April 12, 2010 Issue

Kelefa Sanneh’s “Beyond The Pale” in this week’s issue is a cool – perhaps too cool – review of three books on “whiteness.” I count at least ten instances in this piece where Sanneh, instead of expressing outrage in the face of racism, opts for a cooler response: (1) the reference to an overtly racist Glenn Beck quote as an example of Beck’s “adventurous thoughts and memorable language”; (2) the description of Henry Louis Gates’s arrest as “one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows”; (3) his suggestion that “often the most appropriate answer to the question [what do you mean by white culture?] is a joke or a series of jokes”; (4) his description of the congresswoman Helen Chenowith-Hage’s veiled racist comment as an “ingenious euphemism”; (5) his question – “Should we pretend to be surprised?” – in response to the whiteness of Tea Party membership; (6) his question – “But what of it?” in response to the observation that American politics has been segregated for decades; (7) his description of a passage in James Baldwin’s “On Being White … And Other Lies” as being “marvelously splenetic”; (8) his quip about a racist statement by Hippocrates (quoted in one of the books under review - Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History of White People”), which wittily recycles the Chenowith-Hage quotation: “the warm-climate community, a few millennia ahead of schedule”; (9) his sarcasm about the connection the craniologist Johann Kaspar Lavater made between whiteness and weakness: “It is a delicate race, always on the verge of being overrun or adulterated, dethroned or debunked”; (10) the astonishing rationalization of Leigh Anne Tuohy’s racist rant in the movie “The Blind Side,” telling a black man to stay in his own neighborhood, as “refreshing, because there’s no trace of anxiety in her white identity.” Sarcasm, irony, jokiness, breeziness, rationalization – these apparently are the appropriate responses to racism today. Baldwin’s “splenetic” reaction, “marvelous” as it is, is now considered old hat. Gates’s outrage at being arrested in his own home by a white cop is mere entertainment. The message here seems to be: no matter what, stay cool. Personally, I prefer a little anger, politically incorrect though it may be. I think Baldwin’s outrage is more than just marvelous; it’s effective. And the same goes for Gates’s fierce indignation. It’s still possible to be “intellectual” and yet at the same time bring a little heat: see Gates’s great “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” (The New Yorker, October 23, 1995).