Anthony Walton is the author of the new book The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning with His Life and His Nation. His other books include Mississippi: An American Journey. Also a poet, he teaches at Bowdoin College.
Q: What inspired you to write The End of Respectability?
A: The last several years, as a person in middle age, I have been thinking about and taking stock of my life.
I was born into the Civil Rights Movement, and as such I’ve seen a lot of change in American society—the internet, smartphones, social media, the sexual revolution, to name several catalysts—and I have experienced much of what has gone right for African Americans since World War II.
I have also been face to face with much that has gone wrong for us. This book is a meditation on our society through the lens of my experience, which is, by definition, African American experience.
At the same time I have to remember (and encourage everyone else to remember) that African American experience is American experience. The two cannot be separated, they are “both/and.” So, I’m taking stock of the United States as a nation, and as an idea, or myth vis-à-vis what I have personally witnessed and carefully studied.
Where are we now? How did we get here? How has living in a Black body affected my experience of life and of my self? What are some of the realities, old and new, that I perceive as affecting those questions, both personally and, more broadly, as a society?
I hope I have answered a few of those questions, or at least identified and framed questions (old and new) in ways that are true, salient, and useful.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The book is named after one of the essays, “The End of Respectability.”
Much of my thinking is framed in the context of my parents’ lives. They were born into the Great Depression in Mississippi, had difficult childhoods, came north to Chicago, and steadily worked themselves into positions of traditional American homeowning suburban economic security.
They served as models for and supported their nuclear and extended families. They were valiant members of their community, serving in church, in clubs, in the military, and in local politics; they developed loving, trusting relationships with their neighbors.
They were stalwart members of our local Black community and also developed authentic and warm friendships with white neighbors, coworkers, and others with similar interests (such as Little League and Boy Scouts).
But for all that, they and millions of others of Blacks in their generation who had worked so hard to be a part of American civic life found that large majorities of whites embraced the overt racial disdain and backward-looking attitudes of MAGA and other retrograde political movements to the point of electing an avatar of that attitude as president of the United States.
This was disorienting. I think my father in particular was dismayed by this turn at the end of his life. What had all their striving and achievement been for? Quite a lot, I would say, but maybe not enough? And maybe it would never be?
One path of being an African American, and the one I was raised in, was—in simplest terms—the path of MLK: working to be judged by “the content of your character,” trying to participate in the accepted economic and social norms of American society, and fitting in.
It has been thought that that path, being “respectable,” would be the best way to become, after Civil Rights, full Americans. And in some ways that has worked. There have been all kinds of visible and measurable gains for American Blacks.
But it has not been enough. There have been observably large numbers of whites who resist African American progress, whether the quiet resistance we see in continued school and housing segregation, or the unapologetic and unmasked racism we see in far-right white nationalist, Christian nationalist, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi groups that are pressing for ever-larger presences in our politics and media.
So, it would seem that being merely “respectable” has not been enough and will not be. African Americans and those who care about them and our society are going to have to contemplate ways of being that meet the measure of the current challenges.
Q: The writer Molly Jong-Fast said of the book, “Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complications of racism and its effects on political polarization in America today. Anthony Walton is a teller of difficult truths, and you cannot read this book without finding that it has given you new knowledge about your own life.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I am very thankful to her for her kind words.
Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to racial equality in this country?
A: First of all, I would say time. I used to think that these problems would be eased the old-fashioned way, which is to say through the passing of generations, but we now see that racial animus has taken firm hold in certain factions of the millennial and Gen Z populations, and is probably here to stay for the foreseeable future.
But if I could wave a magic wand, the first thing I would do is rebuild the public school, community and technical college, and university systems, especially in urban and rural areas, to enable those young citizens to have the career and civic skills necessary to participate fully in our society.
I would also want to ensure that the curriculum engaged the entire history of the country, warts and all, perhaps as a model and celebration of democratic problem-solving.
An informed and intellectually skilled populace would probably be able to work its way toward equitable solutions for misinformation, negative speech, social media, and campaign finance, issues that I think threaten our nation.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now I am working on a couple of poetry manuscripts--one finished, another almost. And you can look for my poems in The New Yorker.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment