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03/23/2008: "White people romanticize and falsify the black experience"

The appeal of Seltzer's work lay in the way she positioned herself between America's two races, black and white: She claimed to be a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up poor in a dysfunctional black world. In fact, she is the daughter of a white, upper-middle-class California family. And her story is only the most recent in a long line of literary narratives, entertainments and ethnologies in which white people put on blackface to act as messengers to their white brethren, telling them what life is or was like in the 'hood or on the plantation. The messages they bring back are of black dysfunction, crime and violence, but also of black sexuality, athleticism and soulful musicality. These stories may then reaffirm white audiences' perception of black dysfunction and allow them to use blacks as a negative counterpoint for their own images of normalcy and to affirm their sense of superiority.

Stories written by blacks about blacks, on the other hand, don't seem to offer the vast white reading public that same sense of well-being. Like Seltzer, I write about dysfunction. My own memoir, "That Mean Old Yesterday," actually mirrors some scenes that Seltzer described in her bogus book -- being sexually and physically abused, carrying my possessions in trash bags from foster home to foster home, enduring painful hair-braiding rituals, handling illegal guns.

[ What sells is what's important. Truth? Would be nice, if it paid the bills. So we get a romantic vision of African-Americans, like the "noble savage" vision of American Indians, and truth is far far away. ]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/14/AR2008031403385.html