Read Online Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography And White Identity Crafted By Crispin Sartwell Displayed In Digital
is an incredible book! Oh my! SO much to take in and really lays out in a decisive fashion about prejudice and privilege as it exists in our culture especially as we use "white" as the normative.
I'm going to read this book again, Good read! Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W, E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm Xtheir words speak firmly, eloquently, personally of the impact of white America on the lives of AfricanAmericans.
Black autobiographical discourses, from the earliest slave narratives to the most contemporary urban raps, have each in their own way gauged and confronted the character of white society.
For Crispin Sartwell, as philosopher, cultural
critic, and white male, these texts, through their exacting insights and external perspective, provide a rare opportunity, a means of glimpsing and gaining access to contents and core of white identity.
There is, Sartwell contends, a fundamental elusiveness to that identity, Whiteness defines itself as normative, as a neutral form of the human condition, marking all other forms of identity as "racial" or "ethnic" deviations.
Invisible to itself, white identity seeks to define its essence over and against those other identities, in effect defining itself through opposition and oppression.
By maintaining fictions of black licentiousness, violence, and corruption, white identity is able to cast itself as humane, benevolent, and pure the stereotype fabricates not only the oppressed but the oppressor as well.
Sartwell argues that AfricanAmerican autobiography perceives white identity from a particular and unique vantage point one that is knowledgeable and intimate, yet fundamentally removed from the white world and thus unencumbered by its obfuscating claims to normativity.
Throughout this provocative work, Sartwell steadfastly recognizes the many ways in which he too is implicated in the formulation and perpetuation of racial attitudes and discourse.
In Act Like You Know, he challenges both himself and others to take a long, hard look in the mirror of AfricanAmerican autobiography, and to find there, in the light of those narratives, the visible features of white identity.
Crispin Sartwell was born,.in DC. His Dad and his and his were DC newspapermen, His Mom and Step pa were high school teachers and later organic farmers, He got kicked out of the public school system in tenth grade for fomenting revolution, and attended the New Education Project, aka Bonzo Ragamuffin Prep, then U Maryland, Johns Hopkins, UVA.
He worked as a copy boy inat the Washington Star, where he started writing about pop music.
He was a freelance rock critic through the eighties for, among others the Balt City Paper, Record Mag, High Fidelity, and Melody Maker.
He lives in Glen Rock, PA with his wife, the writer Marion Winik, and their five children.
Hes Visiting Associate Prof of Political Science at Dickinson College Crispin Sartwell was born,.in DC. His Dad and his and his were DC newspapermen, His Mom and Step pa were high school teachers and later organic farmers, He got kicked out of the public school system in tenth grade for fomenting revolution, and attended the New Education Project, aka Bonzo Ragamuffin Prep, then U Maryland, Johns Hopkins, UVA.
He worked as a copy boy inat the Washington Star, where he started writing about pop music.
He was a freelance rock critic through the eighties for, among others the Balt City Paper, Record Mag, High Fidelity, and Melody Maker.
He lives in Glen Rock, PA with his wife, the writer Marion Winik, and their five children.
He's Visiting Associate Prof of Political Science at Dickinson College, He writes a weekly op ed column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, He has also appeared in Harper's, the Washington Post, and on Weekend All Things Considered, He is the author and editor of a number of books, and he's taught philosophy and communications at Vanderbilt, the Unversity of Alabama, and Penn State Harrisburg.
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