关键词:
RACIAL identity of blacks
AFRICAN Americans
NONFICTION
摘要:
This fascinating autoethnography is by turns revelatory, recondite, ambitious, challenging, and uncomfortable. Anthropologist J. Lorand Matory has written an intensely personal meditation on the dilemmas of identity-fashioning that “ethnic Blacks” face in confronting the American racial hierarchy. Whether of recent African or Caribbean immigrant origin, or of Louisiana Creole, part Native American, or Gullah/Geechee ancestry, Matory sees all of these groups struggling to distinguish themselves from a white-defined, dysfunctional African American “constituent Other”—which is ironically the same respect-seeking strategy historically pursued by the Black middle class, who may increasingly be lumped among the stigmatized, Matory fears, as W. E. B. DuBois’s twentieth-century color line gives way to what he calls the twenty-first-century “ethnic line.”Having grown up in the heyday of 1960s–70s Black Power, Matory initially expected that various African-descended groups would tend toward political unity in confronting the American racial binary, but that notion proved disappointingly unfounded. Instead, he uncovered a disturbing tendency that he dubs “ethnic schadenfreude”—distancing oneself socially and deploying a selective rendition of supposed cultural differences while downplaying structural racism, as a means of explaining divergent socioeconomic outcomes and thereby avoiding the ignominy of “last place.” As explanatory context, Matory cites civil rights reforms that enabled some Blacks to pursue upward mobility, post-1965 immigration trends that transformed the country’s ethnic mix, and, most importantly, the Reaganite (neoliberal) political climate in which race-based inequality is explained in individualistic terms. Matory contrasts this situation with the experience of previous generations, most immediately the 1950s generation of his “three fathers”—his adviser, a family friend, and his biological father, respectively Trinidadian, Nigerian, and African American.