To the Editor:
Anatole Broyard’s article “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro” (July) contains a typology of Negro personality which is more illuminating than any similar discussion to be found in social science literature. But outside of this, I find myself disagreeing with most of the statements in the piece.
Why does Mr. Broyard believe that the permutations of Negro personality result from conscious efforts on the part of the Negro to avoid exhibiting certain patterns of behavior which whites disapprove, or to achieve others which whites sanction? He says that “the rejected type studiously inverts the characteristics of the minstrelized type”; or that “role inversion comprises the deprecatory attempts of some inauthentic Negroes to dissociate themselves from the behavior of the bestialized type”; or that “minstrelization results from the inauthentic Negro’s acceptance of his situation as defined by the anti-Negro” (italics mine).
Never once does Broyard indicate what, by now, must be common knowledge: that the characteristics of Negro personality, like those of any personality, are formed during the early years of life by the social institutions inside the Negro community, and that they establish the child’s personality long before he or she ever experiences forces like “social pressure” or “occupational discrimination,” or learns of the “current conception of the suffering artist or poète maudit” (which Broyard feels is an important force leading Negroes to “romanticization”).
I would suspect that Broyard ignores the implication of the psychoanalytic approach to personality because of his concern with the notion of authenticity: if “inauthenticity” derives from an exercise of the will, then authenticity should be easy to achieve. However, authenticity in reference to the Negro is a meaningless concept. This conclusion emerges if one compares the definition of authenticity as given by Sartre, and as used by Broyard.
Sartre says authenticity “consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate.” Notice the discrepancy: to Sartre, authenticity comes through fulfilling the social situation, by living in terms of it; to Broyard, it means acting against it.
This difference in definitions is understandable. The “situation” against which the Negro must act is the inferior status in which the white world has placed him; this is the only “situation” which the Negro has. It is a bare, raw, crude, unprotected situation. The situation of the Jew is different: it contains its private culture, it is walled around with the protective myths of a messianic mission, and buttressed by the doctrine of the chosen people. It is not merely a status of negation, as is the situation of the Negro. It has positive attributes. In terms of such a “situation,” it is possible to build an authentic personality; not so in the case of Negro status.
Perhaps it is the gross difference between Jew and Negro which explains why, on the last page, Broyard is led to reverse completely Sartre’s definition (“If the majority of Negroes would authenticate themselves—i.e., prove themselves fundamentally different only in appearance”); or why he is so apologetic in putting forth his conception (“Admittedly, then, authenticity is difficult to attain. To make it even more difficult, no one seems to know exactly what it consists in”); or why he never intimates that an authentic Negro exists now. Sartre, on the other hand, is able to say: “What is astonishing is certainly not that there are inauthentic Jews; it is rather that, in proportion, they are fewer than the inauthentic Christians.”
Since I do not believe in the concept of the authentic Negro, and do not hold Broyard’s psychological theory, I cannot, of course, share his politics of the Negro problem, which removes the onus of blame for the Negro personality from white to Negroes themselves. What good is it to proclaim that it is the Negro’s job to get rid of discrimination by “defining his essential self” when the Negro has no “self” independent of the second-class social institutions which discrimination fosters? The elimination of discrimination still must come—even though Broyard scorns their efforts—through the activity of liberal and “progressive” movements which help to guarantee Negro workers equal job opportunities with whites, and the Negro protest organizations which aim to remove the laws that bolster segregation.
In conclusion, let me say that for anyone who is as much concerned with the condition of Negroes as Broyard seems to be, he displays a noticeable lack of generosity toward them. Although he is careful to point out that “to Sartre the term ‘inauthentic’ implies no moral blame,” Broyard’s use of it conveys an explicit pejorative meaning. The inauthentic Negro is always “exploiting,” “capitalizing,” “mutilating,” “colluding,” “being insincere”—all unethical acts by the standards of our society. Broyard claims that “only and precisely the Negro” identifies with his oppressors when he makes jokes about his own group. But the Jews and the Irish have such jokes too; and it is important to remember the many jokes in which Negroes make fun of whites.
Robert Gutman
Dartmouth College Hanover,
New Hampshire
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