An Interview with Min Jin Lee

Steve Williams: Free Food for Millionaires is one of the catchiest titles I’ve ever heard. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided on this as a title for your novel?

Min Jin Lee: Years before I started the book, a friend who worked on Wall Street told me a story about how at his bank, after a deal ends, there is usually a free buffet lunch for the deal team as well as others on the trading floor. Usually, the food was thematic to the deal — e.g., Indian food after raising capital for an Indian power plant.

My friend described that at these free lunches, there was one very wealthy managing director who would routinely rush to the head of the line to fill his plate before the more junior, and obviously, lesser paid employees. I thought this was hilarious that a really rich guy, i.e., a millionaire, would lunge for free food and push out the others. It seemed so tacky and ridiculous to me. I grew up in a fairly blue collar neighborhood, and I just remember that it was not cool to be so grubby even when you didn’t have much, and this anecdote made me think more about how poor(er) people and middle class people are often made to feel ashamed of their desires while very wealthy people often feel entitled to get what they want when they want it. I wanted to call the book Free Food for Millionaires because I wanted to write about socially thwarted desires as well as this contrasting idea that grace (unmerited favor) is available to all people.

SW: Free Food for Millionaires takes the form of the 19th century social novel. What appeals to you about this narrative style, and what did you feel made it suitable for your novel?

MJL: The 19th century social novel is my favorite genre so although it was enormously challenging for me, it made sense to try to write one. (“Heck, why not?” she thought.) When I was growing up, I found comfort in the very long European works. I think when the story is good, readers don’t want the books to end; however, today’s reader, assaulted by the immense volume of books to choose from and short on time, is suspicious of the long work, especially when the work’s quality or appeal can’t be verified. That said, I guess, I was faithful that someone else besides my family members may want to read a long book about people I found interesting. I am fascinated by communities, small and large, and individuals in them. I am curious about how we individuals work within communities and without them so it felt very natural to me to pursue this old-school style of writing which allowed for questions, observations and experiments. As a writer, I remain more interested in all the characters rather than one character. I confess that I don’t believe in “a man is an island” or that one man’s fate can be determined in a vacuum so I seek a well populated fiction. As much as I admire the first person voice (see Jane Eyre), I think my work would not have made sense unless it was done in a third person omniscient point of view.

SW: I would imagine one of the greatest challenges of writing about a community is trying to imagine and realize such a diverse cast of characters. Was there a certain character (or characters) that was particularly challenging to bring to life?

MJL: You are generous to say that envisioning and realizing a community is challenging. In fact, for me, it was freaking daunting. I’ve heard some of my favorite artists talk about the image they have in their heads about what their work is supposed to look like. In my image, my story had a lot of strong people and lot of conflicting desire. This picture was helpful for me to overcome the hurdle of the big cast challenges, because I knew I had a book length work. Having a large cast also gave me enormous encouragement and comfort when certain characters would not cooperate. There were characters who lit up the page or tickled me with humor, no different than when I see certain people in my life. This was exciting and lifesaving, because writing requires an unnatural solitude, and I was enduring the absence of society (when writing) through replicating my own society (my characters). As in life, there are people I don’t look forward to seeing, and in my work, there were characters I felt frightened by, or knew there would be danger or injury when they showed up. I had to ask myself why I was afraid or why I dreaded them. When I wanted to write their stories, I had to grant these characters some aspect of myself to relate to them differently. I gave a character my height, or an illness I had once had, my hair color, or an odd interest I used to have in baking muffins. When I did this, it helped me to see my characters differently. The person with whom I had significant problems was Charles, my choir director; so I gave him my sense of failure, my sense of feeling lost in a world that didn’t need my work, my feeling left out in a glittering and imagined New York art world where all the Greats know each other. I was going through a profound and protracted period of sadness during my years of writing my first book, and Charles, a very troubled character who is also gifted, embodied some of that emotion. As I write my current manuscript, I think I may always feel this shadow of melancholy; it feels permanent to me and not necessarily unfortunate. The people in my pages, good and bad, help me with this.

SW: I love the idea that certain characters frightened even you; it’s a testament to how alive the society you create feels. But I want to talk a little bit more about how you give some characters some of your own qualities and quirks. So when you give a character a certain trait of yours, it’s a way for you to begin making them identifiable for yourself? It’s a step towards understanding them?

MJL: Yes, I think when I gave the characters certain biographical traits, it made them identifiable and more understandable to me. If a person tells me that he is from the Bronx, for example, I tend to feel a sense of kinship with him (perhaps irrationally), because I spent four wonderful years in the Bronx attending the Bronx High School of Science. It’s possible that this Bronx native may in fact dislike nerds like me who went to Bronx Science but lived in Queens, but because I associate the Bronx with a place of growth and intellectual safety (really), I identify with him and transfer my positive feelings to him in some measure. I suppose this is why when we attend social events, we ask strangers, “Where are you from?” — it’s a wish to connect through a superficial question, because we want to transfer a personal association (good or bad) to a new person. I suppose it is also a method to infer alleged knowledge from one’s hometown.

SW: You bring up hometowns and kinship. Is the desire to create that bond with your characters a reason you chose to set your novel in New York City?

MJL: I wrote three other (failed) novel manuscripts before this Free Food for Millionaires, and FFfM was the first one set in the boroughs of Queens and Manhattan. I was inspired by A House For Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul, the English writer of Indian descent who was born and raised in Trinidad. Naipaul set his novel Mr. Biswas in “Arwacas” based on the town of Chaguanas (an hour south of the capital Port-of-Spain, Trinidad) where he grew up, and reading that work in particular gave me courage to write about Elmhurst, Queens where I grew up. Naipaul is a controversial figure, and I do not agree with much of his political sentiments, however, I am always amazed by the depth and honesty of his struggle as a writer. I wanted very much to write about this world that meant so much to me, and I think by the time I approached this manuscript, I was much less worried about judgment.

SW: How important do you think NYC is to your work? Or, to put it another way, do you think of yourself as a New York writer?

MJL: I feel most myself in New York City. I grew up in Queens, went to high school in the Bronx, and my parents had a wholesale business in Manhattan’s Koreatown on 30th Street and Broadway. I live in Manhattan now. I feel comfortable around the many different kinds of people in New York, and when I am in a monolithic culture, or a place that elevates homogeneity over heterogeneity, I feel stifled and upset. I think of myself as a New York writer even when I am not in New York, and by that I mean, I think the values and themes of New York — uniqueness, ambition, outsiders/insiders, failure, grandiosity and humiliation — are deeply ingrained in my point of view.

SW: Can you describe some of your habits and practices as a writer?

MJL: Before I write, I read the Bible and I pray. I read a long time ago that Willa Cather did this, and I tried it.

This ritual started out as a kind of curious exercise, and now, I can’t imagine not doing it anymore. It feels very private and quiet to me, and I think I need this before I write.

SW: You come from a law background, attending Georgetown Law and practicing as a lawyer for several years. In what ways do you feel that experience has benefited your writing? Conversely, do you feel there have been certain advantages to never going for an MFA? 

MJL: I think I have a great deal of discipline about work and effort. Many of my friends have MFAs, and they are wonderful writers. I have always wanted an MFA but didn’t have the time or the willingness to change my family life to pursue this. I love classes and studying so I think I would have enjoyed getting an MFA. That said, I don’t think I have any disadvantages from it. I can’t be sure, of course. I don’t know many fiction writers so perhaps this is what happened because I have a very layperson life. I live in a very ordinary way, and I prefer this.

SW: It’s clear that you’ve been influenced by George Eliot and other 19th century authors, but are there contemporary writers who influence your writing or are important to you as a reader? 

MJL: I adore Junot Dîaz‘s work. His work gave me a kind of permission to be honest about the world I loved. Junot Dîaz is a genius.

When I was in college, I read a lot of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde; all three influenced me a great deal when I was starting to put words together.

SW: I’ve heard you and Junot Dîaz talk about writing with a specific audience in mind. From what I understand, the idea there isn’t to exclude anyone, but to give your work a purpose and a goal. To paraphrase something Dîaz said, ‘A comment directed towards someone specific is more interesting to overhear than a comment directed towards nobody.’ When your work reaches that target audience, what would you like him or her to get out of reading your work? 

MJL: I think I would like him or her to feel seen, because I feel like I want to really see everyone. I have felt unseen, and this is a kind of specific condition I have lived with. I think many people feel unseen or in contrast exposed, but few people feel seen for who they are. I think it takes time to see people, to really consider who they are. I hope to do this for my reader through my work.

The Tension Between Domesticity and Artistry: On Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's Madeleine Is Sleeping

When I submitted the unsure beginnings of a novel to my writers’ group, the wonderful Idra Novey recommended Madeleine Is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. I was, am, interested in novels in prose poems. Madeleine Is Sleeping is written as a series of lyrical, impressionistic observations on events or characters that range from a single sentence to a page or page-and-a-half in length. It’s a bildungsroman of sorts: Madeleine has fallen mysteriously into a deep, impenetrable sleep. Without being able to separate dream action from waking reality, the reader follows her as she leaves her provincial French village, joins a gypsy circus, and stumbles into an unexpected triangle of desire.

But in its fractured telling, the story only becomes clear on second read. The novel is more about the savoring of tangential reveries, odd corners and flyaway moments than the propulsion of plot. The inciting incident occurs when Madeleine is caught fondling the village idiot. Her mother dips her hands into a pot of boiling lye and sends her away to a convent. One short paragraph titled “bureaucracy” is given to the revelation and aftermath of Madeleine’s transgression, a single sentence on the same page to the lye. I missed it on first read. Still, the bildungsroman progression was clear, the emotions attending adolescence aptly muddied: The initial pleasure Madeleine, with her bandaged hands, takes in being cared for at the convent; her subsequent escape and discovery that when her bandages are removed, her hands have grown into mitten-like paddles; her determination to use her disfigurement as an acrobat in the circus; her unwitting conversion from victim to victimizer when she is made to paddle another performer, M. Pujol; and her ultimate longing — when this confusion becomes love — for fingers “to touch the soft hair growing there on the back of [M. Pujol’s] neck.”

There are other Freudian metaphors for desire and transformation. Among the circus freaks is Charlotte, who, longing to be touched by her asexual husband in the way that he touches his viol, morphs into a viol, growing black, horse-like hairs down the length of her body. As she unbuttons her bodice and draws a bow across the strings, she tells Madeleine, “Music, more than any other thing in the world, teaches us emotion.” There is the metamorphosis of Matilde, a luxuriously fat woman who inexplicably sprouts two sets of wings and flies up to housetops. An alter-ego for the author, Matilde travels freely between dream and reality, keeping a scientific journal, maintaining that if she meticulously records the details of life, the overall picture will emerge.

Madeleine is Sleeping is a novel that resides in the details. Charlotte’s story is complicated toward the end of the book, its heartbreaking particulars assiduously relayed by Madeleine’s sister, Beatrice, over the course of four sections. Claude, the younger brother, blurts out the ending at the conclusion of the first section, but the reader is rewarded for persisting, even as three interrupting sections cut away from Charlotte’s story. Alas, Beatrice never gets to the end of the story. “The story is too long, Mother interrupts. All those . . . corridors . . . I already know what is going to happen. Claude told us in the beginning.”  Mother is concerned only with the tidy marriage plot she has arranged for Madeleine, which Charlotte’s macabre marriage story quite literally upsets. I won’t be a spoiler like Claude, but ending or no, the rich middle of Charlotte’s story plumbs the tension between domesticity and artistry, speech and silence, and deserves not merely patience, but several re-readings, as it offers a multiplicity of interpretations.

Madeleine’s corridors are wondrous strange. When it’s discovered that not merely Madeleine, but all the girls, have played sex games with the village idiot, he is sent to an insane asylum. There, he mails Madeleine sketches of his brainpan that look like the “moon on its back.” “Conversion” describes how Madeleine’s brothers and sisters make kites from the accumulating drawings, how Mother decorates her preserves with their delicate cranial swirls. When the shared object of their love leaves them, Madeleine and the circus photographer pour over photographs of him. “This image, [the photographer] tells Madeleine, is literally an emanation of M. Pujol: from his body radiates light, which then inscribes itself on the very surface which in turn your gaze now touches.”

M. Pujol’s body emits not merely light, but “the most melancholy sounds [Madeleine has] ever heard: that of the nightingale, the grasshopper, the cuckoo . . . the strange and unearthly emissions reminded her of her home, and she wept.” Lest the novel’s enchantment become too precious, the ethereal is tempered by the body’s humiliations and grotesqueries, the surreal grounded in the sensual. Or rather, Madeleine is Sleeping transcends these divisions. M. Pujol’s musical flatulence is at once farcical and heartrending.

The photographs of M. Pujol were taken for the widow, a rich old libertine who hires the circus to pose in lecherous tableaus for her pleasure. Except the photographs offer her no pleasure. She teases a scientist who interviews her for his study of libertines, “so strenuous were his attempts to manage her perversions, to render them immobile. What you must . . . understand about my predilections (the scientist leans forward: at long last, the secret!) is that my desire does not take; it turns, as milk does.”

Throughout, there are the motifs of desire’s slipperiness, aberrance’s resistance to immobility. The beauty of Shun-Lien Bynum’s vision makes us embrace the strange — what does not fit and is not clear — which seems to me the province of the prose poem. The successful novel in prose poems manages to resist immobility, to open a space for ambiguity. I recently read We the Animals, a novel that similarly refuses the traditional bildungsroman trajectory, that uses the liminal form of the prose poem to get at the fierce space between a family’s power to sustain and destroy.

Through the meticulousness of her language, Shun-Lien Bynum manages to simultaneously inhabit and contain desire, aberrance and transformation. The tension between form and the sublime, the combination of a voice at once extravagant and matter-of-fact, indulgent and constrained, made me think of Anne Carson, whom Shun-Lien Bynum lists among her favorite writers. The artist bildungsroman themes in Madeleine is Sleeping are closest to Autobiography of Red, but I think of Decreation, which searches for, and ultimately explodes, various forms to contain the Sublime — opera librettos, screenplays, poems, oratorios, essays. “Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep),” an essay in which Carson writes about how authors use the space between waking and sleep, seems particularly relevant. Here Carson writes about how To the Lighthouse falls asleep for 25 pages in the middle section, “Time Passes”: “Changes flow over the house of the story and penetrate the lives of the characters while they sleep. These changes are glimpsed as if from underneath; Virginia Woolf’s main narrative is a catalogue of silent bedrooms. . . Down across these phenomena come facts from the waking world, like swimmers stroking by on a night lake. . . . [Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay, having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” In Madeleine is Sleeping, the major plot points similarly “float past the narrative like the muffled shock of a sound heard while sleeping.” The novel’s emotional and poetic density is both allayed and heightened by sleep pauses, recurring pages containing a single sentence: Madeleine stirs in her sleep.   

Carson goes on to discuss The Voyage Out, in which Woolf writes of six people traveling to South America on a boat, afloat between waking and sleep. “The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from one brain to another. They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid ocean.” The characters in Madeleine is Sleeping meld in the same porous way, all of them manifestations of adolescent fears and scars and becoming. Madeleine is Sleeping uses the space between sleep and waking to traverse the liminal territory of adolescence, the space between disfigurement and beauty, the bawdy and the holy, abjection and attraction, asceticism and ecstasy, impotence and power.

In Shun-Lien Bynum’s second novel, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, this sepia­-tinted dream of pseudo-Victorians and fairytale grotesques gives way to a linked collection of stories about a seventh grade English teacher that resemble personal essays in their retrospective composure and resignation. Ms. Hempel puzzles over her reverse metamorphosis, from parti-­colored butterfly to monochromic caterpillar:

“Mr. Dunne, her college counselor, was the one who first noticed the discrepancy. Impressive scores, mediocre grades. A specialist was consulted, a series of tests administered, and a medication prescribed. The bitter pills, her father used to call them. The prescription made her hands shake a little, but that wore off after awhile. And then: a shy, newfound composure. Her mother entrusted her with the holiday newsletter; she wrote film reviews for the university newspaper. She had a nice way with words, a neat way of telling a story.

To her ears, though, her stories sounded smushed. As if they had been sat upon by accident. None of the interesting parts survived.” She remembers the story she told at her father’s funeral: “Beautiful was not what she intended.  Her story was not about safety and concern and anxious attentions.  It was a tale of danger, intrigue; a story from the days before her medicine. . . . This was the story she wanted to tell. Then how did something altogether different emerge?  Something she didn’t even recognize as her own.”

My first book was my Monster in a Box. I finished the first version at 27 in LA, where I’d moved for love and where love and I didn’t seem to make sense. I wrote in my underwear in a roach-ridden hotbox of an apartment; I wrote from inside the wound, unspeakably sad and angry and alone, Baldwin, Woolf, and Carole Maso my closest friends. A large part of this book was about my father’s entrenchment in an authoritarian cult that talked in circles about Rules and Tools, so I had a vested interest in breaking formal rules. I returned to New York alone and dropped this unruly 600-page beast on the desk of an agent who called it an “epic quest full of moral force and luminosity,” who feared that if I cut it down it would “shrink from a big, tawny lion to a skinny cat” and believed we only had to find someone who let it speak to them. I didn’t find that someone and in the years that followed, this first book went through countless visions and revisions. I worked on it for too long, long after its rawness had dissipated. I whittled it down to a skinny cat I hardly recognized as my own.

I don’t devalue the understanding of craft and editing I gained, but I am trying, in the gestation of this second book, to unlearn some of the rules, to locate the intersection between the dream and the analyst. Since it’s the dream that must first be protected, I’m grateful for the unruly extravagance of Madeleine is Sleeping, its courageous insistence upon the strange, misshapen magic of claiming one’s own cracked voice.

"Keep This Post-Black-Boy Running": The Problem of James Baldwin

1.

Why Read Baldwin Now?

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings gathers writings not published in the Library of America’s 1998 volume, James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Far more than a rattle bag of leftovers, scratched drafts, or airy ephemera, the book brings together the kind of rich, bold, and brilliant essays we’ve come to prize from Baldwin even more than his revolutionary fiction.

Edited and introduced by Randall Kenan from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the collection includes some sixty essays, speeches, letters, profiles, and reviews dug out of newspapers, journals, and private holdings and representing Baldwin’s prodigious output from the late 1950s to his death in 1987.

Baldwin’s reflective essays about writers and writing are never merely about literature; or, to be more accurate, they expand and ennoble the idea of what literature is: literature is race is politics is culture is humanity is the future is the world.

As a writer, he saw that after the Second World War, “the ocean, inconceivably, had shrunk to the size of a swimming pool.” Young American writers were therefore “compelled to take it upon themselves to describe us to ourselves as we now are.” He takes his own dictum seriously with every new story and essay, becoming an ever-bolder thinker and writer, as fresh and incisive now as he must have seemed when he was publishing. And that precisely is the problem.

2.

Move Forward or Die

Many of his pieces about literature are prickly and contentious, and he wasn’t shy about criticizing elder white novelists. Looking back, how could it have been otherwise? If Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man bounced the black novel back onto the tracks from where Native Son’s “unsavory” depiction of a black murderer had derailed a decade earlier, Baldwin could hardly avoid chafing under the strain of all the “go-slow” cultural politics coming from both races. He had to clear some ground in order to breathe and write.

So down go Hemingway and Faulkner (with respect and a sense of reverence: “the man who wrote Light in August”), Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and others, along with the celebrated loosening of ties with his former mentor Richard Wright. Critical assessment and dismissal seemed not only right and proper for him at his time of ascendance, but for all American writers, no matter what decade or color of skin he or she happens to be in.

“We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake American into what we say we want it to be.”

And what generation isn’t? Even accepting that writers his own vintage would have been overthrown two or three times already, which no doubt he would have relished, his point remains valid. We have to move forward or die.

Was anyone listening? A few, perhaps, but Baldwin was often as ahead of his time in racial thinking as he was in literary criticism. With its brief disquisition on the strain of racial color in American fiction, specifically the opposition of the Redskin (native) with the Paleface (white), a piece like “As Much Truth As One Can Bear” anticipates Toni Morrison’s motif of the white American writer’s fixation on “blackness” in her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

3.

That Bitterness Is Our Only Hope

Perhaps because it is so ephemeral, one of the most telling pieces Kenan give us is “The Nigger We Invent,” a transcription of an interview Baldwin gave before a House Select Committee in 1969 in support of a bill to establish a national commission on “Negro History and Culture.” It is a devastating alarum about the near total absence of black history in education after the era of civil rights and the beginning of the Black Power movements.

In response to a question about the lack of education about black history, Baldwin says,

“I think one of the stumbling blocks is that the nature of the black experience in this country does indicate something about the total American history which frightens Americans. . . . It brings up the real history of the country — the history of our relationships with Mexican and slaves. All these points contradict the myth of American history. It attacks the American identity in a sense. . . .

“If we are going to build a multiracial society, which is our only hope, then one has got to accept that I have learned a lot from you [white society], and a lot of it is bitter, but you have a lot to learn from me, and a lot of that will be bitter. That bitterness is our only hope. That is the only way we get past it. Am I making sense to you?”

Apparently not enough sense for anyone to listen. We weren’t listening then and we aren’t now. For as powerful a statement as he makes, after forty years we have done nothing about the problem. In fact, we’ve gone in reverse.

4.

Un-Teaching the Movement

When the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance Program last month delivered its report, “Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011,” the truth of our inattention truly was bitter, though not because the truths told are as hurtful as Baldwin predicted, but because no truths are being told at all.

The SPLC’s report tells the shameful story about our children’s ignorance of civil rights and black history, an ignorance that remains one of the fundamental issues of our society. Thirty-five states received a grade of F on their efforts in teaching civil rights. Sixteen states do not require any instruction at all. Most of those who do, concentrate on “heroes” whose biographical instruction to children tends toward hagiography and is often as useful as a biography of Batman might be. Our education system has failed at precisely the time when living witnesses of the civil rights decades are aging and dying.

5.

How MLK Freed the Slaves

To go a step further, while it’s common knowledge that teachers burdened with lesson plans centered on mandated testing rarely have time to teach the post-World War II era, it’s also true that the roots of the society in which those students live were planted in that same period more than in any other. It’s precisely when people are young and impressionable that the seeds of prejudice are sown, or not, and when they are, they take root deeply. By making history a study of “the past,” no more than a vague lesson plan we teach and put away, we are in grave danger of losing the world that formed us, the adults, and them, our children.

Firsthand data is available as your nearest teacher. I had occasion recently to do a quick and informal survey of teachers and librarians across the country about how civil rights is taught. The responses varied, ranging from there being little formal teaching to reports of excellent student projects. Most telling to me was a response from Arizona:

“I tried, as a school librarian, for two years to impress upon the intermediate students that Martin Luther King, Jr., had NOTHING to do with freeing the slaves. For the most part, they firmly believed that nothing happened between the 1860s and the 1960s . . . and then Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus and Martin Luther King gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech and all the slaves were freed!”

6.

The Time a Black Man Became President

Yet if Baldwin could have imagined our current ignorance, he might not have been able to predict how this sad assessment dovetails so neatly with the concepts of Post-Blackness and Post-Racial identity floated from time to time, and again recently in Touré’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?

Now, the concept of a new world of African-American identity is not at all the same as dampening the study of black history in our schools, and yet the dying off of the witnesses to that history put such post-racial trends in a different light altogether. In his review of Touré in the New York Times Book Review, Orlando Patterson says:

“Much has been written on the benefits that accrued to the generation of African-Americans reaping the rewards of the civil rights revolution. But we have heard surprisingly little from those in the post-civil-rights age about what these benefits have meant to them, and especially how they view themselves as black people in an America now led by a black president.”

How does one read this on the eve of an election virtually assured of making the Obama presidency a four-year anomaly? When the euphoria of election night three years ago has dissolved along with everything else in American politics to the recurring and painful image of Barack Obama as the Joker, a landmark presidency of such potential is already being redesigned and relegated into a glitch on the landscape of American political history, something to be taught someday as, “the time a black man became president.”

Where does one put the idea of Post-Racial next to this? How will we deal with multiculturalism when the next lot of bankers muscles its way into the Oval Office, chuckles about how successfully they’ve kept the black/Hispanic/Native underclass running, and buries the poor even deeper?

7.

The Problem of James Baldwin

Baldwin was as much an artist as the next person, black or white. He admired his elder Ralph Ellison’s great novel, though he not so secretly relished the idea of replacing Ellison in prestige. Ellison had the approval of the white press; Baldwin’s support by black journalists and critics was enviable, but less culturally persuasive, and like all writers Baldwin sought the biggest audience for change. But talk about bitter. Baldwin’s main problem was that he was much too hard to listen to.

Had he seen what was happening twenty-odd years after his death and nearly sixty past Ellison’s Invisible Man, he would have seen that its refrain — “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” — is as bitterly true today as it was then, no matter how veiled it has become. We fail to educate. We practice election sleight of hand. We toy with Post-Blackness. We neither read nor listen. What would Baldwin say?