An essay from Stanley Crouch addresses how the election of Barack Obama should affect America’s conversation on race in a new way. He warns against romanticizing Barack Obama as “special” because he has skills and abilities not stereotypically associated with African Americans.
Referring to this “African-American Experience” stereotype, Stanley Crouch writes:
| “This began with the writings of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, both of whom painted essentially one-dimensional portraits of black experience that were determined to shame the white people into removing black people from the limitless house of pain reserved for them. Racism made black people ashamed of their hair, their skin color, their lips and noses, their supposed intellectual inferiority. Were there truly bad things that had been done to black people and continued to be done and are still, in some ways, done to this very day? Yes and no.
Once I got my own bearings, I became as frustrated with black people who were so enraged by liberals trying to be condescendingly sympathetic to their supposed plight of psychological scars, humiliations, and ongoing ass whippings that they went to far in the other direction. Equally smug, they pretended that, except for a couple of redneck knuckleheads here and there, black American life had just been one endlessly wonderful set of evenings dancing to Duke Ellington, eating the cuisine invented by plantation slaves, watching a succession of black boxing champions beat the bull dookey out of white men, and savoring the unique black American expression of timeless and specific but universal variations on the national ethos at its best. … The simple truth is so old that it seems forever brand new. Human being do not know—and have never ever known—how to be anything other than human beings and, I might add but am quite sorry to say, there is nothing that ever holds them free of that reality. When John Lewis recently said that with the election of Barack Obama we had seen a non-violent revolution, he was exactly right. Not the overthrow the nation that we had been promised, not the slaughter of the white people, not the Third World gathering of the troops that would reset the clocks of the planet. … So these fake and pretentious versions of American reality… are some of the things that we have to deal and do away with to the best of our abilities.” |
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