The Artificial White Man by Stanley Crouch
"The Artificial White Man" by Stanley Crouch is a collection of nine essays that delve into the themes of color, class, and gender as they are represented in various cultural mediums, including fiction, music, sports, and film. Central to the collection is the concept of "blues," which serves as a connective thread throughout the essays, although its specific meaning is left somewhat ambiguous. Crouch explores the notion of authenticity, contrasting it with what he perceives as artificial representations in media and popular culture. He critiques contemporary portrayals of African Americans, particularly those that perpetuate stereotypes, while also recognizing works that he deems authentic, such as films by John Singleton and literature by William Faulkner.
Crouch's essays address the superficiality in popular cultural narratives and emphasize the need for deeper, more inclusive storytelling that reflects the complexities of American society. He critically examines the impact of commercial interests on the representation of marginalized communities, advocating for a more genuine understanding of humanity that transcends racial and cultural boundaries. Through this work, Crouch positions himself as a provocative voice, challenging both mainstream and alternative cultural narratives, and calls for an integration that embraces diversity while rejecting bigotry. His unique style and bold assertions invite both admiration and criticism, making "The Artificial White Man" a compelling read for those interested in cultural criticism and racial politics.
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The Artificial White Man by Stanley Crouch
First published: 2004
Type of work: Essays/cultural criticism
Form and Content
The Artificial White Manis a collection of essays, written over a period of several years, in which Stanley Crouch explores the portrayal of color, class, and gender in fiction, music, sports, and film. The nine essays of the collection are connected by the theme of “blues,” a word included in the title of each, although Crouch does not define precisely what “blues” means. The book, whose subtitle is Essays on Authenticity, also lacks an explicit definition of the latter term. Instead, Crouch scatters hints as to his concept of authenticity throughout the essays. By reading them, one may gather that authenticity is opposed to making the unreal appear real. It entails rejecting the artificial divisions slipped into social and national life by commercial and political interests. It is the opposite of the shadow world reflected in the media and technology. It is also opposed to seeking “street credentials” and “hoodlum authenticity.” Crouch announces early in the book that he intends to “spank” those who claim to pursue authenticity while promoting different versions of a counterfeit. Indeed, the book “spanks” many and “celebrates” some.
In the first essay, “Baby Boy Blues,” Crouch attacks what he calls the “new minstrelsy,” contemporary media images of African American youth that merely rehash the “bullying, hedonistic buffoons” portrayed in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915). The purpose of the new minstrelsy is “blaxploitation,” the commercial exploitation of sensationalistic racial stereotypes by the purveyors of popular culture. Crouch stridently condemns much popular culture for reinforcing artificial distinctions that separate people and impeding people’s ability to recognize their common humanity. He also heaps praise on exceptions to this new minstrelsy. The work of film director John Singleton constitutes one such exception. Even though Singleton’s films—Boyz n the Hood (1991), Rosewood (1997), and Baby Boy (2001)—include scenes of violence, casual sex, and drug use and have been criticized as denigrating to African Americans, Crouch interprets them as authentic representations, because they honestly disclose, however unconsciously, the reality of those who struggle to escape a ruinous lifestyle.
Crouch devotes an entire essay, “Segregated Fiction Blues,” to critiquing contemporary popular fiction that cravenly avoids the larger, inclusive, and epic themes of life in American society. Exceptions exist, but the author notes that writers who cross the color line, such as William Styron in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), are publicly flogged by the critics who do see beneath the surface. Crouch repeatedly upholds William Faulkner as an exemplary American writer of authenticity who crossed the color line in Go Down, Moses (1942).
Crouch’s major complaint is that most contemporary fiction writers avoid the grand themes that underlie the epic character of the United States and its history—themes that include the rebelliousness that won Americans freedom from Great Britain, their inherent suspicion of government and authority, their belief in upward mobility, and the freedom they claim to reinvent themselves at every juncture. Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000), which are rooted, in Crouch’s judgment, in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, are also cited as examples of authentic fiction. Crouch recognizes Saul Bellow’s Revelstein (2000) as another work of authentic fiction to the extent that it raises the fundamental question of what it means to cross racial and cultural lines and to feel comfortable on the streets while belonging to academia.
In an essay titled “Blues for the Artificial White Man” that deals with the literary use of spectator sports—basketball in particular—Crouch criticizes David Shields’s Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999), a subjective account of the 1994-1995 season of the Seattle SuperSonics. Crouch argues that suburban whites watch basketball as an opportunity to satisfy “their favorite dreams,” their sexual fantasies, by reducing African American men to “athletic flesh.”
The longest essay in the collection is devoted to the films of Quentin Tarantino that, in the author’s exegesis, call attention to Americans’ obsession with things exotic and their impaired ability to understand anything universal except extreme violence. Tarantino, for Crouch, speaks across race, color, and class lines as he uses characters that are the products of “cultural miscegenation” to confront a pop culture that deals in stereotypes. Crouch concludes the volume with a call for authenticity that entails striving for the kind of integration that rejects bigotry and xenophobia and embraces the entire spectrum of humanity.
Critical Context
Crouch is a multifaceted and controversial author and cultural critic. He is best-known as a syndicated columnist for The New York Daily News, a contributing editor to The New Republic, and a jazz critic. He has challenged all orthodoxies both on the Right and on the Left. Because of his penchant for expressing his views forcefully and ruthlessly, he defies ideological classification. Some have called him a neoconservative, because he has questioned the views of many prominent African Americans. Some have called him a sell-out, because he refuses to buy into mainstream African American perspectives on issues of race and ethnicity. He is highly critical of the lifestyle of those with “gold teeth, dropdown pants and tasteless jewelry.” As a jazz critic, he does not care very much for the new forms of jazz music. Crouch is also notorious for his angry outbursts against his critics to the point of physically attacking some of them on a few occasions. Nevertheless, most critics acknowledge him as among the more powerful voices and literary figures to emerge in recent times from the African American community.
First-time readers of Crouch may find themselves simultaneously fascinated and irritated by his bluster and bold assertions. His prose has also been criticized for disregarding rules of logic and accepted usages, for mixing metaphors, and for what appears to be hurried writing. Nevertheless, critics as well as admirers would agree that his views of the media and popular culture are courageous, and he represents an independent voice free of programmatically ideological constraints.
The Artificial White Man is Crouch’s second major collection of essays, after Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990). His other works include The All-American Skin Game: Or, The Decoy of Race (1995), Always in Pursuit (1998), and the novel Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing (2000). All of Crouch’s works center around the themes of cultural decadence, racial politics, and the ironies and conflicts that prevail in American life. His prose is inimitable in its style, liveliness, and persuasiveness, and it keeps readers passionately engaged, whether or not they agree with him.
Bibliography
Beck, Stefan. “Authenticity Blues.” The New Criterion 23 (November, 2004): 71-73. Offers the view that Crouch startles readers with his uncommon prose to help them see reality beyond the perspective of group affiliations.
Eakin, Emily. “The Artificial White Man: Battling Gangstas and Hussies.” The New York Times, January 16, 2006. While applauding the author’s intellectual concerns, Eakin sharply criticizes his prose for being unclear, insensitive, and imprecise.
Margolis, Edward. Review of The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity, by Stanley Crouch. African American Review 40 (2006): 601-603. Provides a balanced and critical assessment of the book’s contribution to cultural criticism.
Seymour, Gene. “Crouching Tiger.” The Nation, May 16, 2005, pp. 31-33. Concludes that the book is Crouch’s best so far and that it is very effective in challenging conventional thinking.
Walton, Anthony. “Color Blind.” The Washington Post, November 24, 2004. Proposes that, through his essays, Crouch reveals his own autobiography.