The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity

by Stanley Crouch

In this penetrating collection of original essays, legendary gadfly and esteemed critic Stanley Crouch tackles the notion on authenticity-what it is, what it isn't, and what we make of it, for good or for bad. While the question of who's the real deal and who isn't has now seeped into nearly every corner of American culture, nowhere does the idea of authenticity hold greater sway than in the realm of ethnicity. In this bracing collection of original essays, Crouch brings all his rhetorical skills to bear on this animating-and polarizing-idea, and investigates the motives behind those who present themselves as authentic, those who claim to expose the inauthentic, and what this all tells us about the state of the arts-from the vaulted halls of literary fiction to the arena of soft drink-shilling pop stars-in America today. For Crouch, this is not simply an academic exercise, but a summation of our peculiar historical moment. Living in a time in which much of the conventions that defined and limited people's futures-whether it be race, class, or sex-have been obliterated, we're both liberated from bigotries and yet-still-facing profound disillusionment. As influences come and go at breakneck speed, as traditions are remade and re-imagined, it has become hard to tell which metaphorical end is up. The result, Crouch argues, is not only a national paranoia that someone may have put something over on us-i.e. that we have too often been duped into believing that the counterfeit is authentic-but also a deep retrenchment of imagination and artistic expression, from white and black alike. As he promises in his introduction: "This book is an argument with all of that, however sympathetic it might be to the search for alternatives to our disappointments. It hopes to present, through affirmation, a new form of rebellion in our time of cosmetic dissent."

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Sociology, Cultural, Criticism, Politics

244 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2004

About the author

Stanley Lawrence Crouch was an American poet, music journalist & jazz critic, biographer, novelist, educator and cultural commentator. He was also both a civil rights activist and a musician as a young man.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Stanley Crouch attended Thomas Jefferson High School, graduating in 1963. He continued his education at area junior colleges and became active in the civil rights movement, working with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He gained a reputation as a talented young poet, and in 1968 became poet-in-residence at Pitzer College (Claremont, California); he then taught theatre and literature at Pomona College (Claremont, California). In 1969, a recording of him reading several of his poems was released as an LP by Flying Dutchman Records. This was followed by his first book, a collection of his poems published in 1972 by the Richard W. Baron Publishing Co.

During the early 1970s, Mr. Crouch also pursued a parallel career as a musician, playing the drums in a progressive jazz group called Black Music Infinity, which he had formed with saxophonist & clarinetist David Murray, and which also featured saxophonist Arthur Blythe. In 1975, Mr. Crouch & Mr. Murray moved from California to New York City, where they lived above an East Village jazz club called the Tin Palace. Mr. Crouch functioned as the club's booking agent for a while, and he both chronicled and participated in the thriving avant-garde jazz scene in New York at that time, along with musicians such as Henry Threadgill, James Blood Ulmer and Olu Dara, among many others. There were also a number of other poets, as well as photographers, painters and other visual artists actively involved in that milieu. By the end of the 1970s, however, Mr. Crouch had for the most part given up the drums, and his role as a musician, to concentrate on writing.

In 1980 Mr. Crouch joined the staff of the Village Voice, where for the next several years he further honed his craft as a writer. He was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982. In 1987 he became an artistic consultant for the Jazz at Lincoln Center program, along with Wynton Marsalis, for whom he had become a friend and intellectual mentor. After leaving the Village Voice in 1988, Crouch published 'Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989', which was selected by The Encyclopædia Britannica Yearbook as the best book of essays published in 1990. He received a Whiting Award in 1991, which was followed in 1993 by a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mr. Crouch continued to write for newspapers and magazines in addition to writing books. He wrote a column for the New York Daily News, and eventually became a syndicated columnist. He also appeared in several documentary films and was a frequent guest on television programs. His first novel, 'Don't the Moon Look Lonesome' was published in 2000, and 'Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker', his biography of the revered jazz musician, in 2013.

In addition to his writing on music and the arts generally, Mr. Crouch was one of the most incisive writers and socio-cultural commentators on race relations in the U.S., which was a frequent topic of his articles and books. In 2003 he was fired from the magazine 'JazzTimes' after an article he had written on racism in the music business had caused a somewhat overblown and ridiculous controversy. Probably not coincidentally, he was selected in 2005 as one of the inaugural fellows by the Fletcher Foundation, which awards annual fellowships to people working on issues of race and civil rights. Mr. Crouch was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. In 2016, he was awarded the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction, and he was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2019.

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 Stars. This was my first run-in with Crouch, who seems to have taken the cultural skepticism of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray and transformed it into a full-on disaffected cultural conservatism. There's basically no reason to read this book, whether it be because the complete dismissal of hip-hop culture (so dated! so baldly classist!) or the frequent bouts of misogyny (whew lord when Crouch starts explaining *why* Black men date white women) or the mediocre conceptual apparatuses (the essay comparing Borges, Hemingway, and Ellington, because they all share a birth year, feels like an undergraduate idea that the writer couldn't turn away from because the paper was due the next morning). I don't want to be full-on dismissive here because Crouch obviously comes from a much different perspective than I can access, and he obviously has a lot of intelligence, but I also disagree with a lot of things he says, which almost made me feel bad that I was actually agreeing with what he said about Tarantino. But then again, that essay feels nigh irrelevant because it was written after the release of Kill Bill and takes itself to be a look at Tarantino's entire career, which obviously went a lot further in terms of racial commentary and depiction.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

Easily Crouch's weakest essay collection. The essays are slight and too often fawn over the reputation of the subject being criticized, especially Philip Roth (who he loves with reservations) and even Toni Morrison (whose Beloved Crouch deservedly criticized a decade prior, but here has only bland comments to make). There's also a confused essay on Hemingway and Borges that uses their shared birthyear as an excuse to compare short stories; the comparison is unsurprisingly fruitless: the two writers have almost nothing in common, which I thought was obvious. Less surprising is that the best essay here, on Alfred Appel's jazz history, is actually a repeat from Crouch's excellent Considerations on Genius. As a final aside, I can't resist giving him credit for writing the best summation I've read of Daniel Mendelsohn's sourpuss criticism: "the one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest."

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars- A bit repetitive in spots (as is par for the course with collections like this- essays and short pieces gathered together by one author on a general theme). Wish I had read this years ago while dissertating- it had some interesting ideas about coolness, race, and authenticity.

[Ben Bush]

The cover makes me think of when Jonathan Franzen's glasses getting stolen and held for ransom at a reading in London, an association that may or may not prove to relevant. I was reading this earlier today and the man across the table from me asked me how I liked it and then told how he had met Crouch and offered to be his personal trainer in exchange for an equal amount of time spent listening to Jazz with Crouch while Crouch explained what he noticed and heard in the music. I was pretty struck by David Shield's Black Planet and so I'm curious to see Crouch's response: I get the feeling he takes the piss out of him but not totally sure.

[Rhi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Was not impressed with the theories, criticisms, or logic used in these essays. Most of the book seemed to be superfluous references to what other writers had thought about race and authenticity, and if there was any original thought on Crouch's part, it went over my head. I had to force myself to finish to make sure that he wasn't saving all the original ideas for a climactic last chapter, but no dice.