Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur
Book
Review:
The
Opposing Self:
When
Social Pressures Stand In the Way Of Black Success
By Alec
Solomita of The Weekly Standard Magazine
Ron
Christie book begins with a jolt. The
lawyer, political pundit, and former aide to President George W. Bush tells a
story of his younger self, an eager, star struck - and African – American –
junior legislative assistant -union legislative assistant working for a
Republican congressman from Florida, Craig T. James, who served on the House
Veterans Affairs Committee. At the
committee’s first hearing, the 22-year –old Christie was impressed to see
Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), a woman whose work and status (if not
politics) he admired. Waters, he soon
learned, was as impressed by him, but not as favorably.
After the
hearing, she summoned Christie to her office:
“I want to know why you’re working for a Republican. Are you confused?”
“No ma’am,
I’m not confused. I work with
Congressman James because I share his values.
I am a Republican.”
“You are a
sellout to your race! White people work
for Republicans. Not African
Americans! You’re nothing but an Uncle
Tom!”
Christie
reports that he was stunned by the tirade.
But it was not the last time he would find himself facing a liberal’s
fusillade of abuse. Indeed, he seems to
have made a career of refuting such small-minded, hostile accusations. He has gallantly endured the gently expressed
incredulity of Janet Langhart Cohen, who interviewed Christie about his book
and wondered aloud how a black man could possibly be a Republican. And he has repeatedly appeared on MSNBC’s
vituperative Ed Show, attempting civilly, to counter the self-righteous,
perpetually outraged harangues of the host and like-minded guests.
What
Christie is accused of, by blacks and liberal whites alike, is “acting
white.” That is, abandoning his
heritage, selling out. He shares this
distinction with other admirable cultural warriors, individuals as various as
Condoleezza Rice, Juan Williams, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Randall
Kennedy, Thomas Sowell, and Walter Williams.
And make no mistake, they are various:
Their nuanced views cover a wide spectrum. Their only commonality is an independence of
mind that incites the wrath of an enervated, bitter, and self-pitying black
leadership addicted to the glory days of the civil rights movement and, some of
them, to the Black panther party and its offshoots.
Christie’s
thesis has become familiar in recent decades, particularly after Bill Cosby’s
keynote speech at the NAACP’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of
Brown Vs. Board of Education, in which Cosby advised the black community to
look into its own soul: “We cannot blame
white people. . . We’ve got to take the neighborhood back.” Christie expands the argument. A strong and destructive internal attitude
impedes black accomplishment. And this
attitude is encapsulated, Christie says, in the high-school taunt “acting
white,” aimed by black students at peers who pay attention in class and do
their homework.
When “hard
work, diligent study, and eloquent communication skills” become cause for derision
and abuse, the result is a powerful deterrent to success. It is a phenomenon based on a misguided
notion of group loyalty. Its strength
resides in a fear of ostracism.
Acting
White takes a historical approach, sketching out the contours of not just the
term itself but the operating concept as well, the origins of which he discerns
in the antebellum South. He relies
heavily on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), where the
attitudes of whites toward blacks run a gamut of viciousness: from benign
superiority to amusement to sadism, fear and loathing – all serving the purpose
of unthinkable exploitation. Christie points
to whites’ fear of black literacy: “Blacks were legally denied the opportunity
to become literate in several southern states.
Alabama, Georgia and Virginia joined other states in enacting statues
that prescribed fines, flogging, imprisonment and hanging for those who taught
African Americans how to read and write.”
How blacks
perceived literacy becomes the focus of Christie’s attention. The slave George Harris in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
says, “I know more about business than the master does, and I can read better
than he can; I can write a better hand.”
But Harris’s stance was not, according to Christie, prevalent among
blacks in the slaveholding South:
Apparently, the motion that blacks would apply themselves
to become literate and educated . . . was a foreign concept to someone of Uncle
Tom’s mindset . . . This subservient . . .ideology about education – then and
now holds that African Americans seeking to emancipate their minds from the
chains of illiteracy act as do whites.
Although Acting
White suffers occasionally from awkward prose and unnecessary repetition,
Christie proves a competent guide through some complicated history. He shows, for example, that despite Booker T.
Washington’s promotion of “hard work and economic self-reliance for blacks,” he
blinked when it came to true equality, supporting industrial over academic
education for blacks and assuring whites that they need not fear social
assimilation. Interestingly, Washington
and his rival W.E.B DuBois traded similar charges of kowtowing to white
attitudes. “Acting White” seems to be an
equal opportunity slur.
Discord in
the early 20th century between DuBois and the leader of the nascent
Back to Africa movement, Marcus Garvey, makes earlier disagreements sound
mild. Distrustful of education and
opposed to assimilation, Garvey attacked the Harvard-educated DuBois at first
vigorously, and then viciously. DuBois,
Garvey wrote in 1923, “likes to dance with white people, and dine with them,
and sometimes sleeps with them, because from his way of seeing things all black
is ugly, and all that is white is beautiful.”
Garvey’s accusations would seem quaint, perhaps, if they were not as
current as today’s headlines. Christie
quotes a 2007 item from CNN News; “The Rev. Jesse Jackson criticized then
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama; accusing the Illinois senator
of “acting like he’s white” according to a South Carolina newspaper.” And about a year later, Ralph Nader chimed
in, saying that Obama tries to “talk white.”
This
comprehensive history of the dangerous and self-defeating notion that pursuing
an education, speaking well, dressing well, and working in a profession equals
“selling out” is both sobering and encouraging.
And the failure of many black leaders to relinquish the comforting myth
that all of their community’s woes can be laid at the feet of “institutional
racism” is causing young African Americans enormous harm.
