Review: Angry Black White Boy

Charles Demers
Sevem Oaks Magazine
August 16, 2005
http://www.sevenoaksmag.com/commentary/74_comm2.html 

In recent months, the literary world has been engaged
in a debate -- summarized and culminated in the New
York Times Book Review of August 7, in an essay titled
"Truth is Stronger than Fiction" -- about the relative
inability of the novel and short story to confront the
realities of (deep breath, here; I have to drop a
quarter in a jar every time I use this canard) our
post-9/11 world.  Sigh.  Such luminaries as Ian McEwan
and V.S. Naipaul weigh in on the subject, arguing in
favour of non-fiction's unique ability to meet the
rigorous intellectual demands of the contemporary
world.  Given Naipaul's famous hostility to Islam, of
course, it's not surprising that he'd be satiated by
today's headlines, while McEwan's coy search for
relevant, post-9/11 fiction is about as subtle as the
famous chorus chanted by the Bay City Rollers: "S-A-T-
U-R-D-A-Y..." Incidentally, and with great relevance to
this particular review, perhaps the most sober
assessment of the more-things-change quality of 9/11
that I've heard came from the world of hip hop, when
rapper J-Live intoned:

    Now it's all about NYPD caps and Pentagon bumper-
    stickers/ But yo/ you're still a n*gger [...]/ It
    ain't right them cops and them firemen died/ That
    shit is real tragic/ but it damn sure ain't magic/
    It won't make the brutality disappear/ It won't
    pull equality from behind your ear/ It won't make a
    difference in a two-party system/ Where the
    president cheats/ To win another four years

Poet, emcee and novelist Adam Mansbach's new book,
Angry Black White Boy or, The Miscegenation of Macon
Detornay marks a powerful argument for the continuing
relevance of the novel in advancing meditation on, and
exploration and enrichment of vital questions of
contemporary political significance; in this case
questions of race, class, culture, academia, history,
gentrification and appropriation.  Not only that,
Mansbach's novel is a case of precisely the opposite of
current conventional wisdom: Angry Black White Boy is a
work of fiction that successfully takes off from one of
the most important books on race of the 1990s, William
Upski Wimsatt's essay collection Bomb the Suburbs,
where Upski's own (also non-fiction) follow-up, No More
Prisons, failed completely.

Mansbach's novel is intimately engaged with a
particular section of Bomb the Suburbs called
"Wiggers," made up of four essays: "We use words like
'Mackadocious'"[and other progress from the front lines
of The White Struggle], "In Defense of Wiggers,"
"Aren't you in the wrong neighbourhood?" and "Hadn't I
just Been a special white boy?".  Both books steer
clear of totalizing judgements in favour of exploring
what the potentialities and possibilities are for white
behavior when young men are forced to choose between
the condescension of mimicking black culture or else
embracing 'their own' hostile, racist whiteness.

The titular Angry Black White Boy is Macon Detornay, a
young man whom Norman Mailer would recognize as the hip
hop generation's answer to the jazz era's White Negro.
Macon is a middle class, white, non-religious Jew from
an affluent suburb of Boston, unsatisfied with the
middling 'blackness' afforded him by a Star of David
medallion (a direct nod to Upski, who cites a similar,
autobiographical anecdote in Bomb the Suburbs).  Macon
sat at the black table in his high school cafeteria,
shared copious amounts of weed with his black
roommates, he loves hip hop and, as we meet him
settling in to school at Columbia and a part-time job
driving cabs, he is struggling with guilt drawn from
his being the great-grandson of the man credited with
segregating professional baseball.  In one of the
novel's small inconsistencies, Macon is sometimes just
as smart and sensitive as Adam Mansbach, and at other
times he is not.  Macon's greatest flaw, however, is
that he confuses 'solidarity' with 'downness'; he
conflates a thirst for justice with a desire to be cool
('cool' simply code for acceptance by hip black people)
tragically, mixing style and substance, and
substituting one for the other until the two are
indistinguishable and have lost any integrity they
might have had.

Transforming himself into a white Bigger Thomas/Robin
Hood composite, Macon begins robbing his white
passengers at gunpoint, and is surprised to find that
each of them reports their assailant to police as being
a black man, as a result of the anti-whiteness
invective Macon hurls at them during the hold-ups.  In
the chapters that follow, Macon's criminal notoriety
thrusts he and two of his black friends (dubbed 'the
Race Traitor Project') into the media maelstrom of
American race relations, inciting riots, bemusement,
guilt, anger and thwarted atonement in Macon's
'National Day of Apology.'  The story's impressive
challenges to the reader's suspension of disbelief can
be forgiven in the face of the far greater challenge
presented to the wall of 'simple truths' surrounding
any talk of black and white in the 21 st century.

In pointing out some of its enormous limitations --
political, not aesthetic -- Mansbach nonetheless fails
to transcend all the problems of hip hop.  Namely, like
the rap with which he is dealing, the author is unable
to find an important, realistic role for any woman in
his story, and the attempts at creating any fall flat.
His similes tended towards weakness, and the "code-
switching" that the San Francisco Bay Guardian lauded
in his last novel, Shackling Water, was tiresome here
and left many passages prone to dating early.

Still, Mansbach's poetic prose wraps itself around a
compelling and engaging story, replete with jarring
humour, action, and the kinds of complex human
interactions that might only be illustratable in the
world of fiction, where internal monologues of guilt,
desire, resentment, history and condescension play out
with far greater nuance than that which can be
expressed in any headline.

In chronicling hip hop, one of the major cultural
manifestations of American apartheid -- one that many
whites see as a loophole around racism while it is, in
effect, often a plane for more of the same -- Mansbach
has created what will be an enduring and nuanced
portrait of a certain type of whiteness, raising more
questions than answers, and quietly reaffirming the
central role to be played by fiction in sensitively,
attentively and intelligently processing the world in
which we lived and live, before and after the political
debris of fallen towers.