Stanley Crouch just can't quit Louis Farrakhan. Or Jesse Jackson. Or Tawana Brawley. Or gangsta rap. It's always nice to see a writer who has repeatedly physically assaulted folks for the crime of disagreeing with him, get on his moral high horse. The sad thing is that I agree with some of his point--but they're buried beneath his contempt for the 90s. These guys are going to be fighting with each other until the end. It's like their only way of seeing the world. The young people who organized for Barack ain't thinking about Farrakhan.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
I suppose what is extraordinary is that people find it so extraordinary Barack Obama has done as well as has. But it's not. Barack Obama is an extraordinary politician and has run an extraordinary campaign, therefore, his win tomorrow doesn't require an elaborate explanation, but an ordinary one: the better politician and the better campaign won. That doesn't mean it won't be an extraordinary, historic day. It will, and I look forward to it.
I thought his whole point was that Obama has taken us beyond Farrakhan. That we (or rather, you) have quit Farrakhan.
Did Stanley ever spot you on the street after that VV piece? If so, what happened?
TNC:
It's not 1988, it's 1968. Always will be for Stanley. And as I predicted, there's gonna be some serious cognitive dissonance on the part of some older, liberal/progressive boomer folks.
Asher, what do you mean by "'you' have quit Farrakhan"? (Do I even want to know?)
it's all connected. you can't take obama out of what came before. i'm glad we're past farrakhan but i also know a lot of what he was saying wasn't crazy either. sometimes you need a john the baptist to get to a jesus christ for example.
Stanley Who?
Is 'quit' being used in the Brokeback sense of the word here?
In the mind of Stanley Crouch, Barack Obama is a black politician, and Louis Farrakhan is a black politician, and therefore they are an obvious pair to compare and contrast.
That's pretty ridiculous, in the sense that there are plenty of people one could compare Obama to and learn more than comparing him to Farrakhan. These include both white and black politicians of Obama's generation. And Farrakhan's illness has basically removed him from the national scene. Obama and Farrakhan really don't have much in common beyond the ability to draw a crowd. Oh, and blackness. Which seems to be the main thing Stanley Crouch sees. If a white pundit was obsessed with making this comparison, even favorably to Obama, I would pretty much call it straight-up racism, or racialist thinking at best. Maybe we shouldn't call it that from Crouch. But, maybe we should.
How is this any different from white folks demanding that black folks pass some test to prove they deserve to be considered Americans in full standing? Sheesh, Farrakhan...who cares? Stanley's mad because Obama didn't ask *Stanley's* permission to become what he is.
Btw, I don't know why others dance around this issue: Stanley can't write. In his last book he repeatedly misused "who" and "whom" (I mean that he used the latter wrongly, which is much worse than not using it at all), demonstrated an absolutely tin ear about black speech (lighting on a phrase like "capacious booty" and then using it repeatedly...sounding like Tom Wolfe trying to write black).
Farrakhan is either a scoundrel or a fool, and he’s never struck me as a fool.
He was in the loyalist faction that murdered Malcolm X. He’ll never live that down.
OK TNC, the Village Voice piece has me up here chuckling aloud to myself in my cubicle at work, good job...
Yeah, he just seems out of touch. I read the piece & he's really reaching to draw parallels between these two. I don't see what the f#%@ Barack has to do with Farrakhan, beyond the obvious, that they're both Black...also don't agree with him totally demonizing the Minister either.
Knocked on doors in Maine today. I believe Maine is the whitest state, and I walked down some looooong dirt driveways.
Lots of Republicans. Lots of ticket-splitters, Obama/Collins.
"...an accolade that ranks right up there with prettiest journalist"
Withering.
Ben: Are you reading the Stanley Crouch I'm reading? Blackness is the main thing he sees? When he says that a black/white view of American society is too simplistic, that we're now in, not a post-racial era, but a "post-simplistic" one?
I get that he's stuck on the Black Nationalist thing. And lots of people went to the Million Man March for reasons that had little to do with Farrahkan -- a point Crouch doesn't seem to see. But maybe, in bringing up Farrahkan, he was thinking about Clinton's attempt during the primaries to tie Obama to Farrahkan. Crouch's point is that that kind of thinking, on a simple black/white axis, just doesn't resonate in America like it used to. And Obama is his exhibit A.
Disclosure: Way back in college during the 1970s I took a history of jazz class from Stanley Crouch. I liked the class; I liked him. (And, if memory serves, back then he was pretty much into the Nationalist stuff he now deplores. So maybe that's why he's fixated on it.)
If I had a face like Stanley's, I'd be mad too. He's a scary looking dude, and not in a good way.
Don't really see the beef here. Just going off this piece alone, and nothing else Crouch has written, he's seems to be pretty accurate. He's simply stating that the country ISN'T stuck on people like Farrahkhan. That this country isn't making assumptions about all black people based on the likes of guys like Farrahkhan. He may be giving this country too much credit, but I just don't see what others are taking from this.
Jesus Christ, TNC, I just read that VV piece you linked to on Crouch.... almost choked to death laughing. Clearly I need to read more of your stuff.
Stanley Crouch is a douchbag, okay? His small mind was to narrow to follow along with Miles and Bitches' Brew. Instead, Crouch chooses to worship at the Wynton Marsalis Altar of What True Jazz Must Be. Read Miles' bio to find out what he thought about that.
I love 50s and 60s cool, modal, and hard-bop as much as the average jazz nut raised on Blue Note cut-outs and sneaking into West Village clubs underage, but Crouch is, for lack of a better word, a shithead.
What I'm seeing is that Crouch is stuck on the Farrakhan bogeyman as a crutch for his arguments. Again, I don't think he's using it against Obama; actually I think he's disregarding all the other political figures who weren't Farrakhan or Jesse Jackson. He's slanting the argument by using Farrakhan as symbol of the old, when there were plenty of non-extreme black politicians 20 years ago too. Harold Washington or John Lewis didn't get crowds of hundreds of thousands of people when they ran for office, but if it wasn't for people like them, Barack would not be where he is now.
I don't disbelieve his argument about increased diversity and post-simplicity. But I don't think one can prove that the attitudes of the country toward race have changed, by comparing an extreme figure like Farrakhan to a mainstream one like Obama. Of course they have different appeals, because they're very different people.
A more interesting evolution in politicians, to me, is from the generation of big-city black pols who got elected as pioneers, often on civil rights cred (Harold Washington, Marion Barry, Tom Bradley, Andrew Young, ...) to a new generation who get elected as technocrats (Cory Booker, Michael Nutter).
TNC,
Croquet may not be macho, but it certainly is glorious.
Ben:
All good points, meaning, of course, that I agree with you.
His was a short essay, and in choosing Farrahkan rather than say, Harold Washington, Crouch was, indeed, beating his favorite horse.
With a larger canvass -- the book he's finishing -- he should address Washington, Barry, Bradley, etc. I'd be interested to read what Crouch would make of the comparison between them and Obama et al.
I think the point Stanley is making boils down to this:
The old scene, Farrakhan/Jackson the exemplars and exploiters, was about Black UNITY. To me, these guys are dinosaurs.
The new scene is about Black humanity. Something that, surprisingly, has taken quite a lot of time to percolate into the national political psyche.
tnc,
if only the perfect among us could criticize other folks, we'd be engulfed in perfect silence. crouch has never pretended to be without flaws. he is a man who deserves respect for what he's written, said, and done. he shown courage over and over.
when he rags on farrakhan he's on the money. i lived around the geographical area that the tawana brawley circus took place. i don't know that the righteous rev. sharpton ever apologized for the hurt he created, all around. so, what's your beef with crouch? too smart, too incisive, too what?
crouch is right. it's not post-racial, nothing is post-racial. but, it seems we as polyglot nation are slowly overcoming the hurdle of post-simplistic. getting "over" the '60's, '70's, '90's, is not the way of the world, it's the way of the simpleton, or the child. it seems to me that there is an unhealthy and unwise part of the psyche of those who want 'to get over it' that brings some dood to write, "Stanley Who?" if this dood is the emblematic conscious representation of "The young people who organized for Barack..." then they aren't thinking. Obama has taken this country forward, and his presidency will be an immense leap for us as diverse a group of people who ever lived in a civil state [as i write this it has just passed midnight into election day, and nothing is sure. i am edgy. i don't know what will happen. but, i hope.]
to get over 'it' is the epitome of tempero-centrism; that this is the time, that it exists beyond all that that preceded it, and is a new world. that kind of thinking will destroy you who believe that.
we all stand on the accomplishments and the failures of the men and women who came before us. we ourselves are not special. we are simply at the temporal point of the furthest advance. if we are the point of the spear of flawed american exceptionalism, it is only because of the iron and wood and blood that flings us forward. we have yet to prove ourselves. really it is not me as most of my years are done, it is you who follow, who will have to prove yourselves worthy of the man who stands at the abyss of history. now comes the difficult part: governing, and leading this diverse nation in a better direction.
it has been the stanley crouch's of this country who have brought us to this place, not the farrakhan's.
be sure to know how and why we got here. if we forget that, or don't bother to learn, we will fail when the difficulties seem to overcome us. we will think we are alone, and fail, because we have isolated ourselves to the point that we are alone. if you think that the fight doesn't go on to the end, you are fooling yourself.
it is the strength we draw from the past that gives us the courage to create the future.
"it has been the stanley crouch's of this country who have brought us to this place, not the farrakhan's."
Talk about your false choices...
"Talk about your false choices..."
it is not a choice. it is an examination and opinion of what has been worthwhile and what has walked backward. it is a decision on my part. black nationalism and black separatism are reactionary ideologies. re-segregation, no matter how it is couched, creates an us versus them mentality. just look at israel. they have become as warped as the fascist ideology that helped create the state. they have even imitated the worst of national socialism: the ideal aryan, and the sabra; ethnic cleansing; the myth of blood and soil, shared by both.
that's no false choice. that's barbarism vs. civilization.
separatism, segregation, apartheid, imperialism, colonialism, american slavery, militarism, they all share one ideology: a group of self-identified people who first seek to protect themselves and then use monolithic hate to sustain themselves.
“Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean. The technical apotheosis of the barbarians, the terrible march of the mechanized orangutans, armed with hand grenades, poison gas, ammonia, and nitroglycerine….all that means far more than the threatened and terrorized world seems to realize. It must be understood. Let me say it loud and clear. The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness…out of lack of imagination…as the smoke of our burned books rises into the sky…” Joseph Roth