Originally appeared in The Boston Book Review
. . . the
charismatic relationship Afro-Americans have to this society can be as
irresponsibly decadent as it can be high-minded, joyous, soberly critical, and
cautionary. We have as much responsibility for the health of our democracy as
anyone else.
"The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race, The
Long and the Short of It, 1990-1994"
HB: You use jazz as a metaphor for democracy in "The
Skin Game."
SC: It seems to me to be an aesthetic realization of the
checks and balances system, and the idea of individual contribution to mass
reality. In a jazz band, you'll often have the same thing happen that happens
when a person wants to convince other people that his or her policy idea should
be embraced. The great bassist Ron Carter said that in a band whoever is
playing the strongest idea will convince everybody else to come his way. In a
sense it reflects the democratic process.
The constitutional structure is based on periodically
reinterpreting the relationship that the people have to the government, to the
laws, to the business sector. In a jazz band, we know the songs -- "My
Funny Valentine," "Stella by Starlight," etc. -- but they are remade
by improvisations improvisations. Improvisation allows you to reconsider the
way you've approached something before, to see it over and over.
HB: In a traditional African drum ensemble, one person
solos. The jazz band is different, in that the solo moves from player to player,
from instrument to instrument.
SC: Everybody is improvising in a jazz band. You're playing
the saxophone, I'm playing the piano. I'll play something. You'll respond. The
bass player who hears that will play a certain kind of thing, the drummer
something else. What makes a band really sound good is what I think of as the
fundamental aspect of democratic freedom, which I call empathetic
individuality.
HB: You write, "There is a very close relationship
between classic American films and jazz," and that "the improvised
slapstick comedies of Sennet, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were visually akin to
the extemporized melodies, the new tonal colors, the building heat, and the
incantational surprises central to the fusion of primitive vitality and
sophistication that defines jazz."
Generally we talk about jazz as the unique contribution of
African Americans. You're suggesting there was a change of sensibility sweeping
the whole culture, and jazz was a part of that change in feeling.
SC: The sense of comic disorder that's so central to the
world of Max Sennet goes back to the conventions of the minstrel show. If you
read descriptions of minstrel shows, you find a lot them started with people
running in different directions, some tumbling, some playing banjos, some
shouting, some clapping, so you get this riot of activity.
Robert C. Toll's "Blacking Up" is an
extraordinarily important book because it goes into the complexity of the
minstrel shows.
HB: Who were the participants?
SC: They were white performers. Most of the time when we say
minstrel shows, people just think of white guys putting on black face and
making black Americans seem like nothing more than buffoons of one sort or
another.
HB: Sambo.
SC: But it's much more than that
HB: It sounds like white people were using black identity to
arrive at what they thought was a sort of larger arena of expression.
SC: I don't think they even thought about it like that. I
think what they were looking for was something that sounded American. The grand
irony of race prejudice is that the Negro is pure Americana.
HB: An aspect of America that made us distinctly
non-European.
SC: Exactly. The minstrel shows arrive at a time when there
was increasing hostility toward European artistic conventions. The Virginia
minstrels opened up in New York City, I think, in 1834. There were already
riots against English actors for saying Americans had no appreciation of subtle
dramatic expression. All these guys from the Bowery came up to Astor Place
outraged that they had been insulted by the British performers and started a
riot in which over one hundred people were killed in order to prove that they
appreciated subtlety as much as anybody else.
HB: The riot must have removed all doubt.
SC: Oh, boy is that American. The point is that the chaotic
stuff, the sense of the romantic ballads, the bad guy-good guy played out in a
certain kind of way, the syncopations, the percussive rhythms -- those things
are traceable back to the minstrel shows. That way of doing things had become
so American that D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennet and Charley Chaplin and Buster
Keaton were drawing on something you didn't even have to think about at that
point.
HB: You say that someone like Thomas Edison opens the way
for something like Black Studies.
SC: People bringing unconventional ideas into the
discussion, arriving from previously disreputable or varied perspectives, is
not something new in America. And if you didn't have that tradition, you
couldn't have black studies. Thomas Edison is as much a reason for black
studies as anybody. Edison never crosses people's minds when they think about
black Americans because they don't think of black Americans in terms of America
history. They think, well, there's America and then there's these black folks.
I'm trying to get people to be at ease with the incredible
amount of variety in the United States.
HB: Sometimes it seems like you want it both ways. You want
to say blacks are completely integral to American identity. You write you don't
need to look beyond slavery to define yourself; you're opposed to
Afro-centrism. But where, then, do the distinctive contributions come from?
SC: What I'm arguing against is a romantic idea about
Africa. All that stuff about African kingdoms, and we came from Egypt -- who
cares? I was just out on the road where I'd say to the audience, how many of
you know where in Europe Thomas Edison's family came from? Do you have any idea
why you don't know? It's because once you invent the electric light, nobody
cares. Most people don't care where Henry Ford's people came from, where the
Wright brothers came from. The Wright brothers come from a German family, but
you have to dig to find that out because Kitty Hawk is enough. Now obviously if
Louis Armstrong had been born in Africa, he wouldn't have played the trumpet.
Nor would Scott Joplin have invented ragtime, nor Charley Parker played the
saxophone nor Duke Ellington led a dance band nor Bessie Smith sung the blues.
What I'm talking about is the new mixes that result from various people and
various elements coming together within the context of the United States.
Everybody in the world recognizes our American commonalty.
If you were a black guy, and both of us put on African robes and changed our
names and flew to Accra today, within five minutes the Ghanaians would say, ah,
two Americans. If the most Negro-hating South Boston red-neck with an
excessively sentimental attachment to Ireland flies to Dublin today, the Irish
will say, ah, an American. If you put Rudolph Guliani and John Giotti and a
plane across the aisle from each other, sneering, all the way to Sicily, when
they get there, the Sicilians will say, ah, two Americans. That's how that
really goes. That's often missed in these discussions.
HB: You are optimistic about that mix. You think that mix
exists, however imperfectly, for everyone in this country. There are a lot of
black spokesmen who feel that mix does not or should not include them.
SC: The whole separatist impulse is a joke. It's as big a
joke as the Black Panther Party talking about overthrowing the United States.
All people have to do is read Hugh Pearson's book, "The Shadow of the
Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America." Malcolm X
started that imbecilic idea of being a man, masculinity, and all that: "If
they put their hands on you, we say send 'em to the graveyard." Buffoons
like Malcolm X were creating very unrealistic sets of ideas about the man in
the street versus the police. I'm not going to pretend a guy is brilliant guy
who, as I've pointed out many times, and will until they wheel me to the burial
ground, also taught people every day that white people were a race of devils
invented by a mad scientist six thousand years ago.
One thing I learned from Lyndon Johnson is that if you're
interested in serious American issues you may have to be ready to turn in your
card of guaranteed categories. When Lyndon Johnson decided to deal with extending
American democracy in reasonable directions, he had to turn in his card as a
redneck. He was rejected by white Southerners.
I'm not interested in exacerbating some form of self-pity on
the parts of black students, playing into what I call the sadomasochist
relationship that white administrations and black students have on campus after
campus. I am interested in clarifying a fact that is left out of the discussion
over and over, and that is that there are two American traditions, and one is
irresponsible if one does not acknowledge the both of them. There is, in fact,
an ignoble American tradition. It includes drug-dealing, selling small-pox
blankets to the Indians, polluting the land, exploiting children, selling bad
products and all of that.
But if you talk about slavery and you fail to talk about
abolition, then you're not serious. There was no abolition movement in Africa.
There was no abolition movement in China; the Chinese were never concerned
about slaves. There was no abolition movement in India. That's a hard fact.
HB: You talk about black separatism. What about white
separatism?
SC: But look, we started out with that. But now you have a
generation of white people who, for four years at hundreds of universities
across the United States, have extraordinarily hostile encounters with black
students that they didn't engender, in which they were called names, bullied,
told they couldn't get into organizations, told we don't like you, we don't
like America, you're all racists. That kind of stuff has been going in
institutions of higher learning from sea to shining sea.
White people don't treat black people as equals in this
respect.
If you're
dealing with me, or any black person, and you let me do things to you or say
things to you that you wouldn't accept from a white guy, and you go off and
say, well, his people were brought over here as slaves, you're not treating
that person as an equal. Over and over and over in this country, that happens.
But the thing is it doesn't work out in the interests of the so-called black
masses. It works out in the interest of is a group of people who have developed
a race hustle that intensifies white contempt for black people.
HB: The other side -- glorifying Western civilization for
its enlightenment ideals while forgetting the horrors, such as slavery and the
Holocaust -- is no less partial, or widespread, a view.
SC: The basic thing is this: Western civilization is
superior to all other civilizations in the history of humankind. It's not that
it's superior because white people are superior. It's a superior vision of
humanity, and everybody knows it when they came in contact with it. The
slaughter of the Jews in Europe creates a humbling attitude toward civilization
itself. It lets you know, in no uncertain terms, that literacy, a great
intellectual tradition, Christianity, great painters, writers etc. -- none of
those things automatically will save you from sinking all the way down into
absolute barbarism and xenophobia.
What's so great about the Old Testament is its lack of
overconfidence about the power of education, even of illumination. Thomas Mann,
for instance, could hardly believe the grand German tradition was being flushed
down a toilet in favor of a barbaric xenophobe, Adolph Hitler. But the Old
Testament tells you over and over, even if God talks to this guy, that doesn't
mean that two days later, two years later, he might not do something really arrogant,
stupid, and brutal.
If you maintain that understanding about human beings, you
don't become smug about your ethnic group, your anything.
HB: There are no saints in the Hebrew Bible, no perfect
human being. Knowing God doesn't stop you from being human. Adam is made by
God, talks to him daily and still screws up.
SC: It's like the denial in the Garden in of Gethsemane.
Christ says, "Before the cock crows thrice, you will betray me." And
the apostles say, "Oh, no, I ain't gonna." And the guys appear with
those swords and they say, well, I don't know him.
That's the central reason why the Christian tale has had
such a compelling effect on people the world over; of all tales it's the one
that tells us the most about the difficulty of death. There's only person in
the Bible who without doubt knows he's going to heaven, and that's Jesus.
Everybody else hopes to get there. Jesus knows he's going. But when it gets
close, when he's on the cross, he says, "Father, why hast Thou forsaken
me."
HB: You call it the greatest blues line ever.
SC: Because it tells you more about what death is. Death is
something that terrifies even the gods if they choose to take on human form.
It's an ongoing mess. That's what dealing with human beings
is; that's what it means. But this is a cynicism of engagement not a cynicism
of defeat. We're not going to go back to slavery in the United States. We're
not going back to women not having the vote or to sending children down into
the mines. What I wanted to do in the book was to increase what I call
democratic morale, the morale necessary to deal with the periodic and
inevitable arrival of difficulties.
HB: The forces of xenophobia and racism are so powerful that
it's hard to to know what is stronger, those forces or universalism.
SC: Hands down xenophobia is the strongest. Because it's the
oldest, and it's more natural to be paranoid about some living thing you don't
know, than to say, yeah, come on in. That's how Odysseus assesses whether he is
in a civilized situation. When, as a vulnerable stranger, he comes in contact
with people and they say, oh, sit down and have some food, you're a guest until
proven otherwise, he knows those people are civilized. Of course, when he meets
the Cyclops, and the Cyclops puts him on the menu, as far as he is concerned,
that's a barbarian.
No comments:
Post a Comment