THE END OF RESPECTABILITY
Notes of a Black American Reckoning with His Life and His Nation
by Anthony Walton
Sharp essays on race relations from the era between the Civil Rights Act and Black Lives Matter.
Like many Black cultural critics, Walton (Mississippi: An American Journey, 1996, etc.) sees Trump-era racism as the culmination of decades of American bigotry, fueled by Jim Crow and the Southern Strategy. His goal is to show how persistent the problem has been even during what many perceived to be the calmer waters of the 1980s and Obama era. The opening essay, first published in the New York Times in 1989, calls out the bigotry and fearmongering of George H.W. Bush’s campaign ad featuring Willie Horton, a Black convict. A well-turned profile of the Rev. Al Sharpton focuses on his street-level appeal amid efforts to diminish his profile in the wake of the Tawana Brawley case. Walton explores how various occasions have given whites license to broadcast their racism, from a 1957 article by William F. Buckley defending segregation to a PBS documentary on George Wallace to the case of Christian Cooper, a demure New York City bird-watcher on whom a white woman called police simply because he wanted her to follow dog-leash laws. In the title essay, he explains why decades of “going along to get along” conduct by Black people haven’t improved race relations, asking for a society “that no longer privileges white psychic stability and emotional comfort.” Walton is plainly inspired by James Baldwin’s fury and some of his rhetorical approaches—one essay is framed as a letter to a white friend. But Walton is too resigned to thunder for change the way Baldwin did. Nor does he call for broad policy prescriptions, though he does reasonably ask why Black people have been largely denied access to the economic boom within the tech industry. Only by claiming respect for themselves rather than waiting for whites to confer it on them, he argues, can Black Americans avoid becoming the “collateral damage of a public system that fails more often than it succeeds.”
A spirited and informed assessment of American racism beyond headlines and politics.