Black is beautiful, but it can be beautiful in the wrong way:
Jack Kerouac in “On the Road” (1957):
At lilac evening I walk with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I so drearily was, a “white man” disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley. I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro houses; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensuous gal; and dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs.
James Baldwin comments on this passage in an essay about Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” (Esquire, May 1961):
Now, this is absolute nonsense, of course, objectively considered, and offensive nonsense at that: I would hate to be in Kerouac’s shoes if he should ever be mad enough to read this aloud from the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater.
And yet there is real pain in it, and real loss, however thin; and it is thin, like soup too long diluted; thin because it does not refer to reality, but to a dream. Compare it, at random, with any old blues:
Backwater blues done caused me
To pack my things and go.
‘Cause my house fell down
And I can’t live there no mo’.
I agree with Baldwin.
First, Kerouac is viewing the lives of Negroes, Mexicans and overworked “Japs” (a racial slur) from a safe, white middle-class distance. He thinks he is experiencing their world, but he is not. He is at best a tourist. He can escape their world whenever he wants. It is a telephone call away. So he does not know what it is like to be poor with no way out or what it is like to be the “wrong” colour – with no way out. Hell, he does not even know what it is like to stick to one woman for more than a few months. The biggest thing wrong with his life is boredom! Not enough kicks. The country gives him the best it has and this is what he says?
Second, he is stereotyping or exoticizing black women: they are sensuous, mysterious, etc. And he says this just after saying life does not have enough kicks, joy and darkness. And right after admitting he left a woman because of his “white ambitions”, whatever that means. While he does not consider black women to be ugly or anything like that, it is clear that he still does not see them as living, breathing women, but just as a good time, a cheap thrill.
See also:
- Jack Kerouac
- James Baldwin
- Bessie Smith: Backwater Blues – the blues song he quoted
- exotic women
- Jezebel stereotype – black women as sensuous gals
- Why so few white men marry black women, part 1, part 2
- White people cannot know how it feels to be a person of colour
- white privilege
- “Black is beautiful”
What gets me is this “dusky” knees buisness. What’s that about?
I don’t agree with the idea that he sees them, the black women, as a cheap trill. I honestly don’t think there is enough substance here to make that assumption.
When we are lost we often long to be in someone else’s shoes. That is what JK is speaking of here, but it gets lost in some ridiculous mumbo-jumbo about races with “dusky” knees.
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Your’s and Baldwin’s responses to Kerouac’s piece were both clear and compelling, so I really had to work to find my own individual response, reflecting on what you and Baldwin said without being overly influenced by it.
The more I re-read Kerouac’s piece, the more it makes me uncomfortable. I don’t detect that he is writing with a malicious spirit. However, I do agree that he’s referring to a dream, not reality. He doesn’t really know the world of the Negro, the Mexican, the Japanese; he has taken the liberty of constructing their world in his imagination, and therein lies the danger.
It reminds me of people who go on holiday to a resort in some Caribbean island, then come back and say “they’re such a happy people, always smiling.” Well, yeah, they’re paid to smile and act happy while they serve you at the resort. But it’s insulting to reduce the entire country to nothing more than “a nation of happy, smiling people.” Even if there’s no malicious intent, this is still insulting and dangerous. If that’s how you view the people, how will you subsequently be inclined to treat the people?
In describing a world of ecstasy, life, joy, and kicks, Kerouac fails to comprehend that these people are ultimately living in a White world and the implications of that. He doesn’t appear to see pain, fears, anger, death, despair, and injustice. By simplifying and reducing their existence as he does, he strips them of their humanity. Perhaps not intentionally or maliciously, but it’s problematic none the less.
Thanks for a post that really made me flex my brain and think deeply.
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This is a tough one. I think you need to read On The Road to really understand what Kerouack is getting at in his writing. Also, the time is really important as well.
To say that he just needed to call home to get out of things is wrong. He worked every job available to him. He actually went to Columbia on a Football scholarship and dropped out to pursue his writing, which he was, there is no doubt, a genius at.
Also, it is not right to say that someone cannot write about another group’s experience. First, that is what writers do – they observe and move out of their element in order to bring other worlds that were no known to us. I have thought about Jack’s longtime love of “beat” lifestyle, but is he being malicious? No. He is trying, as best he could in the 1950’s to understand a world that was separate from his. I don’t know of too many people that were crossing lines back then.
Baldwin seems to not agree with Abagond actually. Baldwin sees the pain in Kerouac’s writing, however veiled it may be. I think Jack would have loved to get on stage of the Apollo and read and I think he would have been well received as well.
After all, the point of all of this is to understand each other and see the life of one another – not to constantly point out that “White People Do this” and “Black People do that” – Artists such as Kerouac helped set the stage for the counter culture and opened up the way lower -middle class folks thought.
I have thought a great deal about his love of black people and the romantic views he took on them – but you know, he just saw it as a beautiful way to be, much like you Abagond in all of your posts.
Nothing wrong with loving to be black even if you’re not.
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I don’t think he overly romanticizes the lives of minorities. He acknowledges the pain of it when he says his own life didn’t have enough darkness… enough night in it. He seems to know we struggle but he’s saying even those struggles, the pain and ugliness that sometimes comes with being a minority, would be preferable to the ease and banality of being white. It’s like he longs for something in his life to feel deeply about in order to develop a soul.
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Nice post on what I think can only be described accurately as Kerouac’s romanticization of blackness, and Mexican-ness (he did it with the poor and homeless too). Yes, he did try to reach out across such lines, but he did so in simplistic, binary terms (white is bad, so black is good, etc.). On the Road was an intense read back when I too longed to travel away from what seemed like a stultifyingly normal existence, and to point out problems with his approach to various sorts of people doesn’t necessarily mean his books were bad. Nevertheless, I now realize that there’s something rather childish about his lurching from one rejected life to the embrace of other possibilities, but only the supposed good of those other possibilities (he wanted everything but the burden, as they say). There were also some fundamentally conservative elements to his supposedly radical rejection of the 1950s norm, especially his complete refusal to include description of his own homosexual activities (if the claims of others are to be believed), and the quintessentially, ironically white American embrace of individualism.
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I loved “On the Road”. It was a great book. But his wanting to be black is like when people want to live in the Middle Ages: they take for granted the good of their own life (modern medicine, white privilege) and forget the bad of the alternativer life (plague, racism).
I think Kerouac meant well and he did cross race lines more than most whites did back then, but he still saw blacks through shockingly simple stereotypes. In this passage he comes close to calling them “a happy, musical people”.
His black characters are few and thinly drawn. I remember reading “The Subterraneans” and being unhappy with how thinly he drew Mardou Fox, the black girlfriend and one of the main characters in the story.
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Not sure how you can say that as you yourself see whites as stereotypes in most of your posts when you say White people are like this and white people are like that.
I think that he saw black people how he saw them and made it romantic as he did everything else: such as hitching across the country or jumping a train – both hunger inducing and agonizing things. Also, he was a migrant farm worker as well from what I can remember. He saw all of the “Beat” down aspects of life romantic in his writing.
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canalpublishing, I think you’re comparing those proverbial apples and oranges and saying they’re the same thing, when they’re not. In his posts about white people, Abagond isn’t doing what Kerouac did in his writings about non-white people. Abagond writes accurate descriptions of common white tendencies; Kerouac wrote romanticized, ironically distanced descriptions of non-white people that suited his own romantic, ideologically simplistic quest.
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I’m white and do not have the tendencies that he blankets white people for having, though i agree that many do have them.
I also don’t think Kerouac had a simple quest. He was trying to debunk the myth of America and expose it for what it truly was.
He wrote about what he saw as beautiful.
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I’m white and do not have the tendencies that he blankets white people for having, though i agree that many do have them.
Good for you, if that’s true (though I really doubt that you don’t have ANY of the many he’s written about). I myself have managed to untrain myself out of many of them.
When I read Abagond’s posts about “white people,” I never assume he’s talking about ALL white people.
I guess we’ll have to disagree about the simplicity or complexity of Kerouac’s ideological quest. I will say, though, that to say that Kerouac wrote about what he saw as beautiful, without acknowledging the stereotypes and mainstream perceptions through which he perceived, and thus constructed, “beauty,” strikes me as a simplistic approach to his writings.
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Right, I do not mean ALL white people. There is little interesting you can say about ALL white people, but there is plenty that at least 60% of them have in common.
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I do have my stereotypes about whites and my knowledge about them is wanting in many ways, but that does not mean I cannot see the same sort of thing in Kerouac.
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60 percent seems like a fair, though even I would say, low figure.
I do see what you mean with Kerouac, but again, we have to look at the TIME it was written.
Interesting post though. I have thought the same thing myself many times.
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koikou What gets me is this “dusky” knees buisness. What’s that about
poetic mumbo jumbo to meet the editors word count demand.
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Wow. The first comment from canalpublishing— my eyes! The whiteness is blinding.
Let’s play Bingo, shall we?
First, ze starts off with a high-handed suggestion that Abagond “RTFB.” I’m flabbergasted— why the hell would ze assume he hadn’t?! How does CP think Abagond came across the quoted passage?? Then it’s, you’re “wrong” (!) to say Kerouc’s romanticized racial slumming was temporary and therefore shallow, because… he dropped out of college? Er? That’s quite the non sequitur. What does that have to do with…? The logic there is muddy, but the one thing that’s clear is: “you’re wrong!”
Next, we move on to “it was the times!” WTF? It was the goddamn 1950s. Had he cared to look, there were plenty of PoC trying to tell him, and white America in general, what life was really like. And not for the first time. Also? Kerouc was, and still is, supposed to have been a revolutionary, a subversive genius, a seer of new reality. So what’s up with the painfully conventional-for-the-times thought? Apparently, when it’s convenient, he’s a visionary. When it’s not, he’s totally hidebound by “his times,” and we’re to forgive his lack of originality as out of his hands.
Then, we’ll break out an advanced, time-travelling version of “well, my black friend says!” And we’ll mix it with white mind-reading as well: “[according to me] my black friend James Baldwin doesn’t agree with you, so there!” and “[in my totally-pulled-out-of-my-ass contradictory opinion] the Apollo audience woulda loved Jack!”
By the way, y’all, you should be grateful! Hell, “artists such as Kerouac helped set the stage for the counter culture and opened up the way [for] lower-middle class folks’ thought.” Dude. Seriously?? Yeah, lower-middle class white folks’ thoughts, that is.
Aaaand let’s finish up with a melange of “I’ve thought about this adequately/accurately/more than you”; some sympathy for the white man— “don’t be so hard on him!”; an appeal to intent— “he doesn’t mean anything by it; he’s trying to give you a compliment!”; and the pièce de résistance: “Nothing wrong with loving to be black even if you’re not.” Right. Cuz there’s no such thing as racist exotification. But even if there is, if you’d just read it the right way, you’d see that it comes from a place of love! OMFG.
BINGO!!
What’d I win?
Oh, right: a raging stomachache of sadness.
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@ Karinova:
LMAO. Thank you, and thank you for leading me to reread the comments, which were interesting all over again.
Excellent point about how there was absolutely no mystery as to what black people were going through at the time. Nor has there ever been for any White American who truly cared to know. It is not as if blacks in America do not speak English or do not write books or put out newspapers. And now blogs. So Kerouac’s romanticization, if you want to call it that, is a not-wanting-to-know, putting a fairy tale in place of the truth. It is not excusable in someone with enough brains to get into an Ivy League university.
Canal Publishing, by the way, is a he. He also comments under the name of Stal Herz.
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Maybe he was black, or Asian, or both, in a past life and misses it….
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I’m not sure Kerouac saw any woman as being real human beings if he couldn’t stay with them for a few months.
I’m guessing his “white ambitions” meant that he couldn’t have a relationship with a black woman if he wanted to be successful in mainstream society.
The problem is; he was a tourist, he did all these things but he never really “had” to, it was a choice on his part.
Not something he was forced into or an act of desperation or lack of opportunities.
And as pointed out he could always make a phone call and get out if he felt like it.
Kind of makes me think of that guy who died up in Alaska.
Except he let his romanticist tendencies kill him.
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I have been reading this thread post quite frequently and have yet to understand what Jack Kerouac is talking about with this “dusky” knees business. I was wondering if he was high when he wrote this? Is his privileged life so boring that he has to look at the poor people of color the Mexicans and the black people and the tired Japanese people that he used and he used a racial slur that he wants to exchange places with them? Does he really want to exchange places with people who are struggling in society? I have to borrow from that Paul Mooney quote about “Everybody want to be black but nobody wants to be a N***er”. In my opinion Kerouac seemed liked someone of a capricious nature who was unstable and when he was bored being a non-white person he would want his privilege white man status again.
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From Kerouac’s diary we know this took place in August 1949:
(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/06/22/on-the-road-again-2)
In his diary he said::
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“The dusky knee of mysterious sensuous gal.” Hmm…..He views black women as sex objects he does not see their humanity. This statement reminds me of the stereotype of the fast, loose, Jezebel that white men who have fetishes for black women.
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think of ‘white ambitions’ here as: veteran’s tract home (post wwii), white picket fence, regular 9-5, wife, 2 kids, and a dog, probably? in context of course.
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Maybe if kerouac wasnt on his selfpitying angst trip he would have seen something different but he just wanted to be a hitchhiker basically.
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Dusky knee, faces hidden in shadow, he is the outsider in the rain, out in the street, getting glimpses of other lives like other worlds.
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