#stanley crouch

That is now the norm: punking out. Hiding under the bed. Walking beneath a flag of white underwear stained fully yellow by liquefied fear. Like all forms of cowardice in our moment, there is a self-serving psychological process tailor-made for this particular variation. The lack of aesthetic gumption is made into a smugness that eventually grants itself a pedigree in narcissism. As life in America becomes an ever more intriguing mix of styles, relationships, alliances, and even combinations of cuisine, things have gotten so mucked up and segregated in the world of literature that one does not expect American writers to tell us about anything other than themselves, their mono-ethnic neighborhoods, their own backgrounds, the narrowest definitions of the classes from which they come, their erotic plumbing and its meaning, how much or how little melanin is in their skin, and so forth.

Stanley Crouch argued unceasingly that American culture and black culture are inseparable, indeed almost synonymous. America, he wrote, “is not so much a melting pot as it is a rich thick soup in which every ingredient both maintains its taste and also takes on the taste of everything else.” That, I think, is the thing Stanley most wanted to impart: what he considered the real taste of American culture. The idea that “anti-blackness” is foundational to the republic didn’t shock him, but neither did it preoccupy him; he was more interested in the miracle of how blackness transformed the nation’s culture—above all, in its music. Jazz, as he saw it, was not only the expression of American democracy, but it was also the only working model of meritocracy in America, other than sports. Rather than bemoan its absence in other arenas, he wanted to build on the example...”