GRGR(4): "I Wanna Be Black" (PLAYLIST ADDITION)

[Doug Millison]

We may know very little about TRP, but with regard to what he's written
about race in general, and American blacks in particular, alongside this
passage in GR we might also read his essay about Watts, published in the NY
Times Sunday Magazine. This essay, published as a non-fiction journalistic
piece, would seem to help us identify this bathroom scene in GR (as well as
other passages in his fiction that might lend themselves to some sort of
racist interpretation by some readers -- his depictions of George
Washington's jive-talking slave in M&D, for example, or Blood in VL, to
name a couple) as particularly savage examples of black humor.

TRP iss certainly unflinching in his portrayal of this racial  and other
in-your-face material in GR, and courageous to tackle it in the first
place. In GR it strikes me more as the arrogance and anger of outraged
youth thumbing its nose -- giving the finger -- to the Establishment, in
fine 60s extremist style; in M&D the anti-Establishment jabs are perhaps
deadlier and certainly more subtle.

-Doug

At 9:04 PM -0400 6/14/99, Paul Mackin wrote:
>P seems to be quite fearless about these things. No place he fears to tread.
>Essential to drawing us in. Essential to his teasing , implicating style.
>Where
>Indians are concerned he works both sides of the street as with the remark
>about
>the Cherokee lyrics. Seems to constantly run the risk of being called a
>bigot or a
>bleeding heart. But we know better. Or do we? We don't really KNOW
>anything. The
>game is exciting.

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