Opinion | I Did Not Feel the Need to See People Like Me on TV or in Books
Within the mid-Nineties I attended a displaying of a documentary about James Baldwin, through which at one level Brief visited Baldwin in France and the 2 of them performed some blues on the piano. I chatted with one of many movie’s contributors afterward, a white girl, and talked about that it had been neat to see Brief within the blues scene. To my reminiscence, she mentioned one thing alongside the strains of, “Yeah, possibly it helped deliver him again to that.” Hmm. Again to it. She appeared to imply that the blues was the place Brief belonged and that his profession doing Cole Porter and Noël Coward had been an act, not the actual him, and maybe even a bit of suspect or regrettable.
It was simply one thing she mentioned in passing, and she or he in all probability assumed that I, as a Black particular person, would agree along with her. However I couldn’t assist pondering that by my studying, I don’t imagine that Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright or Lorraine Hansberry would have seen Brief’s profession in that approach, and Baldwin clearly didn’t. I significantly doubt that anybody ever ventured such a thought of, or to, a Black man with the same profession a technology earlier than Brief’s, Leslie Hutchinson. (He seems to be a mannequin for the Black singer in later episodes of “Downton Abbey.”) Somewhat, I sense the concept that actual Blackness means ever looking for your self in your studying and viewing is a post-1966 factor, to seek advice from what I wrote right here final week.
W.E.B. Du Bois had no such thought. He wrote: “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Throughout the colour line I transfer arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, the place smiling males and welcoming girls glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of night that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of the celebs, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I’ll, and so they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”
Du Bois tailored these “white” works to his personal wants and predilections. Even the bare racism he lived with day by day didn’t lead him to attract a line round “white” issues as one thing alien to his essence. Somewhat, he insisted that these works have been, in actual fact, a part of his self, no matter how wider society noticed that self or how figures like Shakespeare and Aristotle would have seen him.
Du Bois, on this, was regular. At this time I sit with “Succession,” Steely Dan and Saul Bellow, and so they wince not. I see myself in none of them. Sure, Bellow had some nasty moments on race, akin to a gruesomely prurient scene in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” However I’m sorry: I can not let that one scene — and even two — deprive me of the symphonic reaches of “Herzog” and “Humboldt’s Reward.” What they provide, in any case, turns into a part of me together with every part else.
