Gerald Early and Debra J. Dickerson, editorsBest African American Essays: 2009
290 pp, Bantam. $16.00.
978 0 553 38536 6
The Best African American Essays: 2009 is the first volume in what is intended as an annual celebration of contemporary “black essayistic art” (xviii). Edited by Gerald Early and Debra J. Dickerson, the anthology pays homage to the “grand tradition” (xiii) of Du Bois and Booker T. Washington by showcasing the work of those – including Barack Obama – who have registered their “blackness” (xxi) through non-fiction prose.
The most engaging pieces in the collection tend to be those which confront, and seek in part to remedy, what Early and Dickerson label in their introductory remarks, “the blood-soaked hypocrisy” (ix) of American history. In ‘Jena, O.J. and the Jailing of Black America,’ for instance, Orlando Patterson writes of a “gulag of racial incarceration” (234) in which a full ten percent of African American men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five are imprisoned. The “catastrophic state of black family life” (235), he maintains, has contributed to a cycle of unemployment, anger, and violence. Indeed, the rate at which blacks commit homicides in America is seven times that of whites.
Like Patterson, Malcolm Gladwell addresses the role of the family, noting in a discerning essay on intelligence testing and race that between the ages of four and twenty-four, African American children, nearly seventy percent of them born to single mothers, lose six-tenths of an I.Q. point per year against their white counterparts. For Maxwell, the celebrated author of Blink, the lesson here has less, however, to do with “cognitive disability” (95) than it does the “quality of the world” (101) in which African American youth are raised. As Kwame Appiah remarks in his essay ‘A Slow Emancipation,’ liberation is only the “beginning of freedom” (170).
Despite the occasional inclusion of banal meditations on hip-hop or international aid, the Best African American Essays succeeds in providing a vivid, often jarring, portrait of what it is to be black in America. From Bill Maxwell’s reflection on the state of Historically Black Universities to Hawa Allan’s perceptive analysis of the racial underpinnings of the fashion world, the anthology reaffirms the centrality of the essay in the history of African American writing, and does justice to what Obama refers to in an assessment of pluralistic democracy as the power of the oppressed “to spur social change” (239).
–Jesse Freedman
Jesse Freedman holds degrees in history from Amherst College and Hertford College, Oxford.
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