Authenticity blues.(Book Review)

Stanley Crouch The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity. Basic Civitas, 244 pages, $24

Stanley Crouch's essays on race, masculinity, authenticity and the arts are generally sober and robust. They are also shot through with jarring colloquialisms and demotic imagery. On page one of his collection The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity, we are told that some of Crouch's subjects will be "spanked." Of novelists guilty of lazy or platitudinous treatment of race, he says that they are "[w]alking beneath a flag of white underwear stained fully yellow by liquefied fear." Crouch's engagement of low, folk, and pop culture is heralded by titles like "Baby Boy Blues," "Segregated Fiction Blues," and "Blues for the Artificial White Man."

That alone will raise the hackles of some readers. And though Crouch does not consistently convince us of his offbeat positions, his fusion of "low" subject matter with high intelligence achieves a kind of exhilarating effect. Reading his essays is like having a cant-free conversation with a clever, passionate, albeit frustrating, friend. Given Crouch's overarching themes, it is the right sort of talk with just the right sort of mind.

Little in Crouch's writing marks him as a "conservative" in the usual sense. Few conservatives could stomach, much less write, a seventy-page paean to the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino's radical racial vision ("Blues in More Than One Color"). Yet Crouch places himself in the ranks of black conservatives, like John McWhorter, who denounce the cancer of barbarism growing in black popular culture. He is vocally disgusted by hip-hop music's "neo-Sambo ... mugging or scowling" with "gold teeth, drop-down pants, and tasteless jewelry." He bravely chastises producers and "artists" who peddle the same "bullying, hedonistic buffoons" D. W. Griffith portrayed in Birth of a Nation.

The spark and originality of Crouch's criticism--what will make it impossible to ignore him--is that he takes the customary disgust of conservative critics and goes it one better. He derides the purveyors of crudity because they are, after all, guilty, but he sees the real danger in a wider cultural trend, one more to do with "authenticity anxiety" than race. That trend is the belief, slipped into circulation by the liberal intellectual elite, that what is most "real" is what is most base, most closely allied to the loutish ways of the lower orders.

In his title essay, "Blues for the Artificial White Man," Crouch lifts up a rock of intellectual legitimacy to show us the damp creep of ugly, predatory neuroses beneath it. What he inspects, with equal parts revulsion and fascination, is David Shields's Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season. Shields, a white suburbanite who teaches writing at the University of Washington, is infatuated with Gary Payton, a black basketball player (star of the Seattle SuperSonics when the book was written) known both for his athletic skill and nasty "trash talk." For Shields, Payton is a rebel against Shield's "social frame ... a supposedly vacuous geniality that the writer battles by being as rude and obnoxious in public as he can, making the teenage subtext of his own life clear." Shields practically deifies Payton for his very worst attributes.

Crouch is appalled by this "immaturity ... the result of a willful adolescence, not the helpless hell-raising of a person so poorly educated or underdeveloped that experience is never assessed beyond the perspectives of a teenage boy." In simpler terms: Grow up! You of all people ought to know better. Unfortunately, many intelligent people seem not to know better, and so negative attitudes are reinforced, to wildly destructive effect--while the "intellectuals" play-act, like Marie Antoinette at Rambouillet, at being underclass types.