This Year’s Model
22nd July 2015
Certification as the liberals’ official angry black man is a lucrative gig. The market is upscale, but the job is only temporary. Fashions change, or rather remain subject to a cycle. The job isn’t easy; it requires high attainment in the art of performance. Black rage must be precisely matched to liberal guilt.
James Baldwin provides the original model, in the essays originally published in the New Yorker and then collected in The Fire Next Time. Baldwin was a deeply literary man working at an elevated height, but the descent from Baldwin was steep. The sixties and early seventies served up new models on an almost annual basis. Before long we had Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and, lest we forget, George Jackson.