Book Reviews

Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority, by John McWhorter. Gotham Books, 256 pages.

      In his second book, Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority, John McWhorter goes further with his candid discussions on how many blacks, through self-defeating behavior, undermine their own ability to achieve. His work joins other studies that have helped to create a kind of genre for rethinking aspects of the civil rights movement and exposing the excesses that have exemplified so much of the post-civil-rights period.

      Drawing from a theme introduced by W. E. B. Du Bois of a “double consciousness” shared by blacks, McWhorter offers a new interpretation. A great many blacks, he claims, while privately taking responsibility for improving their lives, will, in public, dutifully take on the “mantle of victimhood.” Such blacks feel obligated to propagate the notion that black people cannot rise without the assistance of whites. Thus, it becomes imperative to downplay the improving conditions for blacks to insure that whites do not abandon the black cause.

      Even the black who knows through his own personal experience that his progress is not fettered by whites assumes that whites are keeping other blacks down. This “Janus-faced double consciousness,” claims McWhorter, where one reality is lived privately, while its opposite is promoted in public, has become a kind of affirmation of “authentic” blackness. This “authentic” black understands that all black success is accidental and just a fluke. He places no value on achievement in mainstream society, for to do so would be selling out.

      While exposing the role that the post-civil-rights leadership has played in compounding the already existing sense of victimhood among blacks, McWhorter also acknowledges a sad truth. That is, “sitting at the core of the African-American soul” is the belief that blacks are inferior. He correctly views this disposition as the initiator of much of the vituperation directed toward whites. In this self-defensive mindset, it is comforting to believe that the continuing “racism” of whites prevents any upward social or economic movement.

      McWhorter claims that for many blacks, this sense of inferiority is a deep-seated problem, and they are not being dishonest about their perception of racial barriers, no matter how incorrect that perception might be. Those blacks in prominent leadership positions, however, are fully conscious of the cynical political ploys they engage in when they rail against the system, charging it with “institutionalized racism.” Their sole purpose is to play on the weaknesses of the vulnerable black masses.

      Much of this book is a criticism of that tendency among blacks to keep whites locked into problems that should rightly be the purview of blacks McWhorter says, “[W]hites have gone about as far as they will; the rest of the job is ours.” Yet, after this revelation of what is basically a psychological problem among blacks, which one would think should be dealt with by blacks themselves, McWhorter proclaims whites still somehow responsible for taking action to mitigate this self-defeating strain.

      Despite McWhorter’s persistent disparagement of blacks who would keep whites “on the hook” and culpable for past, present, and future black problems, he engages in the customary practice of offering prescriptions for whites to follow. We are given a line-up of social programs that he views as detrimental to black progress and that, therefore, should be of concern to whites. For example, he urges whites not to sponsor an open-ended welfare program “that pays black women to have illegitimate children.” Whites should not “dragoon underqualified blacks into positions beyond their abilities.” And whites should not lower standards to accommodate blacks. Such approaches to solutions, claims McWhorter, deny blacks the opportunity to learn “how to compete.”

      Every one of the policies specified by McWhorter, and which he designates as negative, are vigorously supported by black politicians and civil rights leaders. Yet it is incumbent upon whites to navigate around the wills of blacks’ chosen leaders and do what is “best for blacks.” Might one ask the obvious question of why whites are more responsible for helping blacks attain self-sufficiency than those who supposedly represent black interests in the first place and daily fight for the special privileges that McWhorter maligns?

      Although his laundry list of whites’ obligations tends to be considerably shorter than, say, one drawn up by Jesse Jackson, it is a list, nevertheless. It seems clear that if whites fail to possess the prescience necessary to understand what blacks “truly need,” or if, heaven forbid, whites simply don’t give a damn about those needs, they remain on Professor McWhorter’s “hook.”

      While giving the shaft to the historians of Afrocentric fantasies, who teach that just about nothing in the world was invented until an African conceived it, McWhorter does a fine job of outlining the “missing” history of American blacks. This is the story of ordinary people who created an economic base normal to the development of other ethnic groups.

 

      This history of the successful businesses forged by blacks during those years, which were supposedly the “worst of times,” has never been of any interest to the civil rights charlatans since it cannot be used in the service of perpetuating victimhood. The fact of blacks’ successful entrepreneurial history is problematic for those who teach that blacks encountered restrictions, at all times and in all places, on their ability to prosper.

      Although nascent and growing in this early period, the entrepreneurial spirit is evidenced in the thousands of businesses that were created in the North and South beginning in the late 19th century. One example is Chicago’s Bronzeville. As the city industrialized in the late 19th century, blacks migrated from the South, eventually populating a stretch of blocks on the south side. By 1917, over 700 stores and firms had been established. There were doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals. There also were theaters, several hotels, with the Hotel Brookmont billed as “The Finest Colored Hotel in the World.” McWhorter describes Bronzeville as a “thriving civic community,” where the leading churches, such as Olivet Baptist, with a membership of 10,000, focused on community uplift.

      The primary purpose of my newsletter Issues & Views [Elizabeth Wright is editor of Issues and Views] is to tell some of this remarkable story and to profile these ordinary yet special people. The spirit that built Bronzeville also built other black enclaves, including districts in Durham, Birmingham, Nashville, Norfolk, and Tulsa. No one would deny the real limitations to expansion placed upon these businesses by legal factors (every region was different), but within the parameters in which they could operate, a great many blacks were able to leave legacies.

      This is a history worth celebrating and none of it is buried. Over all these decades, any NAACP functionary could easily have collected this data with the aim of inspiring blacks to pick up where these industrious entrepreneurs left off. But for today’s unworthy black leaders, history of this kind becomes interesting only when there is a sad tale attached to it, as in the case of Tulsa, where, in 1921, the successful black business district was razed during riots instigated by whites. Yet, the part of the Tulsa story that is ignored by those who bask in the details of the tragedy as “proof” of the white man’s perfidy, is equally sad.

      After the residents had recovered from the shock of the riots, with grit and determination blacks rebuilt the business district. We learn from historian John Sibley Butler that the second death of the district came at the hands of blacks themselves. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the enterprises of the once proud district began to suffer because blacks won the right to spend their money freely anywhere in Tulsa. This loss of a consumer base, which also spelled the loss of capital, and the later intrusion of urban renewal, effectively put an end to the blossoming revival. As the clamor for integration escalated, money ceased to circulate in black communities, which guaranteed swift and sure economic decline. An important reason that the general history of this black success is shunted aside is obvious—there must never be a hint that there were some advantages to segregation.

      John McWhorter by no means hints at such an heretical idea. In fact, much to the contrary, his world is one that is moving beyond the restricting racial confines of mere integration. It is clear from several glowing passages sprinkled throughout the book that in his ideal world, racial progress is confirmed when hearing ebonics spoken by young white women, wrapped around such words as “dude” and “bitch,” or overhearing the friendly banter of Filipino teenagers as they call one another “nigger.” Progress is a deracinated amalgam of peoples, who accept the “endless waves of miscegenation” and the inevitable hybridism (his word).

      Returning to his key discussion, McWhorter offers scorn for those in academia who would lower the bar of admission in their quest for “diversity.” He intones, “White guilt is a dangerous and addictive drug,” in addition to being “a craven, disingenuous and destructive canard” that is antithetical to black excellence.

      He also takes on Afrocentrists like Randall Robinson, who call for American blacks to find their identity and cultural base in Africa, a vast continent of hundreds of disparate regions where over a thousand languages are spoken, with which blacks have no familiarity at all. On the subject of reparations, dear to the heart of Robinson, whose book is considered by reparations advocates to be the definitive text on the subject, McWhorter claims that blacks already have reparations. They’re called welfare, set-asides, affirmative action, college grants, etc.

      It should be made clear that McWhorter is against affirmative action only in education because he believes that lowering educational standards creates a disincentive for blacks to succeed. Although for much of his book, one could get the impression that he supports a universal ban on affirmative action and special preferences in principle, such is not the case. He offers a sketch of what might be his plan for reparations. In an imaginary case where two candidates were “equally qualified,” he would,

. . . propose that Affirmative Action policies . . . be imposed in businesses where subtle racism can still slow promotion.

And, he continues, “If it were 1966, I would have universities practice racial preferences as well . . . for the sake of a greater good.” But today, he claims, such an approach is “outdated.”

      Prior to this clarification of his position, while reading his many statements of opposition to current affirmative action policies, I had wondered if McWhorter had any objections to these biased laws on the basis of their inherent unfairness. I soon got the message that the only negative rests in what he perceives to be the damaging effects of such policies. “Is it good for the blacks?” he seems to be silently asking on every page. He does not care about the constitutional implications of university policies that might reject qualified non-blacks, as in the case of the University of Michigan.

      From McWhorter’s perspective, whites are not expected to express dissident opinions on race, or show disrespect for what he calls the “civil rights revolution.” And he more than implies that he sees nothing wrong with punishments for some forms of verbal dissent.

      According to McWhorter, carrying on the “civil rights revolution” must still be foremost in every legislator’s agenda. Woe to that council member whose constituency insists that he concentrate on priorities other than the “needs” of blacks. Any legislator who fails to give top priority to the ongoing “revolution” is “not fit” to serve in a legislative body.

      In this book, McWorter takes on a lot of hot button issues and with each one he makes his case without flinching. What makes his book of value is his forthright analysis of the self-defeating attitudes and behavior that continue to hobble a great many blacks. His inside knowledge and candor make this a necessary book to add to the growing library of works that deal with this particular aspect of America’s enduring entanglement with race.

—Elizabeth Wright

The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death, and Legacy, by Roy and Zhores Medvedev, Translated by Ellen Dahrendorf. The Overlook Press, 335 pages, $29.95.

      This is one of the most remarkable books about Joseph Stalin I have read for many years. I speak not as a professional Sovietologist but as one who has long followed Soviet history, especially the era of Stalin.

      It is a remarkable book because it has given me a feel, as it will to other readers, of what life and death among the ranking Soviet elites were like in the Soviet Union during the genocidal years of Stalin’s reign, roughly from 1928 to 1953, when he died under still-mysterious circumstances. It was a period during which this onetime Georgian bank robber and revolutionary became the undisputed leader of a socialist empire that stretched from Berlin to Hanoi, to the thunderous applause of Western intellectuals.

      A lot of the reportage in this volume, authored by two dissident Russian historians, is based on Soviet archives which, with the fall of the Soviet Union, were opened in 1991 and to which the authors had special access. (The book has been superbly translated by a British scholar.)

      What makes this history a fascinating read is that it is not told from the standpoint of Stalin’s victims. It is a behind-the-scenes story of what happened on a day-to-day basis inside the Kremlin. It all seems so ordinary, so routine—except it isn’t. The documented archival revelations are about a large number of government and Communist Party officials trying not to be singled out by Stalin for demotion, arrest, exile or execution.

      Some of the weird happenings in Stalin’s USSR we know; some are new to me. There was the imprisoned wife of Foreign Minister (and onetime Prime Minister) V. M. Molotov who met daily with Stalin. His wife had been jailed by Stalin for some mysterious crime, probably because she was Jewish.

      It would have been impossible for Molotov to ask that his wife be given a trial. Stalin ordered her jailed and that was that.

      Or a semi-literate like Nikita Khrushchev, a man without even a primary school education, who could become ruler of Stalin’s empire and almost start a war with China and a nuclear confrontation with the United States.

      The wife of Alexandr Poskrebyshev, one of Stalin’s most loyal subordinates, was arrested and shot for no other reason than that she was the sister of Leon Trotsky’s daughter-in-law. The GPU (the state secret police) supplied him with another wife.

      There are 15 chapters in The Unknown Stalin, each with a tantalizing title such as the first, “Riddles surrounding Stalin’s death.” Three chapters comprise Part II, “Stalin and Nuclear Weapons.”

      One of the most fascinating sections is Part III, “Stalin and Science”; it tells the story of a 37-year-old colonel named Yevgeny Razin, a military historian, whose books became important texts at a time when Stalin on the eve of World War II was purging and executing his military commanders from the top down.

      Razin’s published admiration of the great Prussian military strategist, Karl Clausewitz, collided with Stalin’s party line debunking Clausewitz. Razin was arrested, tortured and sentenced to ten years in the gulag.

      A few years later, Stalin decided to bone up on military history in preparation for an upcoming meeting with Mao Zedong. So Stalin began reading Razin’s works and asked his aide Poskrebyshev to find out what Razin was doing.

      Panic ensued among all those Politburo members who had participated in the Razin frame-up. The scrawny, semi-starved prisoner was flown back to Moscow. He was immediately promoted to general, appointed head of the prestigious Frunze military academy and ordered to pick up his textbook writing at the point where due to a “misunderstanding” he had been interrupted by his arrest. And he never even got to see Stalin.

      One chapter in “Stalin and Science” deals with another semi-literate, the biologist Trofim Lysenko, who denied the existence of genes. He persuaded Stalin that genetics was a phony bourgeois theory and that acquired characteristics could be inherited.

      The Lysenko story is well known but the Medvedevs supply some new material about how Russian geneticists had to repudiate their science to stay out of the gulag.

      Perhaps the most touching chapter is the story of the fall of Nikolai Bukharin. His biography was told well many years ago by Stephen Cohen of New York University. But there is new material here. To read it is to appreciate the genius of Arthur Koestler and his great novel Darkness at Noon, which was based on Bukharin’s rise and fall.

      Bukharin’s farewell letter to his wife in 1937, which in return for her doomed husband’s confession Stalin promised would be delivered to her, was seen by her 55 years later when the Stalin archives were opened.

How could Stalin have happened? Because highly intelligent men like Bukharin became enslaved to a totalitarian ideology, created by Lenin, and to Marxist slogans like “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

      With us or against us, or as another highly intelligent Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky, in an act of self-betrayal told the 13th Communist Party Congress:

The Party in the last analysis is always right because the Party is the single historic instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its fundamental problems. . . . I know that one must not be right against the Party. One can be right only with the Party, and through the Party, for history has created no other road for the realization of what is right.

      And it all began in the mid-19th century when a bearded German living on his wife’s pawned silverware in his London exile began to scribble in the British Museum. The Unknown Stalin, based on Stalin’s personal archive, documents how Marx’s dream became a global nightmare, as well as a well-deserved nightmare for the top-ranking Soviet mobsters and their families.

—Arnold Beichman

Midnight in Sicily (Vintage Departures), by Peter Robb. Faber & Fabe, April 1998, 336 pages, $15.99 hardcover.

      Peter Robb’s memoir of time spent in the Italian mezzogiorno—chiefly Sicily, but also Naples—is partly a travel book, partly a commentary on art (especially the painter Renato Guttuso) and on literature (particularly the novelists Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia), and partly a celebration of gastronomy. Mostly, however, it is about the power of organized crime in Italy, especially in the south, and its peculiar relationship (parasitic and symbiotic) with the Italian government.

      The power of the mafia and camorra arose from the historic misrule of the mezzogiorno. Robb discusses their remote origins, but concentrates on events since the Allied liberation of Sicily in 1943. Mussolini had attempted to suppress the mafia, and both its Sicilian and American branches (the latter represented by “Lucky” Luciano) accordingly aided the U.S. army in driving out the fascists. The results, like those of U.S. aid to Islamic mujahideen resisting Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, demonstrate the way in which such alliances of convenience and “proxy warfare” can backfire. Robb describes how the Sicilian mafia subsequently established ties with the Christian Democratic Party (democristiani), with the tacit approval of the U.S. government and the Roman Catholic church, as an ally in the anti-Communist cause. Even as this was taking place, mafiosi strengthened their connections with organized crime in other parts of the world, including the United States, and garnered unprecedented new wealth in the international drug trade. Necessary money-laundering was accomplished through penetration of the banking industry, both in Italy and abroad. Corruption of the government proceeded all the way to the top, including the prime minister, Giulio Andreotti.

      All governments, even corrupt and tyrannical ones, have some sort of social contract with the people governed under them. The democratic ideal holds that this should be one openly and freely reached.

      Dictatorships and absolute monarchies attain their social contracts by a mixture of demagogy and repression, so that the “consent of the governed” is obtained by combined elements of fraud and force. The Italian case is an especially strange one, in that government and organized crime have become so intimately connected as to appear almost two sides of the same coin. Albert Jay Nock, in Our Enemy the State, wryly pointed out that many of the things governments do would be considered crimes if done by ordinary individuals. If the state takes life, it is called war or capital punishment. If you take life, it is called murder. If the state takes property under the threat of force, it is called confiscation or taxation; if you take property under the threat of force, it is called robbery or extortion. When the state prints banknotes that have no value other than that assigned by the state, these are called fiat money. When you print them, they are called counterfeit. The state, argued Nock, does not want to suppress crime; it wants a state monopoly on it.

      Many people in the south of Italy take this cynical view of their government, and have good historical reason for so doing. If rulers do not regard government as a public trust, the ruled see no reason to do so either. When government has no moral legitimacy, organized crime becomes an alternative system of social control. As Robb’s account makes clear, the mafia is and always has been both a competitor and collaborator with the state. It is a cautionary tale about what happens to the social contract as a result of the loss of public trust, and how nearly impossible it is to restore it.

      Midnight in Sicily is a fascinating book. I did not find its discursive and digressive style as frustrating as some reviewers, although I confess to finding some of Robb’s verbal and typographic idiosyncrasies irritating. The book’s one telling defect is its lack of an index, which would have been quite useful.

—Michael S. Swisher