything changes when it comes to black culture, right?
As soon as any issue involving Negroes arises, however, most American social science theorists and technicians, the majority of whom are nothing if not Marx-Freud oriented, seem compelled to proceed as if Negroes have only to conform more closely to the behavior norms of the self-same white American middle class that writers like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson had already dissected and rejected long before the left wing political establishment of the nineteen thirties made it fashionable for even the average undergraduate to do so. Somehow or other, the minute the social science technician becomes aware of Negroes having fun “stomping at the Savoy” and enjoying luxuries (of say, Cadillacs) in spite of bad housing and low incomes and injustice, he begins to insist that they should cut out the apathy and escapism and join the all-American rat race - blithely ignoring the fact that there are in almost every Negro community domestic servants and relatives and friends of domestic servants who often have infinitely more first-hand experience with and inside information concerning the social structure and the existential texture of white “middle class” life in the United States than is likely to be represented in any survey. In fact, it may well be that few psychiatrists have either more intimate contact with or more functional understanding of the effects suffered by white people from trying to keep up with the Joneses - or with the whims of Madison Avenue.
Indeed. Just one more from this section.
In point of fact, however, slavery and oppression may well have made black people more human and more American while it has made white people less human and less American. Anyway, Negroes have as much reason to think so as to think otherwise. It is the political behavior of black activists, not that of norm-calibrated Americans, that best represents the spirit of such constitutional nor-ideals as freedom, justice, equality, fair representation, and democratic processes. Black Americans, not Americans devoted to whiteness, exemplify the open disposition toward change, diversity, unsettled situations, new structures and experience, that are prerequisite to the highest levels of citizenship. Black not white or even somewhat white Americans display the greatest willingness to adjust to the obvious consequences of those contemporary innovations in communication and transportation facilities whose networks have in effect shrunk the world to one pluralistic community in which the most diverse people are now neighbors. It is Negroes, not the median of the white population, who act as if the United States is such a world in miniature. It is the non-conforming Negro who now acts like the true descendent of the Founding Fathers - who cries, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and who regards taxation without representation as tyranny. It is the norm-oriented white American who becomes the rednecked progeny of the Red Coats, and yells, “Disperse, ye rebels.” It is the white American who, in the name of law and order, now sanctions measures (including the stock piling of armor piercing weapons to be used against American citizens) that are more in keeping with the objectives of a police state than those of an open society.
So much good stuff in there. From the “welfare queens in Cadillacs” thing - 10 years before Reagan used it as a dog whistle - to the advocacy for voting rights to the devastating psychological effects of competitive materialism.
The next section is all about the “Paleface fables” that many white people like to tell themselves about brown skinned people.
It seems altogether likely that white people in the United States will continue to reassure themselves with black images derived from the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology so long as segregation enables them to ignore the actualities. They can afford such self-indulgence only because they carefully avoid circumstances that would require a confrontation with their own contradictions. Not having to suffer the consequences of sloppy thinking, they can blithely obscure any number of omissions and misinterpretations with no trouble at all.
Another passage made me think about the Ferguson protests and how they were met with military weapons and cops losing their shit on live television.
The compulsions nourished by the folklore of white supremacy seem to be such that white Americans are as yet unable to realize that they themselves are obviously far more impressed by their own show of brute force than black insurgents ever seem to be. They still do not realize that what they actually see on television during all of the demonstrations and, as the saying goes, civil disruptions is not a herd of wall-eyed black natives cringing before white authority. What they see are heavily armed, outraged, and slaughter-prone white policemen and soldiers smoldering with rage and itching to perpetrate a massacre, confronting Negroes who are behaving as if the whole situation were a farce and a carnival but who also have time to grant television interviews in which there is as much snap-course social science jargon as street-corner hip talk.
I mean, anyone who watches the line of black women calmly standing in front of armored vehicles, while a white cop shrieks “Bring it, you fucking animals!” has to be struck by which group is acting the most “civilized” and which is throwing a juvenile, racist tantrum. By far the best argument for police reform is footage of how the police have acted over the last, well…and now we have cell phones to show what black people have been telling the rest of us all our lives.
Next is a section entitled “The Blues Idiom,” and it too has a plethora of great lines. I particularly like the point that the American caste system isn’t objectionable because it deprives people of necessities (although it does that sometimes), but because it forces an intolerable lifestyle on those lower down the hierarchy. Here is how Murray puts it.
Certainly the struggle for political and social liberty is nothing if not a quest for freedom to choose one’s own way or style of life. Moreover, it should be obvious that there can be no such thing as human dignity and nobility without a consummate, definitive style, pattern, or archetypical image. Economic interpretations of history notwithstanding, what activates revolutions is not destitution (which most often leads only to petty thievery and the like) but intolerable systems and methods - intolerable styles of life.
You can apply this to any and all of the groups that are now forcing social change - minorities, women, LGBTQ people, and so on. Being expected to take on the role of second-class humans is an intolerable style of life, and revolutions are ongoing.
Murray goes on to argue that the blues are an inherently revolutionary musical expression, affirming the pain of life while fighting against it. This might be my favorite quote from the book:
As for the blues, they affirm not only U.S. Negro life in all of its arbitrary complexities and not only life in America in all of its infinite confusions, they affirm life and humanity itself in the very process of confronting failures and existentialistic absurdities. The spirit of the blues moves in the opposite direction from ashes and sackcloth, self-pity, self-hatred, and suicide.
And also the obvious:
Distinctive as it is, U.S. Negro music, like U.S. Negro life, is, after all, or rather first of all, also inseparable from life in the United States at large.
This section too has strong words against the kind of social science that denigrates the culture of black Americans, and focuses on “deprivation” rather than the richness. And, on a very related note, these social scientists
[C]elebrate the very features of American life that the greatest artists and intellectuals have always found the most highly questionable if not downright objectionable. But come to think of it, what usually seems to matter most in all findings and evaluations made by American social science survey technicians are indices of material affluence and power. In fact, sometimes it seems that even the most comprehensive social science assessments are predicated upon some indefinite but ruthlessly functional theology involving the worship of wealth and force. In any case, it almost always turns out that whoever has acquired money and power - by any means whatsoever - is assumed to be blessed with everything else, including the holiest moral disposition, the richest sense of humor, creative genius, and impeccable taste.
In a nutshell, this IS white Evangelical “theology.” Those with wealth and power are assumed to be “godly.” Money, power, and privilege are worshiped, and those who lack them are viewed as less than godly. And that is how you get Donald Trump, and all his ill-gotten wealth, being worshiped by white Evangelicals, despite standing -personally and politically - for the polar opposite of Jesus Christ.
The next big section of essays is entitled “The Elusive Black Image,” and looks mostly at portrayals of black people in media, in books, and popular perception. First, he takes a look at Harlem, the epicenter of black culture in the 1920s, with an amazing literary, poetic, musical, and artistic movement that gave us so many riches. (You can find plenty of posts on this blog about books that came from the Harlem Renaissance.) In response to the white supremacist myths about black neighborhoods, Murray describes the vibrant communities you can find across the country - and especially in Harlem. Having lived in both minority-dominated neighborhoods and in whiter ones, I think Murray has a good point.
As James Weldon Johnson noted years ago, not very many New Yorkers in other parts of town seem to have as much involvement with their immediate neighborhoods as do the people of Harlem. Nor is the Harlemite’s involvement a mark of oppression. It is a mark of openness. Most other New Yorkers seem to spend so much time hustling from one interior to another that ntey don’t ever seem to see very much of their affluent and antiseptic neighborhoods except on the run, and they seem to see even less of the neighbors whose status locations they pay such high rents to share.
This is all too true. Our current neighborhood has some good people in it, but there are also some really obnoxious Trumpers with obscene and racist flags they love to parade around the streets (particularly before the election), and many more are either in their houses at all times, or at work. It is definitely a contrast with other places I have lived. I like our place, which has enough space indoors and out for our family, but I kind of miss the community of the more minority dominated neighborhoods.
Here again, Murray calls out the color system and the behavior of white immigrants - who have always been favored by our laws.
The system of racial exclusion in employment forces most people in Harlem to function far below their minimum potential even as it enables recently arrived white immigrants with no better qualifications than Harlemites to exceed their wildest dreams. Not even the most degenerate rituals of the South are more infuriating to multigeneration U.S. Negroes than the pompous impertinence of those European refugees who were admitted to the U.S. on preferential quotas, who benefit by preferential treatment because of the color system, and who then presume to make condescending insinuations about the lack of initiative, self-help, and pride among Negroes.
In the next essay, Murray looks at the arbitrary division between “white” and “no-white.” I admit, I use this language on this blog, although I have yet to find a better way of describing the color line. I have to essentially use the language of white supremacy to describe white supremacy. It’s a quandary I do not have a solution for, unfortunately. Anyway, here is what Murray has to say about it.
As for U.S. Negroes being non-white, nothing could be further from scientific accuracy. Indeed, no classification was ever less accurate. By any definition of race, even the most makeshift legal one, most native-born U.S. Negroes, far from being non-white, are in fact part-white. They are also by any meaningful definition of culture, part-Anglo-Saxon, and they are overwhelmingly Protestant. And not only are they more often than not Southerners, they tend to be Southern aristocrats!
Indeed, most of the “white blood” in black Americans is from…yep…those rapist aristocrats.
Another thing from this book that I really want to remember is the section on the black middle class - which existed even during slavery. And in particular, Murray’s epithet for the social scientist sorts who seem to view black people and culture as “exotic.” He calls them “Safari” scientists. Which is perfect.
I also loved the essay on the condescending view that black people are too trusting, too “simple” - which of course means that the holders of that view are either self-absorbed or not particularly bright. It’s the same mistake as thinking that Native Americans lack a sense of humor. Just because the joke goes over your head doesn’t mean it wasn’t funny.
At this very moment, for instance, Negroes have thrown the whole white world, as the saying goes, into a state of shock, confusion, and almost suicidal exasperation with a simple little black magic trick like insisting that the Constitution is really nothing more or less than the Golden Rule. The best white minds, as the IQ experts say, are having trouble figuring that one out! And yet there are intellectuals who insist that power and intelligence go hand in hand. Perhaps such is the case. But there are at least a few Negroes who have their own ideas about the keys to the handcuffs. These have always insisted that while white supremacy may sometimes be devious, it is not really predicated upon intelligence but on ruthlessness.
That last line is amazing. Exploitation, hierarchies, and so on, really are just ruthlessness, not intelligence. Europeans didn’t conquer the world because they were smarter or better - they merely had the bigger guns and the ruthlessness to enslave and exterminate.
The essay on exploitive literature was interesting, but I will admit that I had a bit of trouble getting into the specifics, having never read the mostly forgotten books he cites. A half century does tend to weed out the dreck, or at least most of it. The books by white authors that Murray cites with approval - Faulkner, for example - have stood up to time pretty well, and for the reasons that Murray notes: they have good human characters, compelling stories, and great writing. And the reason the dreck novels ultimately failed is because they have caricatures, moralization, and flat writing. (The books, by the way, are by both white and black authors.) I should mention that Murray also uses the entire phrase of an old expression: “Doggone my cats.” While it may have become just another minced oath version of “damn,” “doggone” didn’t originate that way, and it is fun to see Murray use the real thing. Also, he is completely correct that the talking animals in Joel Chandler Harris stories are a heck of a lot more human than the humans found in the books he describes.
The one novel by a white author he roasts that I have actually heard of is William Stryon’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. In that case, he called out Stryon’s emasculation of Turner, and his reduction of him in too many cases to being a “safe Negro” - one that won’t make white people uncomfortable. I think Murray sums up the problem really well.
The most fundamental shortcoming of almost all fiction written by white Americans about their black fellow countrymen is also almost always the most obvious. It is, given the deepseated racism of most Americans, also the most predictable. In almost every instance, the white American writer starts out either unable or unwilling to bring himself to make a truly intimate and profoundly personal identification with the black protagonist whose heroism he himself has chosen to delineate and whose sense of life he has elected to impersonate, if not emulate.
This is also - as Dorothy Sayers pointedly said - the problem in the way many male writers write female characters. You have to have a profoundly personal identification with a character to make it come alive. Sayers herself, asked how she wrote such believable male characters given her upbringing almost exclusively among women, retorted that she wrote them as humans.
Murray also notes that part of the problem white writers have in writing black characters, is that they do not understand history accurately. They overestimate traits of white people, good and bad. And thus, they overestimate the comprehensiveness of oppression.
After all, Elkins, perhaps too impressed by Nazi cold bloodedness, oversells the psychological damage of oppression on Negroes while making next to nothing of what the never relaxed slave laws, patrol systems, and disciplinary cruelty did to white people. The slave owners and drivers like many present day police were not simply high-handed and callous, they were mostly always on the edge of hysteria from the fear of black uprisings.
Again, you can see this in various videos of police shootings, of militia types, and so on. There is a genuine terror of black people apparent. I can say from our family’s brief flirtation with prepperism that that movement is also driven by an irrational terror of black people, certain that if society fails, they will need massive arsenals to defend themselves. Also so great in this passage is the mention of the psychological damage that white supremacy has done to whites. One of the worst parts about the Trump Era has been seeing this unveiled, seeing the psychological and spiritual damage done, the destruction of empathy and compassion, the stunted thinking processes, the searing of the conscience.
Perhaps the most fascinating and definitely the most nuanced chapter in this section is the one on James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. All three are now recognized as brilliant and important writers. Murray, however, has some criticisms for Baldwin and Wright, and more praise for Ellison. I will admit that I have not yet read Native Son (I read Black Boy/American Hunger instead, which is more autobiographical than fictional) and I haven’t read the specific essays by Baldwin cited by Murray, so I can’t entirely comment on how valid the criticism is. I can say that Murray has a fair point that both Baldwin and Wright moved to Paris and took potshots from a distance. While Murray might have been a bit prejudiced in favor of Ellison because they went to college together, I think he also identifies the reasons that Invisible Man is a phenomenal book. Murray ties this to the need for novelists to understand the ambivalence of human nature. There is good in bad people, and bad in good people, and great writing is able to convey this complexity. And also with the complexity of society and culture, which is and has always been a mix good and bad.
And then there is a crucial ambivalence in his eternal and even infernal involvement with the ironies of antagonistic cooperation! He is all for achieving the good society, the salubrious situation, the excellent environment. But at the same time he insists that the beautiful community does not automatically produce either beautiful people who stay good or sweetness and light that lasts forever afterwards. Not only this, but he actually seems to be more excited about the fact that sorry situations, ugly communities, trying circumstances, and impossible environments, along with whatever else they do, of their very nature produce not only good people but incomparable heroes who come from the awful darkness but bring sweetness and light.
Very related to this is the problem of oversimplifying cause and effect when it comes to circumstances. I think a key insight here is that wealth and power do not make one a better person - it just protects you from the consequences of being bad. The reason our prisons are overwhelmingly filled with impoverished people has nothing to do with them being worse and everything to do with the fact that wealth gives you a free pass.
If you ignore this and reduce man’s whole story to a series of sensational but superficial news items and editorial complaints and accusations, blaming all the bad things that happen to your characters on racial bigotry, you imply that people are primarily concerned with only certain political and social absolutes. You imply that these absolutes are the sine qua non of all human fulfillment. And you also imply that there are people who possess these political and social absolutes, and that these people are on better terms with the world as such and are consequently better people. In other words, no matter how noble your mission, when you oversimplify the reasons why a poor or an oppressed man lies, cheats, steals, betrays, hates, murders, or becomes an alcoholic or addict, you imply that well-to-do, rich, and powerful people don’t do these things. But they do.
Murray ties the essay together at the end with another mention of the blues.
The blues with no aid from existentialism have always known that there were no clear-cut solutions for the human situation.
The third section is entitled “Getting it Together,” and takes a look at movements such as Black Separatism and the “Return to Africa” idea. I think he makes some great points here, but to a degree, I understand that I am not his audience, and my opinion as a white man is not particularly relevant to the discussion at all. Because of this, I am disinclined to opine about the different approaches to living as a black person in America.
That said, a number of the passages spoke to me in a more universal way, in a way that resonated with my own life experience.
First is Murray’s observation regarding culture. My own experience in Cultural Fundamentalism was one of an attempt to resurrect a mythical past culture - an attempt that sounds a lot like how Murray describes the quest for “African” culture.
Neither African nor American culture seems ever to have been, as most polemicists perhaps unwittingly assume, a static system of racial conventions and ornaments. Culture of its very essence is a dynamic, ever accommodating, ever accumulating, ever assimilating environmental phenomenon, whose components (technologies, rituals, and artifacts) are emphasized, de-emphasized, or discarded primarily in accordance with pragmatic environmental requirements, which of course are both physical and intellectual or spiritual.
This is why trying to go back to a past culture - at least in the way I experienced it - is often more a cover for reinstating certain hierarchies of the past. Which is why the Culture Wars™ of the religious right quickly gave way to open white nationalism once Trump came along and said the quiet part out loud. Culture always evolves, always changes, and always assimilates - the way the Roman Empire appropriated Greek culture is just one example, as is the way that black culture has influenced every corner of so-called “American” culture.
Murray also points on that African Americans were far from the only people to have their culture stripped from them. He points out that people like my ancestors lost their native tongues too - nobody in my family speaks German or Swedish anymore. And we don’t eat lutfisk either, thank goodness. To quote the title, we all became in some way, those Omni-Americans, easily recognizable as Americans, not as Europeans, or as Germans or English or Italian.
In any case, that the black man was the victim of brutal treatment goes without saying, but how much of his African culture he would have or could have kept intact had he come over as a free settler is a question that should be discussed against the fact that the pressure on “free white Americans” to conform is (as non-Protestants, for example, know very well) greater than is generally admitted. The question of African survival should also be discussed in full awareness of the fact that the dynamics of American culture are such that the average American citizen is a cultural pluralist.
And that’s exactly it. Living here in California, we are all cultural pluralists, even the dudebros with their Confederate flags. We all eat tacos and avocados and Chinese take-out and know how to say “La Jolla” and sing along to “My Girl” and “La Bamba” and have a bottle of Sriracha in our fridges and eat corn on the cob and do yoga and our cities and states have indigenous names…and you can see this pluralism absolutely everywhere you look. To truly embrace an American identity is to embrace pluralism and multiculturalism.
Another essay in this section is about Murray’s native Alabama, and gives a well-reasoned defense of how black Alabamans have fought back against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist elements. Theirs is a deeply practical and detail-oriented approach, and, as we have seen in other Southern states, very effective on the whole. Which is one reason so many Southern whites are freaking out about “Critical Race Theory.” They realize they are losing the war for hearts and minds when it comes to racism. I thought Murray’s description of the issues involved in teaching accurate history was particularly good.
Anyway, when involved Mobilians get down to specifics about black heritage they are likely to begin not with self-rejection but rather by saying that the special displays and programs of Negro History Week were never enough to remedy the omissions and distortions in the books used in regular courses in history and social studies. Then, in response to inquiries about offerings presently under consideration at the local school board, they summarize as follows: They do not want black heritage courses to be either extracurricular or elective. They not only want them required but required of all pupils. They do not want them restricted to “black” schools or to black pupils in “white” schools because they are convinced that white pupils need such studies even more urgently than Negroes - who in truth already absorb at least a smattering of black heritage from Ebony, Jet, and other national Negro publications.
Nice reference there to the precursor to Black History Month, of course. And I very much agree. I am proud of my home state of California for enacting a requirement that all high school students take an ethnic studies course in high school. My wife and I have worked hard to ensure that our own children get a balanced and accurate view of history, of course, but all students - particularly the white ones - would benefit from this. In the next essay, which includes a bold vision for black studies in education, Murray expands on his theme of how accurate and complete education would look.
What students are now proclaiming is that black is beautiful and that it is beautiful to be black but that bigoted white historians and vicious white image makers in general have been distorting the beauties and denying the glories of blackness all these years. In other words, what the students are demanding is not more courses in the origin, development, and extent of black wretchedness. On the contrary, they first of all expect to find in the courses they are demanding historical clues to the pathological condition of white Americans. Their frequent references to the sickness, insecurity, and brutality of white Americans make that clear. Further, all the catch phrases about black identity, black power, and black pride make it even clearer that they expect the history they are demanding to reveal a magnificent, hither-to sneakily obscured tradition of black heroism and misattributed achievement.
A few observations here. First, it is no accident that the blitz of laws to muzzle teachers from talking about race hits hard on “don’t make white people uncomfortable.” Of course they are defensive. There is a hell of a lot that is pathological in white America - Trump has made that clear. There is deep disease, insecurity, hate, brutality, and outright evil that is being unveiled. And a lot of white people are absolutely losing their shit about it. Second, Murray is right that for centuries the heroism and achievements of black people have been hidden - or, in many cases, white males take credit for what blacks have done just like they did for women. I am also reminded of the current student uprisings about LGBTQ issues. The students are not down with this whitewashing.
There are just a couple more things I want to mention. First is that I love that Murray mentions in an aside that the term “Uncle Tom” is unfortunate, because the character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is anything but a traitor to his race and cause. The “real” Uncle Tom is a noble person who refuses to compromise his values or his conscience, no matter what his white enslavers demand. That Simon Legree pretty well shits himself and beats Tom to death in a paroxysm of fury is proof enough that Tom cannot and has not been broken. How anyone could read the book and think that Tom has betrayed anyone is beyond me. I am glad to see that Murray agrees with that assessment - unsurprising since he loved and read literature.
There is a final epilogue in the book, which is actually a stand-alone essay published in Partisan Review. It hits a few of the themes already discussed, and thus fits with the general idea of the collection, but it is clearly separate from most of the other essays in the book. One paragraph is particularly great as a concise summary of a central idea in the book, so I will end with that.
Most white Americans are obviously and often all too unconsciously committed to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacy. The narcissism implied by such widely used terms as non-white and assimilation (not to be confused with desegregation or integration) is as unmistakable as it is casual. The findings and categories of social science are as irrelevant to the civil rights of native-born U.S. Negroes as to those of ignorant hillbillies and newly arrived immigrants. But somehow most white Americans seem to feel that white-oriented statistical surveys indicate whether or not Negroes are eligible for things that the Constitution already guarantees. The Department of Labor, for instances, issues the highly questionable Moynihan Report which explains the problem of Negro status in terms of the abnormal structure of Negro family life at a time when Negroes themselves are conducting nationwide demonstrations and riots against segregation in education and housing, discrimination in employment, and police racism! On principle, white liberals and radicals give or “grant” sympathetic assistance to the civil rights movement, to be sure; but few Negroes are convinced that this indicates a comprehensive commitment to equality or even represents a truly intimate intellectual involvement with the fundamental issues of citizenship in an open, pluralistic society….What U.S. Negroes themselves want, it should be easy enough to see, is their share of the material benefits of U.S. life - and they intend to absent enough smugness to get it.
So there you have it. Murray was one in a long and continuing tradition of black writers who seek to turn the questions around and ask, “what is wrong with white Americans that makes them so pathological?” It is a question I have had to ask myself a lot in the Trump Era, as so many people I know or are related to have torn off the mask and openly embraced hate. On the plus side, I suppose, it is now easy to see what the issues truly are. There is no more hiding behind weasel words.
Murray says proudly along with James Baldwin that the destiny of white Americans are inseparable from the destiny of black Americans - we are black, brown, and beige, and more American than we are anything else. No matter how much we want to think otherwise, we are the Omni-Americans, pluralistic by nature and necessity, and our fates are inseparable.
I will say, I am looking forward to reading his books about music and the blues very much. But this was a great introduction to a great thinker and writer.
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