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Overview
Stanley Crouch identifies the civil rights movement of the last four decades as the defining feature of contemporary American society. In Notes of a Hanging Judge, he explores it from all sides—from its epochal triumphs and the forces that have nearly destroyed it, through its great artistic and political success stories, to the crime culture it has been powerless to prevent or control—and traces its complex and ambivalent interactions with the feminist and gay dissent that followed its example.
Balancing the passionate involvement of an insider with a reporter's open-minded rigor, and using his virtuosic prose style, Crouch offers uniquely insightful accounts of familiar public issues—black middle-class life, the Bernhard Goetz case, black homosexuals, the career of Louis Farrakhan—that throw fresh light on the position of Afro-Americans in the contemporary world. Even more revealing are Crouch's accounts of his travels, focusing on his perceptions as a black man, that put places as diverse as Atlanta and Africa, or Mississippi and Italy, in unique new perspectives. Perhaps most powerful of all are Crouch's profiles of black leaders ranging from Maynard, to Michael, to Jesse Jackson. Crouch's stern evaluations have been controversial, especially his vision of the Civil Rights Movement as a noble cause "gone loco," mired in self-defeating ethnic nationalism and condescending self-regard, and conspicuously lacking in the spiritual majesty that ensured its great political victories. His discussions of artistic figures, including extended critiques of Toni Morrison and Spike Lee, have also incited much debate.
Taken together, these essays represent a major reinterpretation of black, and therefore American, culture in our time.
These essays represent a major reinterpretation of black American culture in our time.
Editorials
Sacred Fire
Provocative is the word most frequently attached to the writings of Stanley Crouch, one of America's finest cultural critics. Crouch's essays are written with cool assurance and precision, but they always pack a punch for his favorite targets, from "racial hustlers" and cheap media products to knee-jerk identity politicians and historic revisionists. No matter what the topic—jazz, media, literature, film, history, politics—Crouch's biting, iconoclastic essays land with metronomic regularity on the same fundamental issue: the importance of black people taking their rightful and hard-earned place at the table of American culture and democracy, instead of insisting on a contrived outsider pose and wallowing in unnecessary martyrdom.The essays in Notes of a Hanging Judge were written between 1979 and 1988—years when many of the gains of the civil rights era were being overturned by the Reagan administration and the so-called Culture Wars were just starting to heat up. Crouch's essays capture the intellectual ferment of the era, offering trenchant criticism on emerging cultural trends and milestone moments in film, literature, and politics. One of his most memorable essays, "Nationalism of Fools," is a biting profile of a 1985 Nation of Islam rally led by Minister Louis Farrakhan at Madison Square Garden. Typical of Crouch's approach, he mocks what he considers Farrakhan and the Nation's "muddled" ideology and senseless anti-Semitism, but also thoughtfully considers why such a message and messenger could attract 25,000 people at that historical juncture.
Other essays attach other black cultural totems of the 1980s: "Aunt Medea" argues that Toni Morrison's much-praised Beloved "explains black behavior in terms of social conditioning, as if listing atrocities solves the mystery of human motive and behavior." In "Do the Race Thing," he derides Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing as "the convention of a new black exploitation film." And in "Man in the Mirror," he takes the unusual stance of defending Michael Jackson's extensive plastic surgery by placing it within the context of the American and African American tradition of improvisation: "The American dream is actually the idea that an identity can be improvised and can function socially if it doesn't intrude upon the freedom of anyone else."
It will be hard to find many people who agree with Crouch on every point; his ideas can raise the hackles of conservatives and liberals alike. And his essays can sometimes seem unnecessarily curmudgeonly—sometimes almost mean-spirited. Nevertheless, his often surprising essays, argued in lively and enjoyably rich prose in this collection, are essential to anyone who values serious ideas.