Giving All Stakeholders a Fair Hearing

I’m amused by Dallas Brodie’s comment about the excerpt from my book, Whose Blues?, recently published in PAW. The passage that Brodie fixes on—“I was shocked to see the following sentences at the end of the first paragraph: ‘The history, the feelings, the music. They’re a black thing. And when whites get involved, as they always do, black people suffer.’”—is, as I make clear, a passage in which I am voicing one of two opposed ways in which people on the contemporary blues scene ideologize the blues. I’m steelmanning the Black bluesist argument. I’m not saying that I embrace it, or substantially agree with it. I’m saying, “This is how one important group of contemporary blues people feel.” I then offer a reading of Roland L. Freeman’s poem “Don’t Forget the Blues,” as a way of illustrating the Black bluesist position.

After doing that, I then do what good lawyers do: I steelman the other side. “The black bluesist vision certainly has its virtues,” I write. “But it is confronted, in any case, by a second and diametrically opposed way of ideologizing the blues, one that holds somewhat more sway in our contemporary moment, at least among denizens of the mainstream scene. I’ll call this second orientation ‘blues universalism.’” And then I offer illustrations in support of the blues universalist position.

What I’m doing, in other words, is precisely the opposite of the “woke virtue-signaling” that Brodie blames me for. (And that makes sense, because I’m a skeptical liberal centrist, not a woke progressive, and my views on race are roughly aligned with those of Randall Kennedy ’77.) At a cultural moment when it would have been easy of me to assert that one specific sort of politicized Black spokesperson (Freeman and the Black bluesists) had a monopoly on the truth, I’m insisting that they don’t. I’m forcing those people into a dialogue with the blues universalists.

As for Brodie’s complaint that I’m “doing nothing to promote the ‘unity’ that the Left claims to desire. Division by race is becoming the norm at the Ivy Leagues and I find it both sad and alarming,” I have to wonder if Brodie actually read to the end of my piece. If she’d done so, she’d have come across the following:

“As the interracially married father of a black/biracial son, I dwell in a family circle where there is no racial ‘they. There is only ‘we’....If I’m a member of a troubled, unsettled blues community — a white-and-black community, a world community — I want to understand where we are as a community. I don’t see Freeman, with his black nationalist perspective, as a ‘they’ who is stirring up trouble but as a member of my extended family, as it were, who is doing his best to speak the truth as he sees it. If there’s no black and no white, just the blues, then I want to understand where we, as blues people, really are at this moment in history.”

I can’t speak for what the Left wants, but I’m working hard in this passage, and in the book as a whole, to promote precisely the “unity” that I believe America needs and deserves — and that Brodie, like me, finds lacking in contemporary America. But I’m also doing my best to give the stakeholders of the blues, all of them, a fair hearing.