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.

Anthony Daniels has said that, thanks to the elite’s rejection of
middle-class respectability, “the poor have been deprived of
any useful model to emulate.” Crouch would agree. Crouch would also
agree that he, McWhorter, Thomas Sowell, et al. have no
influence on the young people (and, sadly, even adults) who
emulate the thug model—chances are, these unfortunate souls read
little cultural commentary. So—if one may ask an awkward
question—who are they writing for? Who do they hope or expect
to change?

In the case of Crouch’s essays, the answers are clear. For one,
he writes to reassure us that however destructive the
authenticity crisis has been—both to behavior patterns and to
ideas about race—it is being quietly but forcefully addressed
in various quarters. For another, he writes to put the so-called
intellectuals on notice: he is tired of condescension, of casual,
unconscious racism, of worn-out P.C. pieties. Since his is an
almost uncomfortably direct approach—“naming names” with
fearless abandon—he has a very real hope of changing the terms
of the battle.

We might cringe to read Crouch’s glowing endorsement of John
Singleton’s Baby Boy, a film about ghetto life that—if it has
not been forgotten, or supplanted by other, exploitative
works—might easily be mistaken for a glorification of that
experience. So be it. The hard fact is that young men and women
heretofore lost to that world will see that film, whereas they
will not scrawl marginalia in The Artificial White Man and
adjust their activities or aspirations accordingly. Crouch’s
celebration of Baby Boy—which handily demonstrates the
degrading futility of “thug life”—is a dart directed at
complacency of any color. And it is a reminder that lives are
deeply affected by pop cultural influences, for better or for
worse—while, well out of sight, conservatives squawk and liberals crow.

Crouch’s essays on literature (“Segregated Fiction Blues”) and
popular film (“Blues in More Than One Color”) show most vividly
the sway that pop culture holds over our conversations about race
and authenticity. It may be difficult to swallow, but Quentin
Tarantino’s savage movies do more to change and reinforce
popular ideas about race relations than do any ten John
McWhorters:

We have the perpetual theme of miscegenation and partnerships
that cross ethnic and sexual lines, cultures and
traditions… . [Tarantino] is a major force in American art
because of how well he understands the interplay between human
themes that are as old as the species and the omnivorous strength
and weakness of a popular culture that defines itself by
borrowing, by appropriating, by defiling. Above all, no one
understands better than he the many miscegenations that make our
modern world the unprecedented thing that it is.

Whether this is true (“no one understands better” is certainly
pushing it), it gives us a good idea of what Crouch demands from
the culture: an acknowledgment that none of us is purely this or
that, white or black, high or low. Therein lies our
authenticity—not, as
too many believe, in familiarity, in easy,
tired badges of group affiliation. For Crouch, “miscegenation” is
about combination, creation, originality—but not race, really.
Thus, when discussing the failures of modern fiction, he tells
us:

In essence, Hemingway’s dictum of writing about what you know has
become an excuse for avoiding risks. Since Hemingway wrote about
a wide mix of people, some American, some not, it’s clear the
great writer wasn’t advising those who took up his craft to
isolate themselves from the world… . What you know might be
something you took the time and went somewhere to discover.

Spot on. This should be read, too, as an invitation to “know”
something other than what the self-appointed dictators of the
“appropriate,” “sensitive,” or “socially useful” have allowed us.
All one need do is follow Crouch’s example—be honest, risk a
great deal of scorn, and prepare to be genuinely startled by what
reality reveals.