Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black Intellectual (review)

In Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black Intellectual, Robert Reid-Pharr takes as his premise a fundamental ambiguity in race and ethnicity studies–namely, the fact that race is constructed, on the one hand, through social discourses that are external to the African American community, and on the other by ideas associated with these discourses that are, paradoxically, promulgated within this community. With this in mind, he makes a distinction between two types of thinkers. There are those who are chosen, who submit to the Fanonian gaze or the Althusserian command and thus burden themselves with the racial epidermal schema Frantz Fanon describes with such eloquence in Black Skin, White Masks. And there are those who choose, who refuse to bend to the laws of racial and sexual essentialism and instead practice polysemic reasoning in determining their identities. Those who are chosen (I will call them traditionalists) are readily accused of being misologists: they do not recognize in the specificity of racial identity to which they cling the sea of humanity in which they thought they had immersed themselves. Those who choose are the embodiment of partiality; they have chosen to inhabit a “queer space” that privileges “the radically antitraditionalist aesthetic that fuels this study” (7). I shall call them the exemplars.

That the exemplars represent something other than that which is ideal is clear. Their performance of identity is quintessential, but only in that they perform identity–racial, sexual identity–differentially. This is what Reid-Pharr expresses when, in the autobiographical voice that wends through this scholarly study of choice and desire, he self-identifies as a “young man of color” who “believes that his role is to confront his readers with the reality of their freedom” (7):

[My] challenge to those who would suggest that the weight of history disallows any efficacious manipulation of the cultural and ideological apparatuses that underwrite so-called racial distinction is to suggest that their contention that they cannot or will not choose is, in fact, an affirmation of the racial status quo.

(8)

With this provocative pronouncement, Reid-Pharr turns his attention to the erosion of innocence he sees proclaimed and depicted in the literature of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, in photographs of the Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, and in Melvin Van Peebles’s blaxploitation classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. He admits that the anatomy of desire he sketches looks very much like an Old (Black) Boy’s network of representative men. No black women thinkers–traditionalist or otherwise–figure prominently in Reid-Pharr’s slim study, though they are, at least, present. The main objects of Reid-Pharr’s intellectual desire are black male intellectuals whom he paints as ancestors of his own erudition. Reid-Pharr’s mode of inquiry sets up a masculine genealogy meant to counter the misapprehension of today’s students of literature who mistakenly “reproduce notions of a stagnant Black American history by insisting that the anguished cries of the slave are ultimately indistinct from the complicated musings of the contemporary artist” (37). There is, however, a problem with this articulation of intent.

Reid-Pharr’s book does not, in fact, treat the contemporary artist, at least not the artist contemporary to the twenty-first century. His attention is halted in the 1970s at the height of the black power movement, when articulations of what black is and what black “ain’t” were ruled by the structuralist impulses of the Black Aesthetic movement. Richard Wright is the modern father of this movement, the “funny father”–in Reid-Pharr’s critical language, the “funny” intellectual is at once a precocious analogue and an effect of the idea of the “queer” intellectual–whose genius was, in part, “his ability to map narratives of intellectual celebrity in such a way that the presumably ‘queer’ aspects of his personality, those many parts of his persona that encroached upon ‘sexual...