No
one knows what to make of Macon Detornay. As the novel’s paradoxical title
indicates, he embodies contradictions—an “angry black white boy” who is capable
of astounding arrogance and a hyperbolic sense of his own importance,
relentless in his criticism of white people and the privileges they blithely
enjoy, but just as relentless in his self-scrutiny, which lies at the heart of
his critique: “I’m here to tell the white man in the mirror the truth to his
face.” When we’re annoyed with Macon, it’s usually because he seems to exempt
himself from the vast swath of “whiteness” that is the target of his attacks:
he aspires to “transcendent status,” the one rare white person who might fully
escape his birthright as a privileged American and commit himself to the radical
struggle for racial justice. Readers may want to ask, with Nique, “What’s up
with all this ‘white people’ shit? You like an undercover brother or something?”
(49).
Macon
is capable of astonishing chutzpah, as when he attends a meeting of the Black
Student Union, in the recently rechristened Malcolm X lounge, the only white
person in the room (needless to say), and immediately starts challenging their
suggestions for a guest speaker: “He was blacker than each and every one of
these bourgeois motherfuckers” (123). He models himself after Malcolm X—a pretty
high standard in terms of integrity and commitment to the cause. He smugly dismisses
the 1960s feminist militant Angela Davis as “irrelevant,” the blaxploitation
icon Pam Grier as “sagging,” the politically militant rapper Chuck D of Public
Enemy as “finished,” and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison as “Oprahfied.”
Most contemporary black icons don’t meet his standards. He’s also quick to
distinguish himself from other white boys who are into hip-hop (don’t even
mention the Beastie Boys to him), other white writers who aspired to take part
in black culture (“corny greyboy Jack Kerouac and his one-sided love affair
with jazz” [26]), and other white revolutionaries (even throwing shade on John
Brown—who led a raid on a federal armory in an effort to inspire a widespread
slave uprising across the South and was executed for his efforts, a couple
years before the federal government did the same thing). Who does this guy
think he is?
The
novel opens in Macon’s first-person voice, in a monologue that seems to be set
at the end of his story, on a “Birmingham bus,” “broadcasting live and direct
from the getaway ride as the scene of the crime fades away” (1). We are
confronted with Macon’s beguiling tangle of contradictions from the very start
as he tries to establish himself as “one good white person” when he laments
that no news outlet ever called him “the white Bigger Thomas” (2)—readers of
Richard Wright’s 1940 protest novel Native
Son will laugh incredulously at such an audacious and nonsensical
statement.
But
by chapter 1, a third-person omniscient narrator has taken over. This narrator
is sometimes closely aligned with Macon’s perspective, representing his
interior thoughts and memories, and relentlessly cataloging his acute
self-consciousness, the insecure, nervously sweating, self-doubting kid
underneath this bold and cocky exterior. The scene in chapter 2 of book 1, when
Macon meets Andre for the first time, is remarkable as a portrayal of painful
awkwardness and racially inflected self-consciousness. We learn that Macon has
been anticipating this moment all summer—not only did he request a black
roommate, he’s requested Andre Walker specifically because he’s a descendant of
Fleet Walker, the last African American baseball player to play in the major
leagues before segregation in 1889. Macon is aware that his scheme will sound
crazy to Andre, and he’s right. But even beyond his revelation of their
historical connection, which wigs Andre out (“Wow. What am I supposed to do
with that?” [29]), there’s a relentless self-consciousness to their interaction
throughout. Macon is so proud of his purported degree of comfort around black
people, his deep knowledge of hip-hop culture and black history, that he’s
sharply attuned to the racial subtext of every single turn in the conversation.
Even when he leans back on his bed, a seemingly innocuous and even commonplace
posture for a dorm-mate to assume while shooting the breeze, he scrutinizes
himself for how such a posture might be interpreted by Andre: “He threw a leg
over his half-unpacked suitcase and leaned back, then wondered if the posture
was too comfortable too quick, a typical
cavalier-whiteboy-lounging-cuz-the-world-is-my-domain move” (32). This
self-consciousness is a big part of Macon’s point: he wants to shake white
people out of their complacent stupor, to get them to recognize all the small
ways that privilege underwrites their lives, how they simply occupy space with
a sense of entitlement. We should all be stopping to think before we throw our
legs casually over the half-unpacked suitcase, so to speak. Every movement of
his body and every word he says in this first interaction with Andre is
potentially charged with meaning. Macon wants to make a good first impression,
and he knows that he’ll come across as something of an enigma to Andre (which
he does).
It’s
important, I think, that Mansbach gives us such thorough access to Macon’s
self-doubting interior monologue in this scene, as it’s a vital counterweight
to his verbal bombast elsewhere. We have a would-be “race traitor” who thinks
of himself as more radical than John Brown and on par with Malcolm X in terms
of black militant street cred who is also
very much putting on a front, trying desperately to make his behavior and words
display his commitments—renouncing his whiteness doesn’t mean tinting his skin;
it means presenting a certain face (and voice) to the world, advertising his
abdication of white privilege with every word and gesture. He’s constantly
worried that he’ll be revealed as just another poseur or wannabe, another in a
long line of blackface-minstrel appropriations of blackness, and Andre’s
acceptance of him and his ideological commitments is vital to his sense of his own
legitimacy. It must be exhausting to be Macon.
But
this scene would read quite differently if we only had Macon’s point of view.
We would see the would-be white-antiracist superhero as he sees himself, and
this would reveal a profound degree of self-consciousness and self-doubt under
his bold façade. But Andre would remain an enigma, seen only through Macon’s
eager-to-please eyes: a symbolic black roommate against which he can gauge how “down”
he is. But Mansbach’s narrator has access to Andre’s point of view as well, and
throughout this dialogic scene we see him reacting
to Macon and his performance, and that reaction is full of skepticism.
Andre emerges as a three-dimensional and complex character with his own
complicated relationship to whiteness. As an alumnus of a prestigious,
predominantly white prep school in Los Angeles, Andre has some context for
Macon’s sales pitch: “Andre didn’t feel like listening to his roommate relieve
himself [of white guilt]. He’d already served his time in prep school as a
cardboard self-affirmation cutout. . . . A stoic, amiable receptacle into which
fake-empathetic whiteboys dumped their views, a priest who heard confessions
and smoked joints with the sinners to absolve them” (31). Andre is fully alert
to the ways Macon seems to be making a “token” out of him, treating their
conversation as a “confession” for which he expects “absolution,” and he’s not
having it. To a significant extent, his qualms are justified—Macon is quite
literally aiming for some kind of “cosmic,” historical reconciliation between
the descendants of Fleet Walker and Cap Anson, after all. But we do hear some
grudging props from Andre as well: “Macon might be a lunatic, and his
bloodlines were certainly polluted, but at least he was hip hop enough not to
view black people as an alien species” (34).
We
get Nique’s perspective, too, and in the scene in chapter 3, in Nique’s dorm
room, Macon’s interior monologue is outnumbered by the perspectives of the
African American men he’s so eager to impress. Mansbach even ends the chapter
with Nique and Andre alone in the room after Macon has left. Like Andre
earlier, Nique gives Macon some grudging respect: “[A]t least your boy there’s
trying. More than you can say for most of them” (54). We see that Macon’s
performance hasn’t met with unqualified success, however, as Andre and Nique
compare him to Harley Koon (a former classmate and the son of one of the cops
who was acquitted for the beating of Rodney King, whose story is told in detail
in the next chapter, background characterization for Andre and Nique and the
personal significance of the LA Riots of 1992 that Macon is not privy to—we know
more about their background than he does).
Even
as they take on the role of managers for Macon’s “career” as a white antiracist
activist and provocateur, booking him media appearances and managing his public
image, Andre and Nique make it clear that the jury remains out. Andre says, “I’ve
decided to believe in you until you give me reason not to” (149), and Nique is
even more blunt: “Personally, I still think you’re full of shit, but hell, go ’head
and keep proving me wrong” (163).
Angry Black White Boy is a much more
interesting book, in my view, because it doesn’t offer a single, uncritical
perspective on its would-be hero. It’s clear that Macon and Adam Mansbach have
a lot in common: Mansbach himself is deeply literate in the history of hip-hop
culture; he didn’t have to do research to put together his riffs on the
commercialization of the genre in the 1990s, or why The Low-End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest is such a “good choice”
as the warmup track to his poetry reading (162). The author knows his black
history and black literature, and his book seems to aim to achieve something
like what Macon himself wants to achieve—to get white readers to look
critically at themselves and their own privilege, and to challenge them to live
in such a way that not only doesn’t take advantage of white supremacy but
actively seeks to undermine it. We can tell that the author endorses Macon’s
ideas to a considerable extent, but he also presents a deeply flawed,
self-contradicting, often delusional hero whose sincerity and commitment (and,
indeed, sanity) is under question from the very start. There’s a remarkable
moral courage in Macon’s willingness to scrutinize and try to transcend his own
whiteness, and his arrogance is tempered by a genuine self-critical gaze. But
it’s never clear to what extent we’re supposed to affirm and admire Macon, and
as the story gets increasingly outlandish, it’s not always easy to tell where
the author is in relation to his creation.
No
one knows what to make of Macon Detornay. Least of all the author himself.
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