I thought Beatty was being the only kind of defector he can be at this stage of his life, given his own intellectual formation. Yeah, it's a fantasy; but as fantasies go--aren't all feature films fantasies??!!--it's a pretty good one: his fantasy is a defection fanatsy. [Kenneth Mostern] And this is why I think your notion of "defection" utterly incoherent. My statement was that having Berry say "you'll always be my nigga" is not just a fantasy, its quintessentially white. This is not a minor statement. It means the very structure of the film's logic is built on a narrative culminating on the pleasure of the white male hero. (In and of itself, this is not evil; but when one remembers that this makes it like 98% of the tripe in Hollywood, one pauses from joining in the celebration.) To the extent that that is true, the "information", political and sexual, the movie communicates can be assumed to have an audience structured through certain racial identifications, and not others. This is elementary film theory. If that's true, no "defection" has taken place at all, and the racial world continues unchallenged.
Why let white racial ideology interpolate you like that? Isn't the task to always be vigilant in fighting it, exposing it, and tearing it down? Melanin has nothing to do with race. To NOT insist on that as a teacher of Black books is a mark of incompetence, no matter what your melanin level. And this is not an opinion nor an "individual act." That's living, empirical history that you can back up as a teacher and scholar. Lerone Bennett's BEFORE THE MAYFLOWER, for example, is an excellent source; or Theodore Alllen's THE INVENTION OF THE WHITE RACE. But more than anything, the books themselves are always involved in this question, either to assert the principle (that race has nothing to do with skin color) (as in DuBois, Killens, Childress, Hughes, Baraka, Morrison), to grapple with it (James Weldon Johnson, McKay) or to finally opt out of it altogether (as in Hurston and Ellison). That's very schematic, I know. But it's just a departure point in working this kind of argument out in more detail and with greater precision.
[Kenneth Mostern] To which my obvious, and consistent, response is: how can you possibly imagine that racial ideology doesn't interpollate you? The very fact that you imagine this only suggests to me that at unconscious (and perhaps conscious) levels it does. Our disagreement is not I teach "professionally" while you try to be racially explicit; our disagreement is that you seem to think that, if you explicitly deny white identification, that's as good as "not being white", while I say that a light-skinned person who says "I'm not white" is, in fact, practicing whiteness. (A dark-skinned person wouldn't have to say this, you know . . .) Saying "I'm not white" in a classroom can be done easily enough by anyone who accepts white privilege, and refuses to see their own structuration (including their presence in that classroom) by a history of whiteness. Likewise, breaking down white supremacy -- acting in genuine solidarity with black people, refusing and exposing racial privilege when there are only white people around, etc. -- is perfectly compatible with, as a teacher in a classroom, performing one's whiteness explicitly, and self-critically. That, for the record, is what the black feminists of the early 1980s (cf. Barbara Smith's Home Girls), who appear to have been utterly forgetten (oh, they're "essentialist", aren't they?) advocated.
P.S. Your list of people who claim that race has nothing to do with skin color is dead wrong; rather than enter into a polemic about each one, I will refer you to my article "Three Theories of the Race of W.E.B. Du Bois", in Cultural Critique 34, for an extended discussion about how for Du Bois precisely because race is genetically meaningless, skin-color is its necessary ideological glue. And there is no mystery in the fact that white people have written good books about black history and social theory. Why are you telling me that? I hope you'll think that my forthcoming book is one of them.
Kenneth Mostern Department of English University of Tennessee
"Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage."
Theodor Adorno
-------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 4617 bytes Desc: not available URL: <../attachments/19980606/c1987ed7/attachment.bin>