[After a long piece of ego-boosting whining because a clerk was nice to him and he's certain she would have been nasty to him if he had been black, Eisen says:]

"Black remains the all-powerful, indelible adjective.

Of late, no better illustration of this reality can be found that Henry Louis Gates' New Yorker profile of Anatole Broyard, the late New York Times literary essayist. I had always imagined Broyard as a quintessential Gotham intellectual, no doubt Jewish, a product of City College, and so on. Wrong. Broyard was a light-skinned black (sic) man from New Orleans whose family had migrated to New York in the 1940s.

Gates investigates the essential riddle of Broyard: Why did he deny his blackness (sic)? Why didn't he tell his own children? How did his secret inform his writing? The answer, Gates suggests, is that Broyard understood, in the context of America's hypersensitivity to race, that the label "black" would forever stereotype his writing.

So Broyard chose to shroud his racial heritage and construct a new identity (how typically American). He even ended contact with his darker-skinned sister, As a Village intellectual on the make, he owned a bookstore, wrote for Commentary and Partisan Review, hung out with Alfred Kazin and all the lit-politick lions (Eventually, though, he traded the Boho life for a series of upper-class Connecticut homes and even a day job at an ad agency before joining The Times.).

But never, never, did Broyard willingly `fess up to his blackness, not even to his grown children as he lay dying, painfully, of prostrate cancer. For Broyard, life was a matter of self-invention - not "authenticity" as the promoters of identity politics believe. Broyard wanted to be known as a writer, not a Negro writer. `His perception was perfectly correct,' Gates writes sympathetically. `In a system where whiteness is the default, racelessness is never a possibility.'

This is an essential truth of America in the 1990s. We kid ourselves to believe that America has arrived as a color-blind society. Yet, astonishingly and to our peril, we seldom talk about it."

July 24, 1996

Isthmus
101 King St.
Madison, WI 53703

Editor:

Is Marc Eisen running for Fuhrer?

I'm not kidding. If the late New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard had been guilty of child molesting instead of "rasenschade," Eisen would have treated him with far more respect ["Life in Black and White," July 12].

The "crime" that Broyard committed, in the eyes of Marc Eisen, is the same "crime" that Jews were alleged to have committed during the reign of the Third Reich. Even though German Jews looked and acted like other Germans, the Nazis alleged that they were really a separate "race" of "impure blood" who were really only inferior imitations of "Aryans" and not entitled to call themselves German at all. Eisen's attack on Broyard says the same thing, except that he uses "black" for "Jew" and "white" for "Aryan."

What is Eisen trying to prove? He knows that millions of people in this country de-emphasize or fail to mention Jewish, Slavic or other ethnic ancestries, poor or working-class backgrounds, etc. in order to either rise in the world or exercise the individualism and self-determination which are supposedly at the core of the American character. The federal government's traditional way of dealing with the racial mixture (Indian, black and white) that characterizes the Hispanic population was to "pass off" or declare all of them "white" regardless of racial phenotype. Now what was Broyard's "crime" again? Being a white guy who called himself white? By the way, does Marc Eisen recite his genealogy to everyone?

Marc Eisen used to spend his time attacking powerful elites who were guilty of abuses that harmed real people and the public interest (the privatization of HEAB, for example). Now he's reduced to attacking a dead man for "rasenschade." Broyard's honor is untarnished but the same can't be said for Marc Eisen's.

A.D. Powell

Dear Mr. Powell,

How could you misread my column as badly as you have? Are you dense or just tendentious?

The point of it, which should have been abundantly clear to you, is this: American is horribly hung up on race. Despite the successes of the civil rights laws, blacks are often treated differently than whites in both large and small ways.

To cast me as a Nazi for pointing this out is beyond belief.

You castigate me for "attacking" Anatole Broyard yet make no mention of the fact that I was citing Henry Louis Gates'profile of Broyard in the New Yorker. I can only conclude that you are a willfully dishonest person for (a) trying to besmirch me for something that Gates wrote and (b) for horribly misrepresenting Gates' point - that black people haven't been assimilated into the American mainstream, unlike Jews, Italians, and other ethnics. The Gates profile, if anything, is sympathetic to Broyard for having to go to extremes (i.e., denying his blackness) in order to be judged by his writing alone rather than his skin color.

I don't know what planet you're operating from.

With great disdain,

Marc Eisen

P.S. Yes, we will run your letter.

Actually, my last letter was very friendly, giving Eisen the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he is merely ignorant instead of an evil social-climber trying to make himself whiter by destroying the reputation of a dead man. Obviously that is not the case. Eisen tries to assign to Broyard a false "black" racial identity that is meant to be the ultimate insult. How would Eisen react if his right to call himself "white" were questioned? Indeed, doesn't Eisen take great care not to "insult" the Hispanic or Arab with Negroid features by calling them "black." I have met Jews and Italians who claimed "pure" European ancestry and had the suspiciously Negroid looks that Broyard didn't have. Wasn't Broyard whiter than they are?

Both Eisen and Henry Louis Gates are jealous of Anatole Broyard. Gates is jealous because he wishes he had Broyard's whiteness and ability to assimilate. Eisen is jealous because he wishes he had Broyard's literary fame. He cannot stand the thought of a man from an ethnic group he despises (the multiracial Louisiana Creoles) achieving the fame and respect that has alluded him.

Both Gates and Eisen hate the fact that Broyard was accepted as white by friends who knew of his "impure" ancestry and those who "suspected" didn't care. This certainly makes them the moral superiors of Eisen and Gates.

Eisen claims that Jews, Italians, etc. are assimilated. The Far Right would dispute him on that. The German Jews were deemed to be perfectly assimilated until the Nazis placed upon them the same charge that Eisen and Gates use to condemn Broyard: The charge that they were an inferior, separate race that looked like Germans, spoke like Germans but were not good enough to be German. The Nazi analogy holds and anyone who cannot see it is either ignorant of history or deliberately blind. Eisen is too great a fool to realize that, in utilizing the myth of white racial "purity" to attack Broyard, he is giving strength to an ideology that can be used to destroy innocent people from any ethnic group - not just the ones despised by Marc Eisen.

Instead of uniting with Gates, Tina Brown of The New Yorker and other social-climbing hyenas attacking Broyard's corpse, Eisen should humbly sit at the feet of others and learn wisdom.

Dear Mr. Powell:

What is your problem?

You've apparently fallen down the rabbit hole, eaten a strange substance and created a magical world in which up is down, black is white, and fantasy is reality. I'm at a loss to connect your ravings to what I said in my column.

One more time: The column discusses how extraordinarily racially sensitive America is and how black people in large and small groups are treated unfairly by the majority culture. Despite the extraordinary accomplishments of the Civil Rights laws, we continue to be, fundamentally, a racially-divided society.

I conclude: "This is an essential truth of America in the 1990s. We kid ourselves to believe that America has arrived as a color-blind society. Yet, astonishingly and to our own peril, we seldom talk about it.

Having bizarrely ignored the main points of my article, you've fixated on the idea that Anatole Broyard wanted to be identified as a Creole. THERE IS NOTHING IN HENRY LOUIS GATES' PROFILE THAT SUGGESTS BROYARD HAD ANY SUCH DESIRE. You've concocted this out of thin air!

You have, in your fevered imagination come to believe I said Broyard committed a "crime" by denying his black heritage. You bizarrely continue to assert that I want a race-based society. You somehow assert I feel that Broyard isn't good enough to be white. I think you're hallucinating.

For reasons I don't understand, you've inverted the meaning of my column and accused me of the very thing that I've tried to spotlight-America's tragic hang up with race.

You're a crank lost in your fantasies.

With disdain,

Marc Eisen
Isthmus
101 King St.
Madison, WI 53703
edit@isthmus.com

1) He followed a traditional, racist attack line used against mixed whites in which the racist states that the "inferior Negro blood" makes them too leprous to be "whites" but the "white blood" would make them a "superior" variety of "black." If Eisen is totally ignorant of the tradition he is following, then he has no business lecturing people on "race."

2) Eisen studiously ignores the evidence explaining why the "one drop" myth if not truly enforced (Hispanics and other groups) and the example from Holocaust history of what happens if you endorse the concept of "invisible" race and the "racial purity" of the dominant "race."

3) Eisen (like other "America is so racist" liberals I've known) insists that putting down "uppity" mulattoes and creole whites is merely a statement of his love for blacks and that anyone who supports the right of mulattoes and creole whites to be "white" or otherwise nonblack is denying the existence of racism in the U.S. - both past and present. This neat trick is designed to silence debate on a issue they personally fear - the white race's lack of "purity."

4) Eisen (like other "blacks can do no wrong" liberals) denounces Broyard for enjoying white-skin privilege but Eisen wants to keep the same privilege for himself. Eisen's column goes so far as to deny Broyard's physical whiteness altogether, implying that he shared the same "color" as Gates. Eisen denounces Broyard for not announcing his "inferior" drop of blood to every passerby (like the Biblical leper shouting "Unclean! Unclean" so others would not be contaminated by his touch), but Eisen has never, in all the years he's been editor of Isthmus, informed his readers of HIS ancestry. Passing is fine for Eisen but not for Broyard.

5) Your enemy is always the person who wants to deny and denounce you for the very things he himself practices. Eisen is a racist enemy of the multiracial community and probably the social climber he accuses Broyard of being. If he were 1/10 as antiracist as he claims to be, he would denounce "white purity" and note the shared ancestry, social situations and other commonalties between many ethnicities that are recognized and those that are yet to be recognized. Eisen is 100 times more dangerous than any avowed racist because he (along with Gates) misleads people of good will and tells them that you must go against your conscience and embrace white "purity" and the "one drop" mythology in order to be antiracist.