‘Who will uninvent the Negro? For nearly four hundred years the black man’s personality has been under attack, his selfhood devastated. Ever since he was brought to this country in chains he has constantly been given the ultimatum: “Deny your humanity or perish!” Where are the artists and prophets who will undo this white destruction? Who will write the songs for us to sing of our black heroes?’

Very fascinating book that at its root argues the real Camelot of the Sixties and Seventies wasn’t the larger-than-life Kennedy dynasty but those who filled the void–black people who were front and center in the public’s imagination as cultural icons.

Each chapter is a nice little tapestry that traces the historical, social, and political threads weaving into the ecologies giving rise to athletic, musical, literary, entertainment, and political stars as well as their cross cultural influences–how they painted boundaries for black people and white people to cling to or cross brazenly.

That being said, I was a little disappointed by the conclusion. I am the last person to defend Ronald Reagan but Deburg’s final thrust, which lays the blame for many problems facing black people at Ronnie’s feet, is nowhere near as convincing or laid out as the rest of the book. Yes, Ronald Wilson Reagan contributed to the regeneration of many racist institutions, relationships, code words, etc. but the Teflon Don was a pretty face to an ugly systemic reality (like Trump). That systemic reality or it’s cultural manifestations would’ve been much more interesting and insightful to write about.

The arrival uptown, Harlem, can only be summed up by the feelings jumping out of Césaire’s Return to My Native Land or Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth or Cabral’s Return to the Source. The middle-class native intellectual, having outintegrated the most integrated, now plunges headlong back into what he perceives as blackest, native-est. Having dug, finally, how white he has become, now, classically, comes back to his countrymen charged with the desire to be black, uphold black, etc. … a fanatical patriot!

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization – a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

Wafts of roasting turkey. Wafts of roasting pork. The competing scents battled through the house while I helped Papá and Abuelo set up folding domino tables on both ends of our dining table. We assembled a mishmash of desk chairs, beach chairs, and stools stretching from the kitchen into the living room to seat all twenty-two relatives.

Modern social thought was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than the expression of an underlying natural order.

…

The practical point of the view of society as made and imagined is to discover what is realistic and what illusory in these objectives and to find guidance for their execution.

It’s quite standard for those who hold the clubs to say: “Forget about everything that happened and let’s just go on from here.” In other words, “I’ve got what I want, and out forget about what your concerns are. I’ll just take what I want.