Word: broyard
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...Black Man Henry Louis Gates Jr. once wrote an essay on the life of writer Anatole Broyard, the light-complexioned son of two black parents who lived his life passing as a white man. "He wanted to be a writer," Gates explained, but "he did not want to be a Negro writer. It is a crass disjunction, but it is not his crassness or his disjunction ... We give lip service to the idea of the writer who happens to be black, but had anyone, in the postwar era, ever seen such a thing...
That is resolutely not the message communicated in Obama's campaign, however. "I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation or victimhood generally," he has declared. He enjoys nearly unanimous support from African Americans in polls; nevertheless, just as Broyard sought to avoid being labeled a "Negro writer," Obama resists efforts to define him as a "black candidate." And for some of the same reasons too. As soon as the race label is added, some of the audience tunes out, others are turned off and still others leap to conclusions about...
...shouldn't those who looked as if they belonged in the club try to join it? As America took small steps toward racial maturity, passing should have passed away. It did not; Roth's book was triggered by the news that the late New York Times book reviewer Anatole Broyard had been posing as white for decades...
...pages; $22) and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner; 198 pages; $12). Lahiri has a gift for illuminating the full meaning of brief relationships--with lovers, family friends, those met in travel. A more lasting bond--the one between fathers and daughters--is elegantly explored in Bliss Broyard's My Father, Dancing...
Mills chooses to begin her biography of the man whose career Antole Broyard has described as "a brawl between his talent and his exhibitionism" with a dramatic retelling of Mailer's appearance at the murder trial of Jack Henry Abbot, the ex-convict whose writings Mailer had promoted. After recounting the antagonistic press conference, where obscenities and insults were exchanged--a typical situation for the author--Mills summarizes Mailer in a list of promotional headlines, from "Village Voice Co-Founder" to "Husband of Six Wives." One is prepared for a book that merely rehashes sensational events and doesn't delve...