http://www.webcom.com/intvoice/powell3.html
Essay
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A.D. Powell vs. Marc Eisen
By A.D. Powell
The more I live on this earth the more convinced I am that "one drop"
propaganda is almost SOLELY attributable to black elites and so-called
"white" liberals. Black elites give "permission" to social-climbing so-
called "whites" to attack creole whites and light mulattoes as "black"
and not good enough for their white ancestry. The liberals get the
chance to indulge in ego-boosting racism against an unprotected group
while pleading "not guilty" to any charges of racism because they are
only quoting from black elites and "blacks," they claim, are always
right on "race." At the same time that liberal elites join black
elites in demanding that creole whites like the late New York Times
book critic Anatole Broyard (attacked in The New Yorker magazine as
"black" and only "passing for white") confess to every passerby every
drop of magical (i.e., "inferior") "black blood," these same liberals
take great pains to hide THEIR "inferior" Jewish, Slavic, Hispanic (a
group whose racial mixture is not acknowledged), Mediterranean, etc.
ancestry. Consider the following excerpts from a racist article
against Anatole Broyard by a racist "liberal" editor who wants his own
ancestry to remain unknown:
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Excerpt of "Life in Black and White" by Marc Eisen, "Liberal" and self-
described "white" editor of the "liberal" Madison, WI news weekly,
Isthmus, July 12, 1996.
[After a long piece of ego-boosting whining because a clerk was nice
to him and he's certain she would have been nasty to him if he had
been black, Eisen says:]
"Black remains the all-powerful, indelible adjective.
Of late, no better illustration of this reality can be found that
Henry Louis Gates' New Yorker profile of Anatole Broyard, the late New
York Times literary essayist. I had always imagined Broyard as a
quintessential Gotham intellectual, no doubt Jewish, a product of City
College, and so on. Wrong. Broyard was a light-skinned black (sic) man
from New Orleans whose family had migrated to New York in the 1940s.
Gates investigates the essential riddle of Broyard: Why did he deny
his blackness (sic)? Why didn't he tell his own children? How did his
secret inform his writing? The answer, Gates suggests, is that Broyard
understood, in the context of America's hypersensitivity to race, that
the label "black" would forever stereotype his writing.
So Broyard chose to shroud his racial heritage and construct a new
identity (how typically American). He even ended contact with his
darker-skinned sister, As a Village intellectual on the make, he owned
a bookstore, wrote for Commentary and Partisan Review, hung out with
Alfred Kazin and all the lit-politick lions (Eventually, though, he
traded the Boho life for a series of upper-class Connecticut homes and
even a day job at an ad agency before joining The Times.).
But never, never, did Broyard willingly `fess up to his blackness, not
even to his grown children as he lay dying, painfully, of prostrate
cancer. For Broyard, life was a matter of self-invention - not
"authenticity" as the promoters of identity politics believe. Broyard
wanted to be known as a writer, not a Negro writer. `His perception
was perfectly correct,' Gates writes sympathetically. `In a system
where whiteness is the default, racelessness is never a possibility.'
This is an essential truth of America in the 1990s. We kid ourselves
to believe that America has arrived as a color-blind society. Yet,
astonishingly and to our peril, we seldom talk about it."
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My letter to Isthmus edit@
isthmus.com printed in the August 23 issue:
July 24, 1996
Isthmus
101 King St.
Madison, WI 53703
Editor:
Is Marc Eisen running for Fuhrer?
I'm not kidding. If the late New York Times book critic Anatole
Broyard had been guilty of child molesting instead of "rasenschade,"
Eisen would have treated him with far more respect ["Life in Black and
White," July 12].
The "crime" that Broyard committed, in the eyes of Marc Eisen, is the
same "crime" that Jews were alleged to have committed during the reign
of the Third Reich. Even though German Jews looked and acted like
other Germans, the Nazis alleged that they were really a separate
"race" of "impure blood" who were really only inferior imitations of
"Aryans" and not entitled to call themselves German at all. Eisen's
attack on Broyard says the same thing, except that he uses "black" for
"Jew" and "white" for "Aryan."
What is Eisen trying to prove? He knows that millions of people in
this country de-emphasize or fail to mention Jewish, Slavic or other
ethnic ancestries, poor or working-class backgrounds, etc. in order to
either rise in the world or exercise the individualism and self-
determination which are supposedly at the core of the American
character. The federal government's traditional way of dealing with
the racial mixture (Indian, black and white) that characterizes the
Hispanic population was to "pass off" or declare all of them "white"
regardless of racial phenotype. Now what was Broyard's "crime" again?
Being a white guy who called himself white? By the way, does Marc
Eisen recite his genealogy to everyone?
Marc Eisen used to spend his time attacking powerful elites who were
guilty of abuses that harmed real people and the public interest (the
privatization of HEAB, for example). Now he's reduced to attacking a
dead man for "rasenschade." Broyard's honor is untarnished but the
same can't be said for Marc Eisen's.
A.D. Powell
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Reply from Marc Eisen:
Dear Mr. Powell,
How could you misread my column as badly as you have? Are you dense or
just tendentious?
The point of it, which should have been abundantly clear to you, is
this: American is horribly hung up on race. Despite the successes of
the civil rights laws, blacks are often treated differently than
whites in both large and small ways.
To cast me as a Nazi for pointing this out is beyond belief.
You castigate me for "attacking" Anatole Broyard yet make no mention
of the fact that I was citing Henry Louis Gates'profile of Broyard in
the New Yorker. I can only conclude that you are a willfully dishonest
person for (a) trying to besmirch me for something that Gates wrote
and (b) for horribly misrepresenting Gates' point - that black people
haven't been assimilated into the American mainstream, unlike Jews,
Italians, and other ethnics. The Gates profile, if anything, is
sympathetic to Broyard for having to go to extremes (i.e., denying his
blackness) in order to be judged by his writing alone rather than his
skin color.
I don't know what planet you're operating from.
With great disdain,
Marc Eisen
P.S. Yes, we will run your letter.
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My reply to Eisen's letter:
Actually, my last letter was very friendly, giving Eisen the benefit
of the doubt. Perhaps he is merely ignorant instead of an evil social-
climber trying to make himself whiter by destroying the reputation of
a dead man. Obviously that is not the case. Eisen tries to assign to
Broyard a false "black" racial identity that is meant to be the
ultimate insult. How would Eisen react if his right to call himself
"white" were questioned? Indeed, doesn't Eisen take great care not to
"insult" the Hispanic or Arab with Negroid features by calling them
"black." I have met Jews and Italians who claimed "pure" European
ancestry and had the suspiciously Negroid looks that Broyard didn't
have. Wasn't Broyard whiter than they are?
Both Eisen and Henry Louis Gates are jealous of Anatole Broyard. Gates
is jealous because he wishes he had Broyard's whiteness and ability to
assimilate. Eisen is jealous because he wishes he had Broyard's
literary fame. He cannot stand the thought of a man from an ethnic
group he despises (the multiracial Louisiana Creoles) achieving the
fame and respect that has alluded him.
Both Gates and Eisen hate the fact that Broyard was accepted as white
by friends who knew of his "impure" ancestry and those who "suspected"
didn't care. This certainly makes them the moral superiors of Eisen
and Gates.
Eisen claims that Jews, Italians, etc. are assimilated. The Far Right
would dispute him on that. The German Jews were deemed to be perfectly
assimilated until the Nazis placed upon them the same charge that
Eisen and Gates use to condemn Broyard: The charge that they were an
inferior, separate race that looked like Germans, spoke like Germans
but were not good enough to be German. The Nazi analogy holds and
anyone who cannot see it is either ignorant of history or deliberately
blind. Eisen is too great a fool to realize that, in utilizing the
myth of white racial "purity" to attack Broyard, he is giving strength
to an ideology that can be used to destroy innocent people from any
ethnic group - not just the ones despised by Marc Eisen.
Instead of uniting with Gates, Tina Brown of The New Yorker and other
social-climbing hyenas attacking Broyard's corpse, Eisen should humbly
sit at the feet of others and learn wisdom.
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Another reply from Eisen, just as stupid as the last one:
Dear Mr. Powell:
What is your problem?
You've apparently fallen down the rabbit hole, eaten a strange
substance and created a magical world in which up is down, black is
white, and fantasy is reality. I'm at a loss to connect your ravings
to what I said in my column.
One more time: The column discusses how extraordinarily racially
sensitive America is and how black people in large and small groups
are treated unfairly by the majority culture. Despite the
extraordinary accomplishments of the Civil Rights laws, we continue to
be, fundamentally, a racially-divided society.
I conclude: "This is an essential truth of America in the 1990s. We
kid ourselves to believe that America has arrived as a color-blind
society. Yet, astonishingly and to our own peril, we seldom talk about
it.
Having bizarrely ignored the main points of my article, you've fixated
on the idea that Anatole Broyard wanted to be identified as a Creole.
THERE IS NOTHING IN HENRY LOUIS GATES' PROFILE THAT SUGGESTS BROYARD
HAD ANY SUCH DESIRE. You've concocted this out of thin air!
You have, in your fevered imagination come to believe I said Broyard
committed a "crime" by denying his black heritage. You bizarrely
continue to assert that I want a race-based society. You somehow
assert I feel that Broyard isn't good enough to be white. I think
you're hallucinating.
For reasons I don't understand, you've inverted the meaning of my
column and accused me of the very thing that I've tried to spotlight-
America's tragic hang up with race.
You're a crank lost in your fantasies.
With disdain,
Marc Eisen
Isthmus
101 King St.
Madison, WI 53703
edit@
isthmus.com
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Eisen carefully ignores these facts:
1) He followed a traditional, racist attack line used against mixed
whites in which the racist states that the "inferior Negro blood"
makes them too leprous to be "whites" but the "white blood" would make
them a "superior" variety of "black." If Eisen is totally ignorant of
the tradition he is following, then he has no business lecturing
people on "race."
2) Eisen studiously ignores the evidence explaining why the "one drop"
myth if not truly enforced (Hispanics and other groups) and the
example from Holocaust history of what happens if you endorse the
concept of "invisible" race and the "racial purity" of the dominant
"race."
3) Eisen (like other "America is so racist" liberals I've known)
insists that putting down "uppity" mulattoes and creole whites is
merely a statement of his love for blacks and that anyone who supports
the right of mulattoes and creole whites to be "white" or otherwise
nonblack is denying the existence of racism in the U.S. - both past
and present. This neat trick is designed to silence debate on a issue
they personally fear - the white race's lack of "purity."
4) Eisen (like other "blacks can do no wrong" liberals) denounces
Broyard for enjoying white-skin privilege but Eisen wants to keep the
same privilege for himself. Eisen's column goes so far as to deny
Broyard's physical whiteness altogether, implying that he shared the
same "color" as Gates. Eisen denounces Broyard for not announcing his
"inferior" drop of blood to every passerby (like the Biblical leper
shouting "Unclean! Unclean" so others would not be contaminated by his
touch), but Eisen has never, in all the years he's been editor of
Isthmus, informed his readers of HIS ancestry. Passing is fine for
Eisen but not for Broyard.
5) Your enemy is always the person who wants to deny and denounce you
for the very things he himself practices. Eisen is a racist enemy of
the multiracial community and probably the social climber he accuses
Broyard of being. If he were 1/10 as antiracist as he claims to be, he
would denounce "white purity" and note the shared ancestry, social
situations and other commonalties between many ethnicities that are
recognized and those that are yet to be recognized. Eisen is 100 times
more dangerous than any avowed racist because he (along with Gates)
misleads people of good will and tells them that you must go against
your conscience and embrace white "purity" and the "one drop"
mythology in order to be antiracist.
