Tag Archives: Freddie deBoer

The Ways of White Critics

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Why is it when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis?”

—Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug”

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book Between the World and Me has prompted the critical establishment to embarrass itself even more than is its wont. As I wrote earlier this week at Splice Today, the Economist and the NYT both wrote the same review of Coates’ book in which they flapped anxiously at his lack of respect for 9/11 firefighters and assured him that the world was getting better all the time because of nice establishment folks at the NYT and Economist, why oh why must he be so bitter? To follow that, Freddie de Boer spoke up for the anti-establishment establishment to insist that he did like Coates but only within limits—which is to say, he didn’t like him as much as he liked James Baldwin. DeBoer then went on to insist that the rest of the media overpraises Coates, thereby implying (in line with the anti-establishment establishment playbook) that he alone is telling it like it is and everyone else is blinded by something that sure sounds like liberal guilt, even though deBoer assures us that’s not what he means. (Posts are here and here.)

DeBoer on twitter suggested that objections to his minor critiques of Coates demonstrate his point—i.e., that Coates is overpraised. But I don’t think the resistance deBoer is meeting is because he criticized Coates. Because, as lots of folks have pointed out, there’s tons of criticism of Coates. Again, reviews in the NYT and Economist — two of the largest profile venues around—were both mixed to negative. There have also been a number of criticisms questioning his treatment of black women, notably Shani O. Hilton’s piece at Buzzfeed and a really remarkable essay by Brit Bennett at the New Yorker. I also saw Coates being taken to task in no uncertain terms earlier this week on twitter for alleged failures to reach out to black media with advanced review copies. The idea that Coates is somehow sacrosanct is simply nonsense. Though as Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out on twitter, it might be easy to miss those critiques if you’re not reading, or considering the words of, any black writers.

And I think that’s really the frustrating thing about deBoer’s argument here. The discussion of Coates’ work, and the reception of it, is framed almost entirely in terms of the health and thought of a left which is figured as implicitly white. In an earlier piece on online media, for example, deBoer made a glancing sneer at folks who frequent Coates’ lovingly moderated comments section at the Atlantic. DeBoer characterized them as a “creepshow” and sneered that they were “asking [Coates] to forgive their sins.” I don’t know how to read that except as a suggestion that Coates’ commenters are actuated by white liberal guilt. Which assumes that none of the commenters are black. Which is a mighty big assumption to make, it seeems like.

Presumably deBoer would say that he wasn’t talking about all the commenters, just the creepshow white ones. But then, why are white commenters the only ones who get mentioned? Why is the criticism and the conversation always focused on white people? Why does a discussion of Coates’ work, turn, in deBoer’s second post, into an embarrassing paen to deBoer’s own righteous consistency? “They used to say I was leftier-than-thou, that I always wanted to be left-of-left. Now they say I’m anti-left. I guess that changed. But I didn’t change,” he declares. Coates’ book isn’t a chance to talk about Coates’ book. It’s not even a chance to respond to Coates’ criticism, exactly, since deBoer doesn’t directly acknowledge in his second piece that one of the people calling him out is Coates himself. Instead, the post is an opportunity for deBoer to declare himself, again, the one righteous man, stuck in the same righteous rut as ever.

I wish deBoer weren’t trapped in quite that impasse for various reasons, but the most relevant one here is that there really is a worthwhile discussion to be had about how white critics can, or should, approach black works of art. On the one hand, I think it’s important for white critics to engage with work by black artists because those works deserve serious consideration by everyone, of whatever color. Creators like Ta-Nehisi Coates, or Rihanna, or Jacob Lawrence, are not in some marginal genre, to be considered as footnotes. They’re at least as important as Harper Lee, or Madonna, or Picasso, and they should be treated as such by whoever happens to be sitting down at the keyboard.

But at the same time, when white critics write about black artists, they often bring with them a lot of presuppositions, and a lot of racism — both personal and structural. White people have been defining and criticizing black people for hundreds of years, and mostly that process has ended up with white people declaring, in one way or another, that black people aren’t human, not infrequently as a prelude to killing them. “Too often,” Ellison writes, “those with a facility for ideas find themselves in the councils of power representing me at the double distance of racial alienation and inexperience.” There’s a brutal, relevant history there that you have to think about before you as a non-black critic blithely insist a black author is too bitter, or start spiraling off at random to discuss your own career prospects.

Too easy praise can be as condescending as too easy sneering, of course. There’s no easy route to truth, though an awareness of the difficulty of the task should probably be balanced with the recognition that the trials of the white critic are not the most difficult trials ever devised. In any case, it’s worth keeping in mind, when that piece takes shape in your head, that out there in the world black people exist, who have been known to criticize black art themselves, and even, at times, white critics.

“So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.”

—Langston Hughes, “Theme From English B”

Why So Serious?

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Kanye’s mocked for taking himself so seriously. Kim is seen as frivolous to a fault. The truth, of course, is each is always both: he is really playful, and she has incredible drive. In deed and word, they are powerful—if not perfect—forces for racial, gender, and LGBT equality. You’ll note that only one half of the couple receives any real recognition for it. It’s not a coincidence that he’s the one with the frowny face.

“Kanye should lighten up” and “I can’t take Kim seriously” sound like different critiques, but they’re both centered on the idea that one must attend to every matter in life with the appropriate degree of gravitas. It’s a value judgment that’s so instinctual and self-evident that it’s easy to mistake for a matter of fact. When our values don’t align with someone else’s, an easy way to diminish or discredit their perspective is to suggest they should be talking about something else. Something more worthy of consideration.

You’d think the world of comics would be sensitive to this brand of condescension since it still has a chip on its shoulder about being Serious Adult Art. But many of the same people who have built their lives around the idea that comics are Very Important see no irony in telling people to lighten up about issues surrounding racism or sexism. Consider this piece on representation in Avengers toys, which was described by one prominent comics critic as an “aggressive article about culture war,” and as “fannish overidentification” by another. Those guys aren’t going to say the author of the article is wrong—heavens no!—but they sure do think it’s odd that anyone would care so hard about something as soulless as corporate merchandise. Around the same time I saw another comics blogger who dedicated three paragraphs of a Very Special Post to her observation that people should talk less about Sansa Stark and more about Boko Haram. Fortunately, she’s doing her part to engage with the problem of rape by directing readers’ donations to…a random Paypal that funds computers for orphans. LOL?

The notion that lowly fandom distracts us from meaningful political engagement is not new, but it seems to me it’s been gaining traction lately, particularly among nerds. Simon Pegg recently criticized science fiction as an opiate of the masses, going so far as to invoke the patron saint of People Who Need You to Know How Hard They Give a Fuck, Jean Baudrillard. “There was probably more discussion on Twitter about the The Force Awakens and the Batman vs Superman trailers than there was about the Nepalese earthquake or the British general election,” Pegg writes. (Cluck cluck!) His point about the monetization of nostalgia wasn’t wrong, but that post was maybe half as smart and humble as he thought it was.

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“Talk more about earthquakes, sheeple.” –Baudrillard

Meanwhile Freddie deBoer’s out there pushing his critique of media types who indulge in what he calls “performative love of black culture”—e.g., praise for Beyoncé and The Wire—in lieu of meaningful, challenging political discussions. Beyoncé thinkpieces aren’t going to build a better world is more or less his point, and you could object to it for any number of good reasons. For me, it resonates, though I don’t quite agree. Sure, there’s any number of more pressing matters one could choose to talk about. And yes, there is a certain sameness across publications that makes for an unhealthy critical landscape. I too perceive a flatness in tone…the vague detachment of clever people talking about clever things…the sound of content shedding its skin.

Recently deBoer put forward yet another iteration of his Beyoncé argument, a critique of The Toast that garnered him pushback (especially from women), strong praise (largely from white men), and untold fame and fortune (also, presumably, from white dudes). It was based on “Books That Literally All White Men Own: The Definitive List,” a post written by one of The Toast’s founders, Nicole Cliffe. DeBoer used it to illustrate his longstanding complaint with white media types who are progressive, but not quite political, arguing that her piece is “indicative of a growing exhaustion, with desultory, rote online writing”—much of which functions to make white people feel less white under the guise of promoting equality. He describes the thought process behind that piece and its ilk: “‘Hey, you guys like lists. And you love calling other white people white. Here you go. Eat your slop. Enjoy.’”

Heaven knows there’s plenty of slop out there! But it’s worth noting that deBoer wasn’t the only white guy who had a serious problem with this particular slop; plenty of other dudes hated it too, and his reaction can’t be divorced from that context. Like those other guys, deBoer mistook the post as a failed indictment of white male liberal arts students. But his more serious mistake, to my mind, was writing thousands of words about Nicole Cliffe’s feminism in a post that totally failed to mention Nicole Cliffe or feminism. “We’re speeding for a brutal backlash and inevitable political destruction, if not in 2016 then 2018 or 2020,” he wrote, holding up one unnamed woman’s joke as an instrument of the impending apocalypse. “If you want to help avoid that, I suggest you invest less effort in trying to be the most clever person on the internet and more on being the hardest working person in real life. And stop mistaking yourself for the movement.” (my emphasis)

This last bit is an especially curious directive, couched as it is in a post that, for all intents and purposes, conflates Nicole Cliffe with Mallory Ortberg, a joke post with political discourse, and the agenda of a for-profit website with that of the progressive movement, whatever that even is. It’s this third mistake that gets my goat. The Toast is a vital feminist force, not because its content is political, but because it was founded on the radical notion that two women can publish whatever they want—whether it’s about Harry Potter fan fic, fitness, Ayn Rand, or motherhood—and people will read it. They were so successful in that venture that they launched a vertical where Roxane Gay publishes whatever she wants. This vision—an empire of sister sites in a media landscape where networks like the Awl and Gawker dedicate a single site among many to lady stuff—is even more radical than the one on which The Toast itself was founded.

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Ronbledore wants YOU to join his feminist army.

The Toast has a strong identity amongst its increasingly indistinguishable brethren, which is not an accident. It’s because the site doesn’t approach feminism as a generic movement. It explores it at the micro level by talking about our public personas and our most secret self-images, our successes and failures, our political stands and our throwaway jokes. It cedes the floor to one voice at a time—an important methodology in a world in which feminism as a movement has historically failed (and is still failing) to accept and celebrate different ways of being a woman. These voices aren’t necessarily as loud as Lindy West’s or Caity Weaver’s or Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s, or as weird as Edith Zimmerman’s or Mallory Ortberg’s. They rarely, if ever, offer takes. Instead, they amble in and out of conversations about identity in a world where there’s a tendency to whittle women down to their best or worst qualities, ignoring any part that’s not convenient or a means to an end. In this context, promoting a spectrum of voices—and making money doing it—is a remarkable political act. Mistaking that for solipsism or putting on a show is a fundamental failure to understand the stakes.

In describing the appeal of Broad City, Amy Poehler once said, “The rule is: specific voices are funny, and chemistry can’t be faked.” This is advice worth considering with regard to the urgent work of building a coalition on the left. In my experience (in life and in politics), watered-down beliefs aren’t attractive. Nor is informing people that their interests are insignificant in service of propping up your own. The way to promote engagement and build community is not to ask people to assimilate in the name of the greater good; it is to meet them where they live. To be successful, you have to have the confidence and the conviction to meet them there honestly, as yourself. Incidentally, that’s precisely what Nicole and Mallory have done. Their audience is comprised of people who support the project I just described, not undiscerning fans who “will call anything [they do] a work of genius no matter what,” as deBoer wrote.

For a long time I wondered why deBoer seems to class everything written by media types as political discourse. The answer, it occurs to me, is simple: because that’s what he does. I think that’s cool; sometimes I even think it’s admirable. But promoting progressive unity shouldn’t be about remaking other people in your own image. If there’s any truth to the idea that the left is eating itself, I’m far less suspicious of callout culture and lazy writing than the Serious Men who demand that everyone engage with the issues on their own narrow terms. Meaningful change requires diversity in both background and approach. It requires room to let people pursue their particular preoccupations.

Meanwhile, the notion that we supplant real political engagement with blog slop and mindless entertainment is bunk. There’s not a writer in the history of the Internet who thinks his Beyoncé thinkpiece is going to change the world, nor is there a single nerd who thinks that Sansa Stark is more important than real people. Have a little faith that you’re not the last person on earth with a sense of proportion. Moreover, recognize the power of pop culture to propel political discourse. You can complain all day long about white people’s relationship to The Wire (which, by the way, has officially replaced liking The Wire as white people’s favorite way to distance themselves from whiteness), but the fact that its hero was a black gay vigilante has had a real, if not measurable, impact on the ways in which Americans think about race, justice and masculinity. David Palmer helped get President Obama into office. Almost a decade after his last appearance on 24, the American public still trusts him so much that he’s the face of Allstate Insurance. How crazy is that? If anything we’re desensitized to how crazy that is.

A deep abiding truth I’ve come to understand through the work of Lynda Barry is that identity is not just who we are or what we have. It is also who we can imagine ourselves to be. Stories are not an escape from our real lives; they are part of them. The imaginary past—the stories we read, the dreams we dreamed, the options we considered, and the stuff we dismissed out of hand—runs parallel to every action that’s fully realized. It constitutes an authentic contribution to our lived experience, impacting how we see the world and everyone’s place in it. It also affects how we envision the future—an act of imagination that is central to the liberal agenda.

What_It_Is

from What It Is by Lynda Barry

One of the reasons I love the Internet so much is because it’s the natural habitat of writers who convey a strong sense of what their own two eyes see. It also showcases my favorite thing about criticism: how our smartest thoughts can be about stuff that seems stupid or inconsequential. Anything is inherently worthy of conversation. The old dichotomies of high/low, content/ads, IRL/online and art/merchandise are increasingly meaningless, for better and worse. If you want to analyze Internet culture with an eye towards improving it—a project that overlaps with how to promote solidarity on the left in curious ways, as deBoer suggests—you can’t just gaze upon its treasure. You also need to root through its trash. Forget Hazlitt essays and impeccably researched longreads. I’m talking Buzzfeed quizzes and the archives of TMZ. Anything. Everything. All of it. I’ve learned profound truths about this life from reading Gabe Delahaye on bad movies, Samantha Irby on irritable bowel syndrome, Jacob Clifton on Gossip Girl, Michael K on celebrity culture, CNN dot com, troll comments on Youtube, and Rusty’s most odious tabs. One of the wonders of our strange human brains is their capacity to find meaning in viral videos and silly vampire novels. It’s a sad and small-minded mistake to treat that as anything other than an opportunity.
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Follow Kim O’Connor on twitter: @shallowbrigade.

Fear of a Beyoncé Think Piece

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Art exists in culture. By the same token, culture is represented in, and influences, art. That seems like a pretty obvious and irrefutable point. And yet, to talk about the links between art and culture consistently leads to panicked, even apocalyptic denunciations from those who otherwise occupy little intellectual common ground. Rather than being seen as complementary, or continuous, art and society are seen as matter and anti-matter; bringing them together, it is feared, will cause the end of all things.
 

 
Freddie deBoer fears, in particular, that the confluence of art and society will cause the end, or at least the decay, of society. In a Beyoncé think-piece calling for the end of Beyoncé thinkpieces, deBoer raises the familiar lefty fear that interest in art is a deadly form of false consciousness, distracting the intellectually flaccid from the real business of ridding the world of hegemons.
 

As I’ve said for a long time, a lot of progressive educated white types have essentially replaced having a politics with having certain cultural attachments and affectations. Really aggressively praising the Wire becomes a stand-in for “I am not racist.” Complaining that Selma was robbed becomes a stand-in for having done the necessary work to understand the history of race in America. Telling anyone who’ll listen that you think all of the creativity and risk are in hip hop now becomes a stand-in for advancing a meaningful political platform that could actually improve the lives of actually-existing black people. White people are so weird about Beyonce because Beyonce has become an all-purpose floating signifier, a vessel on to which bourgie white folks project all of their desires for how other people should see them. These vague associations with arts and media are intended to send a message that, if voiced explicitly, we all know by now to ridicule: some of my best friends are black.

It’s easy to get distracted here by the sweeping assumptions of bad faith — but that’s just standard deBoer being deBoer. What’s more interesting is the way that the typical Marxist/Frankfurt School mistrust of the popular arts is retooled in terms of racial justice. “Bourgeois” pops up rhetorically as it might have for Khruschev (who rather gloriously characterized an exhibit of experimental art as being equivalent to what you would see if you looked up from inside a toilet bowl at someone’s ass descending.) But the main sneer for deBoer is not directed at the middle-class, but at white people. DeBoer’s argument (with the unfalsifiable ad hominem mind reading taken out) is that white people care about Beyoncé, and that talking about her is (therefore) self-indulgent and decadent. Real revolutionaries should talk (all the time?) about income inequality, not pop music.
 

OLYMPICS BLACK POWER SALUTE

 
The problem for deBoer here is that black people have an incredibly long, rich, and important history of caring about art, and seeing it as central to their struggle for freedom and justice. Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Miles Davis, Sam Cooke, bell hooks, James Baldwin, and many many more, would all be surprised to hear that their focus on cultural expression and representation was misguided and antithetical to the civil rights movement. Even if you’re just talking about Beyoncé, there are no shortage of black folks who have debated her as a political and cultural force (as just a sample, here’s Janell Hobson, Ebony Elizabeth, bell hooks and Janet Mock, Sydette Harry…the list could go on and on.)

DeBoer leaves himself some wiggle-room; you could read him as arguing that it’s only white people whose Beyoncé thinkpieces are awful. Perhaps he thinks, not that Beyoncé thinkpieces are bad in themselves, but that only African-Americans should be able to write about black popular music. But then you end up in a place where Beyoncé is a specialist, marginalized issue. Black people can talk about this thing that doesn’t matter; white people like deBoer will be over here analyzing matters of authentic importance, like the failure of the left, or the failure of the left (deBoer’s repertoire is somewhat limited). The need to separate trivial discussions of art from important discussions of social issues ends up effectively erasing black voices and black expression, either by suggesting those voices don’t exist, or by assuming that what they say is of only marginal importance to a struggle which is (in theory) centered on black people’s lives. (HT: Sarah Shoker for explaining this issue to me.)
 

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Sarah Horrocks comes at the issue of art and culture from a very different place. DeBoer is worried that discussions of art will distract from the important work of social change; Horrocks is concerned that the battle for social change will distract from the particular, transcendent importance of art.
 

I do not believe that art has societal power. I believe art creates the sacred. What I mean by that is that, for each individual that experience a piece of art, a space exists that only that person experiences, that can be profound and moving, based upon what they have projected out as their perception, and how that filters back to them with this thing called art. But that experience is not something you can translate to another person. Two people can see the same piece of art, but the experience they have is never wholely translatable to the other. You take that shit to your grave. I know this because as a critic, I spend tons and tons of words trying to explain the power of my experience–but in the end, all I can convey is just that…the power of my experience. But even if you think you experience something similar–it is still different.

So what that means is that art can be extremely powerful to the individual, but because it is not translatable to society as a whole, it’s power is isolated to each individual that perceives the work.

It’s popular to say that art is this super powerful thing. This notion that a great work of art can crack the world in half. It is a moronic idea, and I say that as an artist, who absolutely believes in the creation of the sublime experience. But if art was so powerful–then why couldn’t Godard stop Vietnam? Why couldn’t Ralph Ellison end racism? Was their art not powerful enough? And if their art isn’t powerful enough–how can a bullshit issue of batman be that powerful?

 
Horrocks’ piece is much more careful, and much more generous, than deBoer’s. Partially as a result, she says directly what is implicit, or danced around, in his piece. Ralph Ellison (or those Beyoncé thinkpieces) have not ended racism; therefore Ralph Ellison (or Zainab Akhtar criticizing Horrocks) are socially pointless; they don’t matter, and cannot matter. The fact that neither the Civil War nor Martin Luther King ended racism is an conveniently ignored (by deBoer as well). Art can affect people individually Horrocks says, and is valuable for that reason. But it can’t have any social or political effect — a truth witnessed by the fact that great art with social commitments has not created a utopia.
 

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Which leaves you, with deBoer, wondering why all those fools like Ralph Ellison and bell hooks bother to try to deal with political issues in their art or criticism. It seems like you should either be creating individual AbEx yawps, or organizing protests. Mixing the two is dumb — and dangerous. For deBoer, it leads to decadent bourgie white people congratulating themselves rather than overturning capitalism the way they should be. For Horrocks, writing still in the shadow of Frederic Wertham, “A society where art is considered powerful is not a safe one for art to be created in.” If people think art matters, there will be censorship, and even violence, against artists. The problem with censorship is not that voices for freedom are silenced, but that the state and those creating political art both collude in a silly but tragic error. If only Paul Robeson had realized that political expression was irrelevant, he needn’t have bothered with all those songs about racial and class justice, and he never would have been blacklisted.
 

 
This isn’t the conclusion that either Horrocks or deBoer wants to arrive at, of course. Rather, Horrocks hopes that separating art and political expression will leave the world free for purer, less constrained artistic expression. DeBoer hopes that separating art and society will lead to purer, more effective politics. But if you stipulate that art can’t change the world, you end up with art made only by people who don’t care about changing the world — which makes much of the art by marginalized people irrelevant or incoherent. And similarly, creating a politics walled off from discussions of culture or aesthetics ends up with a politics of struggle oddly divorced from the emotions, or thoughts, or interests, or feelings of those on behalf of whom you’re supposedly speaking. #BlackLivesMatter is a movement, but it’s also a poem — which is why, with the power of art to mean more than it means, it can, and has to, apply to black women (and men) at the Grammys, as well as to black men (and women) targeted by police.

Horrocks loves art, and wants to see it protected. DeBoer is committed to creating a better world, and doesn’t want that struggle debased. I love art and want a better world too. But I don’t think you can have art without the impetus, or hope, of change, and I don’t think you can get to a better world by denying the power of dreams. Surely if the African-American experience in this country has demonstrated anything, it’s that you can’t take the struggle out of art, nor the art out of the struggle.