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The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy
The Omni-Americans is a classic collection of wickedly incisive essays, commentaries, and reviews on politics, literature, and music. Provocative and compelling, Albert Murray debunks the "so-called findings and all-too-inclusive extrapolations of social science survey technicians," contending that "human nature is no less complex and fascinating for being encased in dark skin." His claim that blacks have produced "the most complicated culture, and therefore the most complicated sensibility in the western world" is elucidated in a book which, according to Walker Percy, "fits no ideology, resists all abstractions, offends orthodox liberals and conservatives, attacks social scientists and Governor Wallace in the same breath, sees all the faults of the country, and holds out hope in the end."
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
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February 11, 2024
This book is incredible and was a real paradigm-shifter for me. Way back in the year I was born (1970, I'm old), Albert Murray was mainly a music critic. But he was also writing fiery polemics on race and racism, from the perspective of a black man who saw the many flaws in this nation while also celebrating its many strengths. And in a voice that is so acerbic, witty, angry, humorous, empathetic, bitchy, and above all, masterful. The guy knows what he's talking about. His mind is all spikes and spokes, constantly poking and turning, his writing all switchbacks and sudden, surprising connections. Truly enlightening stuff.
I'd heard of him before, as I had read many sociopolitical classics in college. But I had mainly learned of him in the context of being the counterpoint to James Baldwin, a writer who Murray is famous for critiquing. It's telling that while I was assigned many of Baldwin's works, Murray was never on the curriculum. Clearly a dynamic was created between them similar to Booker T. Washington versus W.E.B. DuBois, with Washington often seen these days as upholding a white supremacist value system (spoiler, he didn't).
Murray seethes about the treatment of African-Americans by white America, I do want to make that clear. But he seethes against anyone who would flatten the black American experience, who would turn a complex ethnicity into a race of victims. And so his seething isn't just against clueless, vicious white racists or against the many horrible and familiar examples of systemic racism; he also fumes against sociologists and politicians and cocktail party liberals who turn black Americans into portraits of misery. Just as he speaks out against black writers who he feels do the same. This is not a man who would appreciate much about Ta-Nehisi Coates or Nikole Hannah-Jones or Ibram X. Kendi, let alone Robin DiAngelo or the tenets of Afro-pessimism. If you read this and end up admiring him, I'd recommend modern black writers like the very-different-from-each-other Coleman Hughes and Chloe Valdary and Kwame Anthony Appiah (but not so much Glenn Loury or John McWhorter, both of whom I imagine he'd dismiss as bougie af).
Murray's ideas (and ideals) can perhaps be summarized as:
(1) The black American experience is a layered, complicated experience and anyone who would paint it as solely a history of being demeaned - for whatever goal, positive or negative - well, that person is either a grifter trying to get some clout by trucking in stereotypes about "Negro inferiority" without actually saying that openly, or is just your garden variety stupid asshole with their head in the dirt.
(2) Black people are central to the American experience and what it is like to be an American and what constitutes the American character. He believes that black culture(s) and white culture(s) are often different, of course. But blacks and whites have deeply influenced each other. The impact on one from the other and back again means "American culture" is black, white, all the colors. And so black Americans have more in common with white Americans than they do with people in other nations who have black skin. Murray despised both white and black separatism. To him, there are no "black Americans" or "white Americans"; thus the "Omni-" of the title.
(3) To look at race rather than culture as the central part of identity is to be both a fool and a dullard.
(4) The history of the U.S. is not simply the story of white heroes & white villains with black identity defined by how black people coped or benefited from the various villainous or heroic acts of those white people. Instead, American history is a history of so many white and black heroes, all of whom have one unifying factor: they are each Americans, and should be celebrated as such.
some things that amused/interested me:
- oh how he rails against the reasons behind "the natural look" for black people that was being embraced by hippies and counter-cultural black people and various fashion magazines of his day. all of that was hilarious and eye-opening to me. Murray points out that not only has black American culture often celebrated artifice and flash and stylization as key components of style, he points out that if you really want to be that person looking at African roots as key to black American culture - and he is decidedly not that person - then you need to at least realize that African culture has fully embraced stylization, flash, and artifice - including body modification - since before the U.S. was even a country.
- oh how he rails against sociologists and social workers who would demean black female mastery and, well, the entire concept of matriarchy, by positing that one of the key problems of black culture is the fact that many black kids are raised by single moms. Murray celebrates these women.
- oh how he rails against photographers and "ethnologists" who paint places like Harlem as anything less than complex, vibrant, and full of beauty & joy, and instead focus on the poverty and pain and sorrow that is also - but only - a part of that world. And far from the most important let alone influential part. Such diminishments are often celebrated as "realism" - all the better to earn the acclaim of various white liberals, who can then condescend to Harlem and other black-majority places as hellholes in need of rescue.
- oh how he (more gently) rails against James Baldwin! (who I love.) this was shocking, but he has a point. Baldwin started his career speaking against "propagandistic" books that would flatten the black experience and portray black people as a race of victims. but then Baldwin went to France and... changed. Suddenly he was full of sorrow over the poor, poor black Americans and their supposedly miserable lives that contained no joy or richness, and so that's what he talked about in interviews and that's what he wrote about in essays and in books like Another Country. Murray sees Baldwin as a man who betrayed his own former ideals and his own formerly realistic and nuanced perspectives, a person who once railed against books that transformed black people into victim archetypes, and who then - after he was included in the circle of hip literati & American expats of the day - apparently decided that providing such misery porn was maybe not such a bad idea after all.
(I'm not sure where I land on this perspective and I'd probably need to read a biography of Baldwin to truly form an opinion. but I get where Murray is coming from.)
- he also has, let's just say, some thoughts on Norman Mailer & his essay "The White Negro." I'm less interested in Mailer than I am in Baldwin, so I'm not going to go into detail. But those thoughts are Murray at his scathing best. Haha Mailer, wonder what you thought about that.
my man:
an excellent article on Murray by another one of my favorite black writers (and perhaps the one who hews most closely and most explicitly to Murray's ideals), Greg Thomas:
https://www.metapsychosis.com/reading...
some choice quotes:
"American intellectuals, like those elsewhere, are profoundly preoccupied with the abnormally wretched predicament of contemporary Western man in general... almost every significant work of art of the twentieth century contains some explicit and often comprehensive indictment of the shortcomings of contemporary society and the inadequacies of contemporary man... As soon as any issue involving Negroes arises, however, most American social science theorists and technicians... seem compelled to proceed as if Negroes have only to conform more closely to the behavior norms of the self-same white American middle class that writers like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson had already dissected and rejected long before the left wing political establishment of the nineteen thirties made it fashionable for even the average undergraduate to do so."
"Most Negroes have always had enough inside information about the history of this great hit-and-miss republic to know that other people have been deliberately writing Negroes out of the history books, even as the same people permitted newly arrived immigrants to write themselves in."
"Identity is best defined in terms of culture, and the culture of the nation over which the white Anglo-Saxon power elite exercises such exclusive political, economic, and social control is not all-white by any measurement ever devised. American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other. And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society."
I'd heard of him before, as I had read many sociopolitical classics in college. But I had mainly learned of him in the context of being the counterpoint to James Baldwin, a writer who Murray is famous for critiquing. It's telling that while I was assigned many of Baldwin's works, Murray was never on the curriculum. Clearly a dynamic was created between them similar to Booker T. Washington versus W.E.B. DuBois, with Washington often seen these days as upholding a white supremacist value system (spoiler, he didn't).
Murray seethes about the treatment of African-Americans by white America, I do want to make that clear. But he seethes against anyone who would flatten the black American experience, who would turn a complex ethnicity into a race of victims. And so his seething isn't just against clueless, vicious white racists or against the many horrible and familiar examples of systemic racism; he also fumes against sociologists and politicians and cocktail party liberals who turn black Americans into portraits of misery. Just as he speaks out against black writers who he feels do the same. This is not a man who would appreciate much about Ta-Nehisi Coates or Nikole Hannah-Jones or Ibram X. Kendi, let alone Robin DiAngelo or the tenets of Afro-pessimism. If you read this and end up admiring him, I'd recommend modern black writers like the very-different-from-each-other Coleman Hughes and Chloe Valdary and Kwame Anthony Appiah (but not so much Glenn Loury or John McWhorter, both of whom I imagine he'd dismiss as bougie af).
Murray's ideas (and ideals) can perhaps be summarized as:
(1) The black American experience is a layered, complicated experience and anyone who would paint it as solely a history of being demeaned - for whatever goal, positive or negative - well, that person is either a grifter trying to get some clout by trucking in stereotypes about "Negro inferiority" without actually saying that openly, or is just your garden variety stupid asshole with their head in the dirt.
(2) Black people are central to the American experience and what it is like to be an American and what constitutes the American character. He believes that black culture(s) and white culture(s) are often different, of course. But blacks and whites have deeply influenced each other. The impact on one from the other and back again means "American culture" is black, white, all the colors. And so black Americans have more in common with white Americans than they do with people in other nations who have black skin. Murray despised both white and black separatism. To him, there are no "black Americans" or "white Americans"; thus the "Omni-" of the title.
(3) To look at race rather than culture as the central part of identity is to be both a fool and a dullard.
(4) The history of the U.S. is not simply the story of white heroes & white villains with black identity defined by how black people coped or benefited from the various villainous or heroic acts of those white people. Instead, American history is a history of so many white and black heroes, all of whom have one unifying factor: they are each Americans, and should be celebrated as such.
some things that amused/interested me:
- oh how he rails against the reasons behind "the natural look" for black people that was being embraced by hippies and counter-cultural black people and various fashion magazines of his day. all of that was hilarious and eye-opening to me. Murray points out that not only has black American culture often celebrated artifice and flash and stylization as key components of style, he points out that if you really want to be that person looking at African roots as key to black American culture - and he is decidedly not that person - then you need to at least realize that African culture has fully embraced stylization, flash, and artifice - including body modification - since before the U.S. was even a country.
- oh how he rails against sociologists and social workers who would demean black female mastery and, well, the entire concept of matriarchy, by positing that one of the key problems of black culture is the fact that many black kids are raised by single moms. Murray celebrates these women.
- oh how he rails against photographers and "ethnologists" who paint places like Harlem as anything less than complex, vibrant, and full of beauty & joy, and instead focus on the poverty and pain and sorrow that is also - but only - a part of that world. And far from the most important let alone influential part. Such diminishments are often celebrated as "realism" - all the better to earn the acclaim of various white liberals, who can then condescend to Harlem and other black-majority places as hellholes in need of rescue.
- oh how he (more gently) rails against James Baldwin! (who I love.) this was shocking, but he has a point. Baldwin started his career speaking against "propagandistic" books that would flatten the black experience and portray black people as a race of victims. but then Baldwin went to France and... changed. Suddenly he was full of sorrow over the poor, poor black Americans and their supposedly miserable lives that contained no joy or richness, and so that's what he talked about in interviews and that's what he wrote about in essays and in books like Another Country. Murray sees Baldwin as a man who betrayed his own former ideals and his own formerly realistic and nuanced perspectives, a person who once railed against books that transformed black people into victim archetypes, and who then - after he was included in the circle of hip literati & American expats of the day - apparently decided that providing such misery porn was maybe not such a bad idea after all.
(I'm not sure where I land on this perspective and I'd probably need to read a biography of Baldwin to truly form an opinion. but I get where Murray is coming from.)
- he also has, let's just say, some thoughts on Norman Mailer & his essay "The White Negro." I'm less interested in Mailer than I am in Baldwin, so I'm not going to go into detail. But those thoughts are Murray at his scathing best. Haha Mailer, wonder what you thought about that.
my man:
an excellent article on Murray by another one of my favorite black writers (and perhaps the one who hews most closely and most explicitly to Murray's ideals), Greg Thomas:
https://www.metapsychosis.com/reading...
some choice quotes:
"American intellectuals, like those elsewhere, are profoundly preoccupied with the abnormally wretched predicament of contemporary Western man in general... almost every significant work of art of the twentieth century contains some explicit and often comprehensive indictment of the shortcomings of contemporary society and the inadequacies of contemporary man... As soon as any issue involving Negroes arises, however, most American social science theorists and technicians... seem compelled to proceed as if Negroes have only to conform more closely to the behavior norms of the self-same white American middle class that writers like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson had already dissected and rejected long before the left wing political establishment of the nineteen thirties made it fashionable for even the average undergraduate to do so."
"Most Negroes have always had enough inside information about the history of this great hit-and-miss republic to know that other people have been deliberately writing Negroes out of the history books, even as the same people permitted newly arrived immigrants to write themselves in."
"Identity is best defined in terms of culture, and the culture of the nation over which the white Anglo-Saxon power elite exercises such exclusive political, economic, and social control is not all-white by any measurement ever devised. American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other. And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society."
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December 1, 2011Albert Murray—the greatly under-recognized novelist, memoirist, biographer, and cultural critic—began arguing nearly 30 years ago that the blues, not slave narratives, are the definitive African-American art form. Furthermore, Murray believes that the blues represent our entire country’s most creative, cathartic means of confronting adversity; and that blues singers are America’s archetypal heroes, possessing “the ultimate human endowment” of on-the-spot invention (i.e., improvisation) in the face of history’s dragons, which prove vulnerable to the blues’ ironic humor and resilient spirit.
Murray’s inclusive aesthetic, which calls our culture “mulatto” and the U.S. Constitution “a jazz [i.e., improvisatory] document,” bears some similarities to present-day American feminist literary theory. Its practitioners, like Murray, find less truth in the fixed rise-and-fall of traditional narrative than in more associative, lyrical patterns. But the feminist theory of American identity has evolved largely into a non-assimilationist stance that values what Murray calls the “mosaic” over the “mulatto.” While the latter celebrates the profound effects of cultural mixing (think “melting pot”), the former seeks to honor each of America’s diverse, often fragmented traditions, which has proved problematic: One person’s symbol of tradition—like the Confederate flag—can be another’s symbol of oppression. Additionally, gender almost never operates in a vacuum: African American women have been rightly critical of a monolithic feminism that downplays the tension between competing social categories.
By contrast, Murray’s “mulatto” metaphor seeks social connections and ways to improvise on them, thus broadening the terms on which people can meet. When that meeting takes place between books and a reader, and when the books are recent memoirs by African-American women and the reader is a white Southern female, the language of feminist theory seems less accurate, appropriate, and metaphorically rich than Murray’s blues-grounded “mulatto-ism,” especially since race, not gender, forms the core of each of these books.
(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE)
Murray’s inclusive aesthetic, which calls our culture “mulatto” and the U.S. Constitution “a jazz [i.e., improvisatory] document,” bears some similarities to present-day American feminist literary theory. Its practitioners, like Murray, find less truth in the fixed rise-and-fall of traditional narrative than in more associative, lyrical patterns. But the feminist theory of American identity has evolved largely into a non-assimilationist stance that values what Murray calls the “mosaic” over the “mulatto.” While the latter celebrates the profound effects of cultural mixing (think “melting pot”), the former seeks to honor each of America’s diverse, often fragmented traditions, which has proved problematic: One person’s symbol of tradition—like the Confederate flag—can be another’s symbol of oppression. Additionally, gender almost never operates in a vacuum: African American women have been rightly critical of a monolithic feminism that downplays the tension between competing social categories.
By contrast, Murray’s “mulatto” metaphor seeks social connections and ways to improvise on them, thus broadening the terms on which people can meet. When that meeting takes place between books and a reader, and when the books are recent memoirs by African-American women and the reader is a white Southern female, the language of feminist theory seems less accurate, appropriate, and metaphorically rich than Murray’s blues-grounded “mulatto-ism,” especially since race, not gender, forms the core of each of these books.
(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE)
April 24, 2017
Albert Murray thinks your faves don't have the range.
September 1, 2020
Excellent perspective from 1970 on the richness of the American cultural mosaic and critique of the cult of Black dysfunction. Critical commentary on the role of Black Americans in arts and literature and particularly in music during the season of the Black Power movement. Murray's comments are relevant 50 years later.
"Many white writers go on year after year turning out book after solipsistic book in which they pretend that the world is white. In this they go hand in hand with most U. S. journalists, photographers, and motion picture producers. But any U. S. Negro sharecropper surrounded by a field of snow white cotton knows better than that. And he knows that the world is not black either. He knows that the only color the world has is the color of infinity. Whatever that color may be. This particular sort of U. S. Negro knows very well that the white man, for all his relative political and economic power, is not free." (Murray, p. 144)
"Many white writers go on year after year turning out book after solipsistic book in which they pretend that the world is white. In this they go hand in hand with most U. S. journalists, photographers, and motion picture producers. But any U. S. Negro sharecropper surrounded by a field of snow white cotton knows better than that. And he knows that the world is not black either. He knows that the only color the world has is the color of infinity. Whatever that color may be. This particular sort of U. S. Negro knows very well that the white man, for all his relative political and economic power, is not free." (Murray, p. 144)
June 1, 2013
The title of this book really piqued my interest, but I ended up being very disappointed. Described as a collection of essays on black history and culture (as it is American history and culture, of course), I had assumed the essays would each cover a different event or issue. Instead, the book read more like a rant, one that was interesting for the first section, but ended up repeating the same points over and over. I had hoped to learn more about the hidden history of American minorities, but instead I had to suffer through yet another textbook-style monologue. To be fair, I gave up reading thoroughly after the first third of the book, and simply skimmed the rest to see if Murray ever brought up some new information (he didn't).
July 9, 2020
A collection of penetrating, hilarious essays that out the "folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology" and affirm African American agency and continuity. I really enjoyed, was challenged by, and learned from, this book.
February 26, 2021
wow, some very interesting common sense perspectives on things you may - or may not - have taken for granted. murray is razor sharp, and no nonsense. this is one i know i'll go to go back to again and again.
May 29, 2007
Although it's a few decades old, no book better describes the dilemma of race relations in the US than this classic by Albert Murray. Plus, he just such a pleasure to read.
January 7, 2023
I came to this book via Walker Percy and his suggestion that it, “fits no ideology, resists all abstractions, offends orthodox liberals and conservatives, attacks social scientists and Governor Wallace in the same breath, sees all the faults of the country, and holds out hope in the end."
I’d say that’s a good summary. In any event, I’ll be reading more Murray for sure.
I’d say that’s a good summary. In any event, I’ll be reading more Murray for sure.
July 4, 2022
Sad to admit, but I'd not known of the work of Albert Murray until the The Journal of Free Black Thought sponsored a symposium on his life and work. The sub-title to this collection of essays says it all: "Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy" and those who buy into the 'anti-racist' racism of Ibram X Kendi and 'allies' like Robin DiAngelo would benefit from exposure to the bracing, challenging, and powerful words of Albert Murray who, at the height of the Black Nationalism of the 1960s could write:
"The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people..... American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto."
Murray argues against the pathologizing of racial essentialism and for a "militant integrationalism." He writes as to how black art and culture, and in particular jazz and blues, which were formative in my childhood development, IS "American culture" because "American culture" and "black American culture" are one and the same.
As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes in his "Foreward" of the edition I read, Murray's poetic voice, impassioned argumentation, and pluralistic vision have only become more urgently needed today.
"The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people..... American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto."
Murray argues against the pathologizing of racial essentialism and for a "militant integrationalism." He writes as to how black art and culture, and in particular jazz and blues, which were formative in my childhood development, IS "American culture" because "American culture" and "black American culture" are one and the same.
As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes in his "Foreward" of the edition I read, Murray's poetic voice, impassioned argumentation, and pluralistic vision have only become more urgently needed today.
August 11, 2020
This book is a dense, sophisticated, wild ride and I think I would need to read it multiple times to really gleam all that it has to offer. Broadening by own knowledge of its 60s and 70s context would help too, since there are many references to what was happening in the world and in the halls of scholarship at the time Murray wrote. In any case, Murray serves in this text as a 20th century Black-American De Tocqueville, providing a host of rich philosophical observations about American culture, race relations, and racial categories. Refreshingly, Murray is suspicious of the category of race and this seems to be because race is often treated in an essentialist way, as an either-or proposition. Murray would rather talk about culture than race. Culture is dynamic and always changing through encounter and adaptation. His thesis is that mainstream American culture in general is mulatto, and thus more black than most white people acknowledge. At the same time, there are white elements to black sub-culture. White and black Americans he theorizes, without over simplifying (an important qualification!), have more in common with one another than they do with people in other places. That's true not only due to the fact of their long cohabitation in the same country, but also to their common human nature. The blues (and also jazz, and other art forms) serve as a source for his philosophy. The blues is an authentic expression of American culture. It is rightly associated with black Americans, but it has white influences (particularly Protestant Christianity). The way white and black musicians respectfully encounter one another and the way blues continues to innovate through encounter may be a paradigm for the wider society to follow. Murray rejects assimiliationist ideology. He defends integration and celebrates (without romanticizing) black culture. He opposes what he calls "the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology." This is a hopeful book and a vision of America in both its reality and promise that I found encouraging.
August 10, 2020
This was an interesting book, which I picked up kind of randomly at the local bookstore. Murray makes some great quotable arguments about the pathologizing of black communities, in sociology, politics, and popular culture (like novels about "ghetto life"), staying grounded in the fact that the only problem is racism and discrimination. True! And has other interesting insights. Sometimes, though, he goes in directions I don't agree with, particularly in some of his literary opinions, which I thought showed he was as trapped by the contradictions of his time as everyone else that he rails against (James Baldwin, for example). Some of his side digressions seem like pet peeves, that I thought detracted from his main themes. I was particularly annoyed with his dismissal of J.J. Phillips' "Mojo Hand," one of my favorite novels, which I could go on about at length, but I won't; suffice that I thought the reasons he gives for not liking it seem to contradict his general points. Overall, though, it is great to see someone argue persuasively that black culture is American culture, that American culture as we know it wouldn't exist without black culture, that black Americans deserve the credit for it, and that the only thing holding them back is racism.
February 7, 2017
A tempering and occasional attack of some of James Baldwin's theories and writings. A thorough look at the social constructs of race, that we're all in the same boat, that saying someone who's 1/16th white is black but someone who's 1/16th black is white (or black) is insane and not productive.
Murray's a strong writer who stands his ground, claiming to be more of the average-joe than Baldwin (who he says sees his homeland of Harlem through the eyes of the Greenwich Village elites, who he says fell into the trap of writing the protest novel that he, Baldwin, had protested before). His work also gives a quick but celebratory look at the importance of the blues and jazz on the American psyche, the original artform born out of America.
Perhaps what I found most interesting was the question of educating students regarding black history (then, it was Black History Week rather than Month). There are lots of good points to think about, even when Murray's language can be a bit overthetop.
Also good: 'fakelore' and the idea of what 'traditions' are. Murray would probably have had a decent conversation with VS Naipaul on that...
Murray's a strong writer who stands his ground, claiming to be more of the average-joe than Baldwin (who he says sees his homeland of Harlem through the eyes of the Greenwich Village elites, who he says fell into the trap of writing the protest novel that he, Baldwin, had protested before). His work also gives a quick but celebratory look at the importance of the blues and jazz on the American psyche, the original artform born out of America.
Perhaps what I found most interesting was the question of educating students regarding black history (then, it was Black History Week rather than Month). There are lots of good points to think about, even when Murray's language can be a bit overthetop.
Also good: 'fakelore' and the idea of what 'traditions' are. Murray would probably have had a decent conversation with VS Naipaul on that...
Want to read
February 5, 2021“Murray, a blues philosopher, novelist, genuine Renaissance man, lifelong friend of Ralph Ellison, and co-founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center, makes, with tremendous flair, the case that America is fundamentally a mongrel nation and that ‘any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.’”
Recommended by Thomas Chatterton Williams here: https://spectator.us/books-america-re....
Recommended by Thomas Chatterton Williams here: https://spectator.us/books-america-re....
August 18, 2020
A totally different perspective and a great one.
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March 10, 2022I got this because someone in a writing program kept talking about it, and it seemed to contradict some of my received wisdom on (anti)racism. I'm interested in social justice and antiracism in general, I'm writing an epic fantasy with a (struggle against a) strict caste system that has some parallels to racism, and I'm on a racial equity team at work. So I was interested to see how this fit in with the things I've learned on my own and from the tons of training we've had recently at work.
Mainly, a lot of the training from work stresses statistics on the disparities between Black and White outcomes to show that racism has real effects, something that Murray initially seemed to eschew. However, as I read I realized that he does not deny the existence of racism or its effects and in fact supports fighting against racism. His issue is more with the images of blackness and whiteness.
His argument seems to be that although oppressed, Black people (not a term he uses, btw; he uses Negroes - this was written in the 1970s) are not culturally inferior or un-American, nor do they see themselves that way, and in fact their improvisation and openness to change help them thrive and make them quintessentially American. Among other revolutionary statements, he asserts that Black culture is American culture (it is an integral part, modern music as we know it being just one example) and that America is mulatto (because there is no clear dividing line; there is admixture on both sides).
Part I, the first 60 or so pages, makes these arguments, and that was pretty interesting, engaging and thought-provoking. In Part II, however, he goes into rants against other writers, only some of whom I've even heard of, and I started falling asleep a lot during this part. Part III talks about Black identity and pride, and that was interesting again, particularly the thought that Black people don't need more pride - they have a very high opinion of themselves already (Murray's point not mine) - they need economic opportunity, an end to discrimination, etc.
So does this fit with what I've been learning recently about antiracism and racial equity efforts? Yes, I think so, and not only that but it's an important corollary to racial justice training materials that emphasize the problems faced by Black people. There is a real danger that such discourse could lead to seeing Black people merely as problems. Murray reminds us of all that Black people have contributed to American society and culture (and also that White people don't actually have it all like white supremacy claims) as well as the not-to-be-missed opportunity we have for a richer society and culture if we would just let Black Americans be full citizens.
Mainly, a lot of the training from work stresses statistics on the disparities between Black and White outcomes to show that racism has real effects, something that Murray initially seemed to eschew. However, as I read I realized that he does not deny the existence of racism or its effects and in fact supports fighting against racism. His issue is more with the images of blackness and whiteness.
His argument seems to be that although oppressed, Black people (not a term he uses, btw; he uses Negroes - this was written in the 1970s) are not culturally inferior or un-American, nor do they see themselves that way, and in fact their improvisation and openness to change help them thrive and make them quintessentially American. Among other revolutionary statements, he asserts that Black culture is American culture (it is an integral part, modern music as we know it being just one example) and that America is mulatto (because there is no clear dividing line; there is admixture on both sides).
Part I, the first 60 or so pages, makes these arguments, and that was pretty interesting, engaging and thought-provoking. In Part II, however, he goes into rants against other writers, only some of whom I've even heard of, and I started falling asleep a lot during this part. Part III talks about Black identity and pride, and that was interesting again, particularly the thought that Black people don't need more pride - they have a very high opinion of themselves already (Murray's point not mine) - they need economic opportunity, an end to discrimination, etc.
So does this fit with what I've been learning recently about antiracism and racial equity efforts? Yes, I think so, and not only that but it's an important corollary to racial justice training materials that emphasize the problems faced by Black people. There is a real danger that such discourse could lead to seeing Black people merely as problems. Murray reminds us of all that Black people have contributed to American society and culture (and also that White people don't actually have it all like white supremacy claims) as well as the not-to-be-missed opportunity we have for a richer society and culture if we would just let Black Americans be full citizens.
December 21, 2020
Collection of magazine essays written in the 60s and collected and published in book form in 1970. I liked Murray’s basic perspective that American blacks and whites have much more in common than not, and that it would be good for people to realize that, and build on it, But these essays were really responding to events and discussions in the sixties and I didn’t follow a lot of it or find it meaningful. I did like the appendix with a summary of his life, which was amazing, and I think he deserves a good biography.
October 6, 2020
After reading this compelling collection of essays by Albert Murray about the Black experience in America, originally published in 1970, I understand why Henry Louis Gates calls him "the great contrarian of American cultural criticism." Agree with his arguments are not, Murray's gift of the written word is indisputable. He is a masterful crafter of eloquent, incisive, provocative prose.
June 24, 2020
This should be required reading, especially in 2020. Id give it 6 stars if I could. There's a couple essays that seem to not fit, like the short one on Harlem architecture, but the good stuff here is REAL good.
December 24, 2020
A highly compelling book that holds up more than 50 years after it was written. Highly recommended along with Racecraft, the New Jim Crow and others as reasonable arguments about the future of liberalism in the United States in comparison to How to Be an Anti-Racist or White Fragility.
February 23, 2022
Good-faith, lyrical criticism
August 31, 2022
Extremely provocative set of essays. Has really forced me to come to terms with the African American experience in new ways. Will be thinking about this for quite some time.
November 15, 2022
I listened to this at night and fell to sleep to it often. Wonderful writing. Not sure what he is about. Refreshing view of being black and American. I will have to listen again.
July 4, 2024
Granted, I'm a white dude. But I do think it's a much stronger, more subversive, and ultimately richer and more democratic argument he's making here than the people he's criticizing.
There is no "true" American racial, political, or artistic monoculture; we've been swinging the changes, improvising our destinies, and everything is lives within everybody else, since Plymouth Rock and 1776 and 1865 and 1939 and 1964 and 2001 and 2008 and right up to this anguished present.
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September 23, 2023In The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture, Albert Murray issues spirited “counter-statements” to what he sees as troubling strains of culture and politics in the 1960s and 70s. He takes to task, for example, the Afrocentrism then popular in Negro communities. The problem, Murray believes, is that Americans mostly misunderstand American identity. Murray’s arguments build on the work of cultural critic Constance Rourke. In the “incontestably mulatto” species of homo Americanus (22), Rourke names four component parts: Yankee, backwoodsman, Indian, and Negro; she recognized in each a “mood of disseverance” (16): the willingness to break from a given constraint in search of something better. She writes, “Their comedy, their irreverent wisdom, their sudden changes and adroit adaptations provided emblems for a pioneer people who required resilience as a prime trait” (16, emphasis mine). For Murray, these characteristics of play define what it means to be an American because America is at its core an experiment—democratic tinkering toward the promises of life, of liberty, of happiness and its pursuit. And experiments, in his view, require the kind of improvisational “idiom that reflects [an]...open, robust, and affirmative disposition to diversity and change…smoothly geared to open-minded improvisation…Improvisation after all is experimentation” (53). Murray finds this idiom nowhere more fully or elegantly realized than in the history and present of Black life and art—particularly the blues and jazz.
November 7, 2022
From Murray's response to Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel" (Murray's italics):
Nevertheless, there are many reasons why it is all but impossible for a serious writer of fiction to engage his craft as such in a political cause, no matter how worthy, without violating his very special integrity as an artist in some serious way. All of these reasons are complicated and some may seem downright questionable, but perhaps none is more important than the fact that, as well-meaning as he may be, the truly serious novelist has what almost amounts to an ambivalence toward the human predicament. Alarming as such ambivalence may seem, it is really fundamental to his open-minded search for the essential truth of human experience... Perhaps it is in the nature of things that activists, whether young or middle-aged, will have little patience with such intellectual checks and balances. Nevertheless, the serious apprentice to the art of fiction can never afford to dispense with them.
January 30, 2008
I borrowed it from barron claiborne. Supplemental literature to our conversations.
October 12, 2010
Celebratiing the fortieth anniversary of the publication of this pioneering book!
April 21, 2017
The Omni -Americans was at least partly prompted by the Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: The Case For National Action) from 1965, and author Albert Murray states his central thesis in the introduction, “Someone must at least begin to try to do justice to what U.S. Negroes like about being black and to what they like about being Americans. . . . far from simply struggling in despair, they live with gusto and a sense of elegance that has always been downright enviable.” I must say that, in a day when everyone seems focused on victim politics, Murray’s celebration of African American life is refreshing. It’s like the way the African American community rose up when Trump portrayed their lives as unrelentingly bleak.
I know Albert Murray as the as-told-to Author of Count Basie’s autobiography, Good Morning Blues. That may not seem much of an acquaintance, but back when I was reading about jazz Good Morning Blues was one of the best books I came across, and I suspected at the time that it involved much more than Count Basie talking into a tape recorder. The easy and relaxed idiom of the book, its lilt, the way it arranged itself into sections, were all exceptional, and it told me a great deal about music that I’d never known. I’d happily read it again.
So when my favorite reviewer Dwight Garner reviewed this larger volume, and I heard it included Stomping the Blues, a book I’ve wanted to read for years, I thought I’d have a look. I love the Library of America volumes, especially like the way they’ve wandered away from the acknowledged classics and made daring choices in recent years, like Ursula LeGuin, Elmore Leonard, and Loren Eiseley.
The first thing I read, as I almost always do, was the 26-page Chronology, which forms a mini-biography and in the case of Murray is fascinating. He was born in 1916, so this year marks his centenary. He didn’t publish his first book, The Omni Americans, until the age of 54. In the meantime he had led a rich life as a learner and a teacher, studying literature and culture in general at Tuskegee Institute and returning to teach there, also having a career in the U.S. Army Air Corps, in which he enlisted in 1943. While at Tuskegee as a student he noticed that many of the books he was checking out of the library had previously been checked out by a slightly older student named Ralph Ellison.
He juggled dual careers in the Air Force and in academia, was placed on reserve duty in 1947 but called back to active duty during the Korean War (as was my father-in-law, E.B. Blount; he told me some years back that that was the biggest shock of his life). In 1957 Murray suffered a mild heart attack, and five years later was allowed to take early retirement from the military because he was diagnosed with arteriosclerotic heart disease. That was a fortunate diagnosis. Murray lived another 51 years, to the age of 97, and never had further heart trouble. Also in ‘57 he and his wife moved to their Harlem residence in the Lenox Terrace Apartments, an “eighth floor corner apartment” with “spectacular views of Harlem and midtown.” He would live there the rest of his life.
Murray seemed to know everyone in African American cultural life, from Ellison and Romare Bearden to Basie and Ellington. It seems odd is that it took him so long to publish his first book, though he apparently—like his friend Ellison—worked slowly and carefully and was not in a hurry to publish; the semi-autobiographical narrative “Jack the Bear” that he began in 1951 wasn’t published until it became two novels, Train Whistle Guitar in 1974 and The Spyglass Tree in 1991. It also seems odd, for a man so learned and eloquent, that his first published volume, The Omni-Americans, seems halting and unsure of itself, cobbled together from essays he’d written earlier.
Murray was a man of high culture. His epilogue at the beginning of the book is from Andre Malraux, he seems conversant with the whole Western canon, European writers as well as American ones, and he is deeply suspicious of—I don’t think it would be too strong to say he hates—the social sciences, the kinds of studies that produced the Moynihan Report. He doesn’t so much argue with the evidence as with the way it is interpreted. “Nowhere does Moynihan explain what is innately detrimental about matriarchies.” And he flatly denies the image that it presents of black life in America.
“Harlem Negroes do not act like the culturally deprived people of the statistical surveys but like cosmopolites. Many may be indigent but few are square. They walk and even stand like people who are elegance-oriented. . . . They dress like people who like high fashion and like to be surrounded by fine architecture.”
Murray doesn’t give cultural figures a pass just because they’re African American. He has a wide appreciation of musicians, especially jazz musicians, especially those who played the blues. But he’s devastating about the famous writers of his day, dispatching with Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, James Baldwin. The only writer he seems unequivocally to admire is his friend Ralph Ellison, and that’s setting a high standard.
What’s really great is when Murray cuts loose. One wishes he would do it more often, though I’ve read into the next volume and there’s a lot more there. Here is a small part of his wonderful riff putting down Eldridge Cleaver. “And then they discovered that not only was he a member of the Ramparts magazine brotherhood, but had chosen to define himself largely in terms of the pseudo-existential esthetique du nastiness of Norman Mailer, who confuses militant characteristics with bad niggeristics precisely because he wouldn’t know a real bad Negro until one happened to him. . . . who the hell needs a brown-skinned Norman Mailer?”
His real answers to the Moynihan Report come not when he’s being academic and respectful, but when he lets himself go.
“And if black people have such low self-regard, why they hell are they forever laughing at everybody else? How come as soon as they get something desegregated so many of them feel so at home that they subject to try to take it over by sheer bullshit (which they would never try in an all-black situation)? How come they’re forever talking as if superstars like Willie Mays, Jim Brown, Oscar Robertson, and even Leontyne Price come a dime a dozen in the black community. And if they really feel so stupid, how come a third-rate Harlem hipster is always so certain he got him a square as soon as he spots an Ivy League white boy in a non-academic situation.”
This is the kind of celebration of black life that Good Morning Blues was full of. I don’t know where to look for it now that Murray is gone. But there’s a lot still to read in this volume.
davidguy.org
I know Albert Murray as the as-told-to Author of Count Basie’s autobiography, Good Morning Blues. That may not seem much of an acquaintance, but back when I was reading about jazz Good Morning Blues was one of the best books I came across, and I suspected at the time that it involved much more than Count Basie talking into a tape recorder. The easy and relaxed idiom of the book, its lilt, the way it arranged itself into sections, were all exceptional, and it told me a great deal about music that I’d never known. I’d happily read it again.
So when my favorite reviewer Dwight Garner reviewed this larger volume, and I heard it included Stomping the Blues, a book I’ve wanted to read for years, I thought I’d have a look. I love the Library of America volumes, especially like the way they’ve wandered away from the acknowledged classics and made daring choices in recent years, like Ursula LeGuin, Elmore Leonard, and Loren Eiseley.
The first thing I read, as I almost always do, was the 26-page Chronology, which forms a mini-biography and in the case of Murray is fascinating. He was born in 1916, so this year marks his centenary. He didn’t publish his first book, The Omni Americans, until the age of 54. In the meantime he had led a rich life as a learner and a teacher, studying literature and culture in general at Tuskegee Institute and returning to teach there, also having a career in the U.S. Army Air Corps, in which he enlisted in 1943. While at Tuskegee as a student he noticed that many of the books he was checking out of the library had previously been checked out by a slightly older student named Ralph Ellison.
He juggled dual careers in the Air Force and in academia, was placed on reserve duty in 1947 but called back to active duty during the Korean War (as was my father-in-law, E.B. Blount; he told me some years back that that was the biggest shock of his life). In 1957 Murray suffered a mild heart attack, and five years later was allowed to take early retirement from the military because he was diagnosed with arteriosclerotic heart disease. That was a fortunate diagnosis. Murray lived another 51 years, to the age of 97, and never had further heart trouble. Also in ‘57 he and his wife moved to their Harlem residence in the Lenox Terrace Apartments, an “eighth floor corner apartment” with “spectacular views of Harlem and midtown.” He would live there the rest of his life.
Murray seemed to know everyone in African American cultural life, from Ellison and Romare Bearden to Basie and Ellington. It seems odd is that it took him so long to publish his first book, though he apparently—like his friend Ellison—worked slowly and carefully and was not in a hurry to publish; the semi-autobiographical narrative “Jack the Bear” that he began in 1951 wasn’t published until it became two novels, Train Whistle Guitar in 1974 and The Spyglass Tree in 1991. It also seems odd, for a man so learned and eloquent, that his first published volume, The Omni-Americans, seems halting and unsure of itself, cobbled together from essays he’d written earlier.
Murray was a man of high culture. His epilogue at the beginning of the book is from Andre Malraux, he seems conversant with the whole Western canon, European writers as well as American ones, and he is deeply suspicious of—I don’t think it would be too strong to say he hates—the social sciences, the kinds of studies that produced the Moynihan Report. He doesn’t so much argue with the evidence as with the way it is interpreted. “Nowhere does Moynihan explain what is innately detrimental about matriarchies.” And he flatly denies the image that it presents of black life in America.
“Harlem Negroes do not act like the culturally deprived people of the statistical surveys but like cosmopolites. Many may be indigent but few are square. They walk and even stand like people who are elegance-oriented. . . . They dress like people who like high fashion and like to be surrounded by fine architecture.”
Murray doesn’t give cultural figures a pass just because they’re African American. He has a wide appreciation of musicians, especially jazz musicians, especially those who played the blues. But he’s devastating about the famous writers of his day, dispatching with Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, James Baldwin. The only writer he seems unequivocally to admire is his friend Ralph Ellison, and that’s setting a high standard.
What’s really great is when Murray cuts loose. One wishes he would do it more often, though I’ve read into the next volume and there’s a lot more there. Here is a small part of his wonderful riff putting down Eldridge Cleaver. “And then they discovered that not only was he a member of the Ramparts magazine brotherhood, but had chosen to define himself largely in terms of the pseudo-existential esthetique du nastiness of Norman Mailer, who confuses militant characteristics with bad niggeristics precisely because he wouldn’t know a real bad Negro until one happened to him. . . . who the hell needs a brown-skinned Norman Mailer?”
His real answers to the Moynihan Report come not when he’s being academic and respectful, but when he lets himself go.
“And if black people have such low self-regard, why they hell are they forever laughing at everybody else? How come as soon as they get something desegregated so many of them feel so at home that they subject to try to take it over by sheer bullshit (which they would never try in an all-black situation)? How come they’re forever talking as if superstars like Willie Mays, Jim Brown, Oscar Robertson, and even Leontyne Price come a dime a dozen in the black community. And if they really feel so stupid, how come a third-rate Harlem hipster is always so certain he got him a square as soon as he spots an Ivy League white boy in a non-academic situation.”
This is the kind of celebration of black life that Good Morning Blues was full of. I don’t know where to look for it now that Murray is gone. But there’s a lot still to read in this volume.
davidguy.org
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