Tina Brown plays
the race cardBy GARY KAMIYA
After The New Yorker's much-hyped but remarkably feeble Women's Issue, readers may have groaned when the mag announced yet another "theme" issue -- this time on "Black in America." Fortunately, Tina Brown and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., whose fingerprints are all over this one, have done a far better job than Brown and largely-phantom "guest editor" Roseanne did. Although "Black in America" could use more intellectual zest and evinces a disappointingly homogenous, big-name take on its subject (surprise!) it's a worthy attempt to capture an infinitely complex reality.
The editorial tone of both issues reflects a nuanced version of the prevailing liberal orthodoxies. But "Black in America," though it plays it a bit too safe (the cartoons, by The New Yorker's far-from- multicultural team of artists, dutifully poke fun at schematic white racial lameness, and are uniformly unfunny), is much more coherent. The confused, half-hearted-P.C. tone of the Women's Issue -- caught between rah-rah sincerity, post-'70s weariness and just plain silliness -- derived from the fact that the magazine's editors seemed to lack conviction that feminism, or indeed any ideology, was adequate to describe the state of women in America -- yet couldn't free themselves from its vocabulary. (In future years, New Yorker watchers may remember it as the issue in which appeared the two most embarrassing pieces of prose ever to run in the magazine, Mary Daly's ridiculous memoir and Daphne Merkin's cringe-inspiring article about her spanking predilection.) If "Black in America" is more successful, it's in large part because it carries more editorial self-assurance. With reason: "Blackness" is not an entirely coherent political category, but it resonates more as such in '90s America than "femaleness."
Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the story selection in "Black in America" is its emphasis on what W.E.B. Du Bois called the "talented tenth," the black intellectual, professional, and artistic elite, and the relative scarcity of pieces about the black working class or underclass. Thus, in addition to profiles of major figures like Louis Farrakhan, William Julius Wilson, Clarence Thomas, and Jessie Jackson's wife and family, there are articles on the film star Angela Bassett, on a millionaire stock trader, on basketball star Dennis Rodman, on the first class of black women to graduate from Harvard Law School, and on bestselling author Terry McMillan. Excluding a brutal short story by Sapphire, herself a rising media star, the only stories not about the wealthy and famous are a feature about an all-black small town in Oklahoma and an essay about West Indian blacks.
To be sure, issues pertaining to the less fortunate among American blacks are examined. Gates and political editor Hendrik Hertzberg set the ideological tone for the issue in their introductory essay, in which after acknowledging the achievements of the black middle class they recite the depressingly familiar statistics about crime and poverty in the inner city and call for America to "live up to its nominal creed." And other articles at least touch on the hot-button issues of affirmative action, race versus class, black nationalism.
One can understand the mag's tilt towards gentility (and not just because this is the new, celebrity-obsessed New Yorker). After all, pieces on the lurid pathologies of the underclass have already appeared in The New Yorker (for example, Susan Sheehan's articles about an extended family in the New Haven ghetto). And to dwell on black failure rather than black success might be -- and has been -- perceived as racist.
It's not another crack-dealers-in-the-'hood story that the issue needs, however: it's textured reporting from real lives, from ordinary people. And where is the younger generation? Rap and hip-hop might as well not exist. Lacking this existential and pop-culture ballast, "Black in America" feels a little narrow, even disembodied.
That might be OK if the issue was filled with intellectual fireworks, but it's not. The most challenging piece is Malcolm Gladwell's penetrating examination of why West Indian blacks are seemingly exempt from the prejudice directed against African-Americans. Gates brings his usual intelligence -- subtle, slightly slippery, at times disarmingly confessional -- to his piece on Farrakhan. David Remnick's profile of William Julius Wilson is thought-provoking, and Jeffrey Rosen's sympathetic article on Clarence Thomas, despite its somewhat tendentious conclusion, may finally begin the Justice's rehabilitation. (Whatever one thinks of his politics, the rhetorical demonization of this man has been outrageous.)
But despite these and other strong pieces (Scott Malcomson's feature on the anachronistic all-black Oklahoma town is first-rate, and novelist John Edgar Wideman pulls off with elan the difficult task of defending terminally weird rebound-machine Dennis Rodman), there aren't enough essays here, not enough in-depth engagement with issues. THE explosive issue of the day, affirmative action, is tacitly and in some pieces explicitly supported, but never really put on the table for full debate. There's no discussion of the increasing problematic of mixed-race people who refuse to choose a single ethnic designation, with the concomitant irony of the "one-drop rule" now being invoked by blacks. The race-vs.-class issue is settled a bit too conveniently in favor of race (a result gratifying for middle class black intellectuals). In short, the debates that animate the black intellectual community are muted.
Still, "Black in America" offers a refreshingly intelligent and understated take on a subject too often burdened by emotional and rhetorical excess. And it would be wrong not to mention the two short stories by Ralph Ellison published here for the first time. Raw, filled with the excessive sincerity of youth, lacking in the consummate literary craft evidenced in "Invisible Man," they are nonetheless eloquent early works, deeply touching in their righteous anger, their generosity of spirit, the glimpse they afford us of what would become one of our century's great voices of humanity.