In One Drop, Broyard replayed a story that was became a headline in The New Yorker magazine that was a prime case of the how people can change and become blinded by the crisis of racial confusion and society’s opinions of Black and White. Wolff, to her credit, does no such thing. In her memoir, her Dad has no particular crisis. He is who is, not a mixed race guy picking a side, but a white man living in an increasingly integrated neighborhood who decides to integrate himself and his family along with it. To humorous and often touching effect, Wolff replays a journey that not all of the members of her family were willing to take.
Hers is a classic fish out of water tale. It’s “Everyone Hates Chris”, but in whiteface, and the reversing of the minority/majority no doubt provides the curiosity factor that made the book a bestseller. In short, Misha and younger sister, Anora are the children of John Wolff, an athletic, Black Panther-sympathizing hippie who’s been down with the brothers since high school. His identification with Blackness is not a conversion as much as it is a worldview, a sense of what is real and what it not. To the dismay of his wife, he sets out on a mission to keep it real. And like most Black people who decide to keep it real, his “real” is an embrace of both the authentically cultural and the ridiculously superficial, often mistaking fashion, language, habit and lifestyle for cultural truth.
Mishna navigates this different world as an outsider trying hard to fit in, but not succeeding, as she also tries to comprehend the normal insanity that accompanies growing up. In her words, she would have preferred to be a “honky” and as her life swings wildly between cultural experiences, she find things to both hate and admire on both sides of the racial fence.
Wolff’s storytelling at times borderlines on brilliance, and indeed rises above that line. In fact, Wolff’s writing is sometimes too good for its own good. The author is a humorist and fledgling screenwriter. As a result some of the actions and phrases attributed to characters in the book can seem manufactured for effect, as if Wolff has the movie and its direction in mind. A reader’s guide in the back of the book even begins with the question “Which actor should play Mishna’s Dad?” That aside, Wolff knows her way around a page and around the culture she was a part of. And after she hooks you into the first half of the book with humor, the remainder becomes a touching search for connection to a world (and a man) the author seems not to have completely understood.
It makes for a hilarious and engaging read, but to be honest many of the things that have made white reviewers chuckle and give praise will also make some black readers wince. That the book is growing in popularity as a spark to discussions on ethnicity in classrooms and book clubs where certain nuances are sure to be missed also makes one a bit nervous.
The troublesome conceit in Wolff’s book (as well as Broyard’s) is that its characters seem to be constantly running away from (or running to) a singular and particularly narrow definition of Blackness. Her father’s imitation of Blackness, no matter how sincere, is limiting, as limiting as his rejection of “whiteness”.
Most of Wolff’s experiences are not about race at all, but about class. To that end, the book could have been written as easily by a Black woman in a Black family and little would have changed. There are just as many black kids in middle class black households who have no jumpshot, no rhythm, no natural affinity for the surface of what is understood as “Black culture” and share the same conflicts as Wolff. The same goes for Jewish, Latino, Asian and other households where people have boxed themselves into their own closed cultural expectations and definitions.
But for good or bad, the black/white dynamic is what still intrigues us most and where we look for the most insight. And as a highly entertaining personal journey into two cultures, I’m Down pays off in spades and is highly recommended. Just don’t confuse it with a treatise on the psychology of race relations.
