Black Like You

I’ll start off by saying that, now that I’ve read it, I’m exhausted. There are so many issues that are brought up in the text. And, I can’t help but feel a bit disillusioned by it all. I understand, of course, that this is probably not the point. Maybe my reading of the text is far too shallow. But if we’re going to talk about reactions, here’s mine. What’s the point of discussing this if there just doesn’t seem to be a way of getting it right, of finding some answer, some solution? Of course, according to Strausbaugh, the solution lies in the discussion of the issues. I certainly hope he’s right. To make my case, however, take for example, Strausbaugh’s discussion on negro-dialect literature in chapter five. Of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s writing Strausbaugh states:

“There’s life in Dunbar’s best dialect verses, music, humor, vivacity. If he can be accused of literary blackface, can’t a reverse critique be made of his and Johnson’s formal verse—that it was a kind of phony whiteface poesy? And shouldn’t it be noted that, whether writing in dialect or with grave formality, they were doing whatever they thought was needed to reach White readers and audiences? They wore the mask. They were slumming, like Will Marion Cook and Bert Williams and countless others, and they knew it. It beat waiting tables or digging ditches.” (182)

And he’s right, isn’t he? I mean, what strikes me most of all is what seems to me to be a never-ending cycle of criticism. If you do it this way you’re an Uncle Tom. If you do it that way, you’re “wearing the mask.” And this is only one example. He gives plenty more. So what can one do?

I feel my cultural background, something that I have always believed to be a privilege—to experience, first hand, two completely different cultures—may, in this particular case, be a real disadvantage. I was born in Mexico to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother. I see myself as being fully Mexican as well as being fully White. My life has been marked by trying to accommodate this duality in my identity. So, when it comes to reading texts like Black Like You, there is a part of me that becomes so incredibly frustrated. I feel like I’m supposed to choose a side. I just don’t know which side that is.

Strausbaugh calls America a “mutt” culture several times throughout the text. I know this idea is something that some of my closest friends are fiercely against. And, though I will admit that there is something unsettling about describing an entire culture in this particular manner, something about it gives me comfort. The melting pot—“an industrial crucible, a smelting pot where the ‘metals’ of various races and ethnicities [are] hot-forged and hammered into a newer, stronger national identity, the American alloy,” (134)—it just sounds right to me. Maybe it has something to do with my own cultural background, something to do with my feeling that the only place where someone like me can belong would have to be a “melting pot.” I know that I will be criticized for feeling this way. There will be plenty of people that will call me ignorant. But if we’re going to talk about reactions, here’s mine.