If you can’t tell by now, my vacation reading focused on recent works examining “race” and racial relationships. I’ve had a number of books looking out on me from the bookshelves waiting to be read. In God’s providence, I’ve been able to get to a couple of them between naps, swims, Pringles, and kayaking.
The week began with Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now (review) and continued with Mishna Wolff’s witty memoir, I’m Down (review). Touré contends that there are 40 million ways of being Black, a decidedly individualist approach to racial identity that rejects expectations of gazing Whites and Blacks. Wolff almost provides an illustration of Touré’s thesis, recounting her growing up years in the home of a White father who considered himself Black and lived in an all-Black neighborhood. What are we to think of Touré’s proposal, a proposal that allows White men to be Black?
Enter a creative and helpful work by John L. Jackson, Jr., Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005). Jackson works as the Richard Perry University Professor of Communication and Anthropology at The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In Real Black, Johnson attempts both an analysis of race and a reflection on the work of ethnology itself. The book provides a critique of anthropological method and an exploration of racial identity.
The Key Ideas
The subtitle points to the key premise of the work: “racial sincerity” sometimes undermines and sometimes cooperates with “racial authenticity” in performances of blackness, but neither can adequately or exhaustively define “real black.” To understand Johnson’s argument, we need to understand a few key ideas.
First, Johnson draws upon the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah to introduce us to “scripts.” Johnson quotes Appiah: “Collective identities provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people us in shaping their life plans and in telling their life stories” (p. 12). We all define our group selves according to narratives that delimit the possible and probable of our perspectives. ”These scripts provide guidelines for proper and improper behavior, for legitimate and illegitimate group membership, for social inclusion and ostracism” (p. 13). These scripts become texts for determining “racial authenticity,” whether someone is “really Black” or “really Latino” or “really White,” etc. In this way, scripts may imprison, causing “racial identity… to function a lot like social incarceration” (p. 13).
Second, Johnson distinguishes between “authenticity,” which figures prominently popular notions of race and in a lot of ethnographic studies of race, and “sincerity,” which he prefers as a lens onto racial identity. While we commonly use the words as synonyms, Johnson uses the words’ etymology to unveil important conceptual contrasts:
Sincerity… comes from the Latin term sincerus (originally applied to things, not people), meaning without wax, unadulterated, not doctored. Authenticity, however, derives from the Greek authenteo: to dominate or have authority over, even to kill…. Sincerity was once about things, and authenticity about relationships between people. In the present, their connotations have been reversed. To talk exclusively in terms of racial authenticity is to risk ossifying race into a simple subject-object equation, reducing people to little more than objects of racial discourse, characters in racial scripts, dismissing race as only and exclusively the primary cause of social domination and death. At the same time, this position kills some of what is most interesting about the hows and whys of racial living (p. 15).
Why does the notion of “racial authenticity” kill? According to Johnson, “Authenticity conjures up images of people, as animate subjects, verifying inanimate objects. Authenticity presupposes this kind of relationship between an independent, thinking subject and a dependent, unthinking thing. The defining association is one of objectification, “thingification”: a specialist applying his or her expertise to a seventeenth-century silver candlestick, or a newly discovered Picasso, or any item dusted off from a dead grandfather’s attic and brought before the appraisers of PBS’ Antiques Roadshow. Authenticity presupposes a relation between subjects (who authenticate) and objects (dumb, mute, and inorganic) that are interpreted and analyzed from outside, because they cannot simply speak for themselves” (pp. 14-15).
So, authenticity kills because it first reduces the observed person(s) to object status then renders a verdict on their “realness” while disallowing them subjective, interior speech. In the authenticator’s hand/mind is a script that they apply to the behavior, speech, and ways of the observed. Those who conform to the script are deemed authentic and those who do not conform are rejected as inauthentic, fake, not real. Here’s where our racial scripts (“Real Black people are like…” or “Real White people are like…”) become prisons. Here’s where the gaze of others become the warden’s incarcerating stares, judgments and executions based not on what a person is subjectively but on what they’re perceived to be objectively (as objects).
What Difference Does All This Make?
How does a shift to “racial sincerity” help? Johnson contends that sincerity establishes a subject-to-subject relationship. Objects cannot be sincere even if they are authentic. Only subjects can be sincere, which requires we allow the person the freedom to conform to their deeper personal selves. Sincerity “presumes one another’s humanity, interiority, and subjectivity” (p. 15). Sincerity requires a look at the person rather than the scripts.
Now here is the trick, captured well in a George Burns quote about Hollywood: “Sincerity is key. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Even though sincerity undermines the scripts of racial authenticity, sincerity itself may be faked. Race becomes so many layers of performance, compliance to external social scripts and even a drama of making and re-making the interior self (sincerity). Johnson maintains that we can never quite be sure that what we’re observing is, in fact, “the real thing.” We’re prone to two mistakes: either rejecting as inauthentic someone who is indeed very sincere or accepting as authentic someone who performs the script insincerely. ”We cannot take racial performances at face value” (p. 18).
Think back to Mishna Wolff’s father “Wolfy.” He’s a white-skinned man convinced he’s “Black.” He walks, talks, and acts “Black,” that is, according to the social script titled “Blackness.” She contends that he was not pretending; it’s who he really was. If “real blackness” requires black skin or genealogy, then clearly Wolfy is not authentic. If, however, sincerity matters most then Wolfy has a good case for his Black bona fides, as does Eminem and a few others we might consider. These white guys who “keep it real” earn their proverbial “ghetto pass” not simply as a matter of trying to obey the script but as a consequence of perceived sincerity. That’s why Eminem receives a pass and Vanilla Ice doesn’t it. Though Ice could in some sense mimic the script, he never presented as sincere.
Johnson uses a very powerful example of this tension between authentic and sincere when he recalls the story of Leo Felton. Felton made national media when arrested as a neo-Nazi skinhead passing counterfeit bills in a scheme to destroy Jewish monuments throughout the city. After his arrest, police determined that the light-skinned would-be Italian Felton was actually the son of a Black man and a white mother. ”The Aryan racist was black!” Felton not only passed for white, but for a white neo-Nazi skinhead that attacked Blacks and Jews. How could that be? Felton later told an interviewer that all his life he felt white inside. In his own mind, Felton lived the deeper truth of racial sincerity–an ugly sincerity to be sure. The script of authenticity would falsify Felton on both tests of whiteness and blackness, but Felton had a truth, a sincerity, that couldn’t be measured by the external scrips of authenticity. And, as John points out, “One of the wonderfully troubling ironies in all of this… is that Felton can maintain this spiritualist reading of his own racial sincerity at the same time that his record of physical violence against other people is steeped in the very racial materialism he otherwise disavows” (p. 21). In other words, Felton could fall back on “racial sincerity” in his self-understanding but applied the meaner logic of “racial authenticity” in his violence against Blacks and Jews. Felton illustrates how “authenticity and sincerity are at each other’s throats;” they are “at war with one another, battling for hegemony and explanatory efficacy vis-à-vis everyday displays of racial self-making” (pp. 18, 21). In this battle, “Authenticity attempts to domesticate sincerity, rein it in, control its excesses” (pp. 17-18).
But Johnson has given us a tool for resisting the soul-killing, identity-stealing weaponry of authenticity. He’s helped us see that a less-fettered sincerity holds promise for freeing us from the prison of the Authenticity Police. He joins others in shifting the ground of racial identity from ontology and essentialism to something resembling Tourè’s individualism, framed here as sincerity. Johnson’s Real Black becomes another crack in the defenses of the retreating, embattled phalanx of racial hegemony. Should the ground shift from authenticity to sincerity we might just see greater gains on the stubborn ground of racial freedom.
Brief Chapter Overviews
The remaining chapters of Real Black work out this tension between authenticity and sincerity as paradigms for understanding racial identity across a number of chapters. Chapter 2, Real Harlemites, uses the prisms of class, gentrification, globalization and “ghetto fabulousness” to explore racial performances. Chapter 3, Real Bodies, reflects on Black worship and “catching the Spirit” to illustrate the impermeability of sincerity, concluding that sincerity taken to its extreme becomes “the unflinching self-truth of the terrorist” (p. 86), which scares us. Chapter 4, Real Jews, took me way back to another Thabiti in another time! In chapter 4, Johnson follows a group of young Black Hebrew Israelites fed on a hash of racial nationalism, conspiracy theories, “divine mathematics,” and cultural alienation in order to reveal the racial masks we wear, self-deluding masks, masks worn so long John questions whether they can be removed. Authenticity and sincerity can turn against the racial performer. Because he so often touched on the places and people that shaped my life before Christ, this was probably my favorite chapter.
Chapter 5, Real Publics, examined the “gendered and religified” marketplace of ideas in the Black community. Chapter 6, Real Natives, revisits the anthropologist’s role in ethnography, rejecting the notion of “objective observer” in favor of a “nativist” reading where both the anthropologists and the people shape one another, co-create the story, and depict stories that ought not be confused with definitive statements of “the real.” Chapter 7, Real Emcees, provides a short history of hip hop with particular focus on Mos Def as a window into hip hop’s valuation of sincerity as “the most dominant interpretation of the real” (p. 196). A very helpful chapter to consider.
Chapter 8, Real Names, looks at the way naming provides not just descriptive detail but performances of race and memory. Johnson concludes chapter 8 with a fitting summation:
We are constantly battling over the insides and outsides of racial reals, and authenticity tests are not nearly the most productive method for naming how they inform our individual and collectively wrought social selves. Rather, we need to find ways of reimaging racial politics, ways that privilege substance over style, reasoning over rhetoric, and actual politicking over posturing.
Chapter 9, Real Loves, summarizes and concludes the book. Johnson reminds us that racial sincerity is “a way of reasserting humanity through the demand that ones’ dark opaqueness and unknown interiorities be acknowledged. Sincerity’s organizing principle maintains that the erstwhile racial object always knows more about itself, its insides, than the external authenticator–even while granting the incompleteness and partiality of all such attempts at self-knowledge” (p. 227). Johnson’s proposal for “racial sincerity” undermines the all-too-easy racial stereotypes and scripts that govern so much of our discourse and self-understanding. That’s a valuable contribution because our racial scripts are tired and worn out, unable to service us (if they ever did) in this increasingly diverse and diversifying moment. His thesis privileges sincerity, which returns humanity and subjectiveness to center stage by reminding us that an “other” lives in the bodies and lives we’re authenticating. Necessarily, then, Johnson encourages us toward a view of “race” that accepts a certain amount of agnosticism–not only as a function of our limited knowledge but also as a recognition that not even our doubts should be hardened into certainties.
Conclusion
Real Black doesn’t read as smoothly as Toure’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? The first chapter requires some grinding, though the remaining chapters read much more engagingly on the whole.
However, the two books belong to different genres. Real Black makes a solid contribution to the field of anthropology and ethnology–both as a critical engagement with the rules of those fields and as a study of African-American racial identity. If you’re wanting a popular read, try Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? But if you want a more scholarly (49 pages of endnotes and a 17-page index!) and conceptually trenchant critique of racial identity and its performances, check out Johnson’s Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity.
