Outside Theory
“Woke” once denoted an oppositional mentality. How has it come to mean something close to “square”?
Recently, the journalist Michael Wolff reported that a centenary republication of Norman Mailer’s work had been scrapped due to objections to his notorious 1962 essay “The White Negro.” In what follows, I will add a few additional observations to my recent essay on the continued relevance of Mailer’s perennially controversial polemic. In my previous comments on the subject, I noted that:
today’s reader will . . . find lines that could have been published recently, with slight modifications, such as: “No Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk.”
The passage I quoted from Mailer continues as follows:
The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, lob and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible. The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger.
Any observer of our cultural discourse over the past five to ten years will know that a large proportion of today’s white writers and intellectuals share the preoccupation Mailer voices here. In particular since the rise of Black Lives Matter and the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, the quotidian dangers facing black Americans at the hands of the white majority and the state has been invoked at every turn. However, Mailer’s purpose in emphasizing this theme differed from those pursued by his contemporaries. He did not aim to call out “white privilege”or to demand a world in which such danger is eliminated, or at least distributed more proportionately across demographic groupings.
Rather, Mailer’s claim was that deprivation and oppression had allowed black people to see through the hollowness of the entire modern project of progress and prosperity – a realization that the crises of the twentieth century had also begun to force on their “hip” emulators. The a-bomb and the Nazi camps, he believed, had laid bare the fraudulence of the West’s fantasy of civilizational advancement, at least for a minority of outsiders who were willing to be honest about the implications of these events. But they were proceeded in this recognition by black Americans, who had always known the dark truths about America and the West that whites had denied.
