Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity

By John L. Jackson Jr.

Book Overview

New York's urban neighborhoods are full of young would-be emcees who aspire to "keep it real" and restaurants like Sylvia's famous soul food eatery that offer a taste of "authentic" black culture. In these and other venues, authenticity is considered the best way to distinguish the real from the phony, the genuine from the fake. But in Real Black, John L. Jackson Jr. proposes a new model for thinking about these issues-racial sincerity.

Jackson argues that authenticity caricatures identity as something imposed on people, imprisoning them within stereotypes: an African American high school student who excels in the classroom, for instance, might be dismissed as "acting white." On the other hand, sincerity, as Jackson defines it, imagines authenticity as an incomplete measuring stick, an analytical model that attempts to deny people agency in their search for identity.

Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in and around New York City, Jackson offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that directly and indirectly address how race is negotiated in today's world-including tales of book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost. Jackson records and retells their interconnected sagas, all the while attempting to reconcile these stories with his own crisis of identity and authority as an anthropologist terrified by fieldwork. Finding ethnographic significance where mere mortals see only bricks and mortar, his invented alter ego Anthroman takes to the streets, showing how race is defined and debated, imposed and confounded every single day.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226390020
• ISBN13: 9780226390024
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Sincerity Revisted

My frequent 8 year-old verbal skirmishes with my parents often ended with my reluctant capitulation. Each altercation was unfailingly followed by one parent that incessantly prodded me to apologize to the other. While I was surely not penitent, I still spewed the defeated words of "I'm sorry" through clenched teeth in order to ensure the restoration of peace and sanity in the household. Was it an authentic apology? Surely. Was it a sincere apology? Far from it. John Jackson extrapolates upon these often complicated notions of authenticity and sincerity and extends them into the discourse of contemporary American race relations. Though Jackson's SAT-word infused jargon may be underappreciated by non-academics in the field, he nonetheless establishes eloquent and critical arguments about the notion of racial sincerity that can be appreciated by both scholars and non-scholars alike. Jackson presents a fresh look of the concept of black authenticity through the new viewing "lens" of sincerity. He maneuvers beyond the traditional theories of racial authentication by use of several so-called real characters that he encounters throughout his ethnographic adventures in New York. Jackson's selection and subsequent juxtaposition of opposing characters, beliefs, and identities is done elegantly, and serves to further support this idea of racial sincerity. The author presents this view of sincerity as an affront to the commonly accepted belief of authenticity as the defining factor in the validation of one's racial identity. Leo Felton, a black white supremacist, serves as one of Jackson's most prominent examples. Felton is a neo-Nazi skinhead who was arrested in Boston for trying to pass off counterfeit bills at a local convenience store, but was in fact discovered to be planning a much more sinister plot to blow-up Jewish monuments throughout the city [19]. Further investigation revealed the shocking truth; this Aryan racist was in fact of mixed-race black ancestry. How could this happen? Felton's answer was simple. He wasn't living a lie, but rather living a more significant racial truth. He may have been materially black, but spiritually and soulfully white [19]. Jackson challenges the reader to consider this new twist on an age-old dilemma. What is real racial identity? Could it be more than simply a predetermined set of genetic coding in our DNA? Or even beyond the amount of melanin in our skin? Tyrone, a talented young black man with a magnificent singing voice, unconsciously emerges at the center of controversy at a local New York high school's gospel concert. One's sincerity, as an internalized and opaque concept, cannot be validated as truth or duplicity to the outside world without the presence of a certain performance. In Tyrone's case, the storm of debate revolved around the sincerity of his vocal performances. His unforgettable vocal prowess was interrupted mid-concert by the spiritual infusion of the Holy Spirit. Tyrone's so-called "nerv

A Sincere Challenge to the Theory of Racial Identity

While television scripts instruct the actors where to be and what to say, real life scripts teach us how to determine who belongs to a certain group and who does not. These latter, everyday scripts are stringent stereotypical outlines of expected physical and personal attributes, based on race, gender and other immediately identifiable characteristics. They allow us to judge the legitimacy of one another's actions and group memberships without any information other than what is visible. These scripts are easy to use and govern what we think of as authentic, but are they the best way to differentiate between what is real and fake? John L. Jackson Jr. tackles that question in reference to racial scripts in his book Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity and answers in the negative. This book introduces his concept of racial sincerity, which contrasts and challenges the scripts that lead to monolithic notions of racial authenticity. Through searching ethnographic studies of race and identity carried out in Harlem and Brooklyn, Jackson presents the reader with stories that defy the scripts they use every day, opening minds to a new perception of race. Jackson received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University and is currently a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is very familiar with New York City, having done research there for his previous book, Harlem World: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America. This focus on the familiar does not limit the scope of his work though. His argument for sincerity's adaptability over authenticity's strict definitions is easily applicable to other situations in a country that so frequently uses "these scripts as easy shorthand for serious causal analysis," (13) so all readers will find this book relevant. By far, the stories told by Real Black are the book's strengths. Examples include black Jewish conspiracy theorists who reject all other religions and races, a teenager who uses race to justify not enlisting post-9/11 and a middle class Harlem restaurant surrounded by scenes of urban blight. Jackson's carefully selected and decidedly meaningful profiles--of people, groups and situations that simply do not fit within authenticity's boundaries--are highly interesting and make strong, easily understandable arguments for sincerity. This is crucial because in some sections of the book, the intellectual depth of the material and Jackson's diction prove difficult to access for those without a background in anthropology. For example, the average reader may not be able to follow the contention that race is about "authenticating others who concomitantly escape solitary confinement within the pre-scripted categories that others impose." (17) However, when Jackson profiles Leo Felton, who was born to a black father and a white mother but chose to act as "a white, neo-Nazi skinhead who attacked black people because of their race," (19) we can better understand his point. Becaus