David Mamet and the Delusion of Race
Author, film director, and playwright David Mamet, whose play Glengarry Glen Ross won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984.
Over the weekend, a member of a private online group I participate in posted an email with the Subject Line: Race. Intrigued, I opened the email and clicked the link to a site, Unherd, where the lead piece is playwright David Mamet’s “Race is a Delusion: Sanctimony has eclipsed reality.” Mamet, 74, says he was asked to choose an overlooked book, so he went way back to his days as a teen in the 1950s, growing up in Chicago. He chose a work by novelist Sinclair Lewis, who, as Mamet recalls, hipped him to literature.
His Babbitt (1922) is the story of a real estate Booster — the progenitor both of Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross. The books are masterpieces. I will not suggest you read them, in the hope that you may. And he, a most prolific gent, wrote a bit of trash, some okay fiction, and a few outliers. Outliers include It Can’t Happen Here (1935), the story of Fascism’s arrival in America, and Kingsblood Royal (1947).
What follows is my email response to that private group about Mamet’s essay, followed by some closing thoughts.
The title of the essay, "Race is a Delusion," is a phrase I've embraced of late, along other related words such as "illusion," "decoy," etc.
David Mamet's penultimate para is telling:
Sinclair Lewis’s story might have ended with Kingsblood’s discovery that he had been given the wrong genealogical chart, and that, after all, he did not have that drop of tainted “Negro Blood”. The end, therefore, which perhaps did not need further clarification, would have been that race is a delusion. As indeed it is. Its contemporary pre-eminence to the exclusion of all other human characteristics is our current-day sanctimony, as false and wicked as bussing, segregation, and Jim Crow; and, like them, a mantra in repetition of which one can seek escape from rational thought.
I agree with Mamet, though I prefer Faulkner's engagement with the thorny issues of race and identity, not to mention Twain's, both of whom did so before Lewis's story in 1947.
But the question remains: if race is a delusion, an illusion, a decoy (and, as my late friend Stanley Crouch put it, the "All-American Skin Game"), then what should we do to call into question—in our propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory ways of knowing—our continued use of language, thought, and behavior that depends on the fatally flawed concept of race?
Here's how Mamet introduces Lewis' Kingsblood Royal:
It is the story of a returning white WWII Vet, a rising cashier at a bank, who lives in the country-club set. The set takes up a lot of the members’ time drinking and dissing the servants. Their servants are all black, and their dish is about how lazy, offensive, sub-human and so on black people are, and how they are getting too big for their britches. Neil Kingsblood, our hero, agrees, and joins in the jollity.
But Neil, lamed in the War, can no longer engage in his beloved tennis; and, looking for a hobby, he takes up genealogy. What does he find? He finds that his great-great-grandfather was black.
What to do?
Note, this is 1947, where a mixed-race couple, walking down a street in the South or the North did so at the risk of their lives; where the entire country was Jim Crow, and blacks, who’d been hired in the war effort were fired at the war’s conclusion. And so on. Not that long ago.
I have not an iota of objection to Mamet's description of Lewis's account of the stereotyped and racist attitudes of some white-identified folks of that time. Some who identify as "white" today maintain such attitudes, as do other groups, including some racialized as black (such as some immigrant Africans and some from the Caribbean.)
Going Meta
Let's go meta for a moment: Notice that in the para above, I use the terms "white" and "black," while attempting to provide both context and, at the same time, implicitly calling into question the validity of the concept of race via expressions such as "racialized as," "identify as white," and "black-identified."
Not once did Mamet call into question racial language in like fashion. Until we use the cultural tool of language to counter-state the use of race as an implied [or explicit] biological reality (or even as a social construction), we won't transcend or move past this delusion, illusion, decoy.
Mamet may not be hip to the latest ways to fight race and racialization through the very language we speak, but since words, drama, and literature are his stock-in-trade, I'd expect more from him than only a critique of the admittedly over-woke state of much of our public discourse and its capture of many of our pillar institutions.
Mamet is clearly against those who embrace a victim mentality and fixate on oppression:
Will some people today find the book objectionable? Yes. That they will is evidence of another community sickness, that of our own advanced time: that sensitive matters can only be treated by those claiming to be victims, and then only by their indictment of their supposed oppressors. (I will name whites, straights, conservatives, Christians—ingathered into that accommodating portmanteau: “Haters.”)
Fine. I agree [up to a point]. But it'll take more than rhetorical backhanding and eye-rolling against the woke brigade to get us out of this mess. That "more" is what we'll explore at the "Resolving the Race(ism) Dilemma" conference on September 24th in Lexington, MA.
Outro
If I were a member of what above I call “the woke brigade,” I’d have pointed out Mamet’s ideological turn to conservatism, and the many “politically incorrect” stances he’s taken in the last decade or so, along with attendant statements he’s made in that rightwing vein. Being a conservative and a defender of the orange-haired menace to society would be enough to cancel him from (im)polite progressive conversation—except for his being spoken about in tones of derision and dismissal.
But just as I see the dangers posed by extremist alt-right white nationalists, I’m very concerned about the illiberal and intolerant forces among postmodern “anti-racist” progressives, who have captured a plethora of American institutions. (Eric Weinstein, a key member of what used to be called the Intellectual Dark Web, characterizes these groups of people as MAGAstan and WOKEistan.) I believe in free speech, so Mamet has a right to say what he damn well pleases, just as I have the right to state my provisional agreements and disagreements with him. And, in retrospect, Mamet placing the expression “Negro Blood” in quote marks above does qualify as calling into question the absurdity of what Ralph Ellison called racial “blood thinking.” My main problem with his reference to race as “a delusion” is that it’s done mainly to slash at the left, not to cast doubt on the very underlying assumptions of the racialized terms in which the discourse and debate occurs. (I’ve neither seen nor read his 2010 play, Race, so I won’t comment on it.) The result is a dialectic that ping-pongs arguments back and forth without ultimately moving the needle.
What’s needed is more radical than what so-called left vs. right politics can hold. The status quo of racialization has got to go.