Then, we all lived in a world where the "assigners" of racial categories, "the owners of the machinery of racial recognition" -- the very architects of modern racism -- got to call the shots about what race meant in the wider world. By "racist fiat," Anatole had become a member of this exclusive "assigners" tribe.
Summarized simply, Anatole Broyard undoubtedly was among the New York intellectuals who knew that American racism was different only in degree, not in kind, from that practiced by Adolph Hitler. And because of this, American whiteness, with both its black and Jewish intellectual critiques bearing down on it, was found to be the most hollow of all the racial components.
Indeed, what variable in the equation of race, could be more weighty or more "inauthentic" than whiteness? Was Anatole pretending not to know that, by its very definition, whiteness was a supreme "act of bad faith (in Sartre's sense)?" For under the rules of whiteness, tribal members are required to hitch their self-worth, self-esteem, and their self-respect up to a set of dead phenotypic parameters: pale skin and blue eyes? And like Anatole had done himself, whites were so heavily invested in a bankrupt form of racist social practices, and racist consciousness, that it hardly left any room for a normal authentic humanity?
Even today, beyond pale skin and blue eyes, no one knows exactly what whiteness is? Indeed, who are these people who have been self-defined as superior? All that those passing for white, like Anatole Broyard, knew for sure is that pale skin and blue eyes entitled them to a suite of cross-generational tangible and intangible benefits large enough to define them as superior people --even if it was only in the "abstract" -- outside the bounds of normal morality.
Yet, is phenotype alone enough to render a people's humanity whole? No one seemed prepared to give an answer to that question during Anatole's time. It is not just pale skin, blue eyes and a skewed set of racial rules that has created the boundaries of whiteness? How authentic is it not to recognize that this is what encloses and encapsulates white reality -- a reality that only partially and "conditionally" admits them to the human race?
Thus, Anatole Broyard must have been acutely aware of the irony that without blackness to fall back on, blue eyes and pale skin, was all there was to his faux white humanity? Surely the brilliant Anatole did not miss the most profound irony of them all, the one that lies deep in the subtext of this book, that his whole humanity and that of his immediate family, hung by the slender thread of two empty phenotypic attributes of pale skin and blue eyes.
Despite his best intellectual efforts, his house in Connecticut, his reputation as a brilliant intellectual, the self-defined racial parameters upon which they depended, alone did not quite add up to a fully- formed un-fractured being? Racism had rendered them counterfeit.
With only them, Anatole's surely knew that his humanity was incomplete; without them as a white, he also surely knew that his humanity, under the heavy weight of racism, had all but vanished altogether? Indeed, without his blackness to fall back on, Anatole lived only through the ghosts of white phenotypes. Southport, Connecticut too was just another barren human desert of pale skin and blue eyes? It all was a false reality -- a humanity by fiat, and by definition, one maximally inauthentic.
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