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Ferociouskitty
Veteran Poster
Username: Ferociouskitty
Post Number: 124
Registered: 02-2008
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 - 09:24 am: | 
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/books/04fake.html?ex=1205298000&en=24cb6a16398 f649b&ei=5070&emc=eta1
The author isn't black, but she evokes "LA! Gangs! Drugs! A Black Foster Mom named 'Big Mom!' Guaranteed success for a "half-white, half-Native American" woman (which she isn't).
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Robynmarie
Veteran Poster
Username: Robynmarie
Post Number: 726
Registered: 04-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 - 10:24 am: |
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WTF?? Damn. When is the publishing industry gonna get a clue? If it sounds too stupid/weird/outrageous to be true it probably isn't. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 11792
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 2 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 - 05:46 pm: |
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Makes you wonder about the editors who are supposed to be so savvy and hip, and who have a reputation of being very quick to reject good manuscripts, but who are very guillible when it comes to the veracity of sensationalism.  |
Hen81
Regular Poster
Username: Hen81
Post Number: 46
Registered: 09-2007
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2008 - 04:00 pm: |
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This seemed an easy thing to bust. A quick background check to verfy addressed lived at, schools attended, etc. Three years went into this and no one outed this person. One of the reasons given by major publications for only reviewing books from major publishers is that they are properly vetted. That seems to ring shallow in this case.
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Ferociouskitty
Veteran Poster
Username: Ferociouskitty
Post Number: 129
Registered: 02-2008
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2008 - 04:26 pm: |
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Hen81: The author's sister made the exact same point.
I have an essay coming out in a national magazine, and they were hesitant to run the name of a deli I mention in passing because the deli is no longer in existence, and they could find no evidence of it! Ultimately, they have decided to run the name, but only after a lot of back and forth with me, and hand-wringing. WTF, lol?
I think all involved in the above case had dollar signs in their eyes and got lazy. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 6385
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, March 06, 2008 - 01:08 pm: |
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Think about it. Somebody comes to you with a memoir. The language is right. The facts seem right. She brings in pictures. Tells you that people don't want to talk to you because they got warrants and sh*t.
Plus you see a smash hit.
It ain't hard to see.
Making up false memoirs is as old as literature itself. Some of you probably think those scripted "reality" shows are real.
This is America. Everybody is a liar. |
Urban_scribe
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Urban_scribe
Post Number: 677
Registered: 05-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, March 07, 2008 - 06:23 pm: |
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Another memoir controversy has been brewing for a few months concerning the accuracy of Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone. The debate's becoming very, VERY intense.
http://www.slate.com/id/2185928/ |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 6406
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, March 08, 2008 - 10:29 am: |
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I was listening to the BBC and this reporter said all these guys hang out at these bars and try to sell these stories to reporters and get over on them.
Up unitl now though, the media has propagated these stories because they play into the racist sterotypes that Europeans have of Africans and African Americans.
After the Holocaust and WWII (50 million killed) white folks ain't got a damn thing to say about who is a savage. |
Ferociouskitty
Veteran Poster
Username: Ferociouskitty
Post Number: 155
Registered: 02-2008
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 - 01:42 pm: |
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The Rap on Whites Who Try to Act Black
By Stacey P. Patton
Sunday, March 16, 2008; B02
The Washington Post
It was a tale of sex, violence and a young girl crossing the color
line. It was raw, gripping, sad and triumphant, tracing the heroine's
successful escape from an environment of abandonment, abuse, poverty
and gangs. It was supposed to be true.
Not a word of it was.
The recent media frenzy over Margaret Seltzer's "Love and
Consequences, " yet another hoax memoir published by yet another
respectable publishing house, has subsided, but the perplexing
questions remain: Why would a writer take the huge risk of publishing
an easily discredited story, and what enticed a respectable
publishing house to buy and promote it?
As a former foster child who actually lived the reality of some of
the kinds of black dysfunction that Seltzer put forth as her own
experience, I find the answer in a long history of white Americans'
voyeuristic fascination with -- and perhaps sometimes even envy of --
black people.
The appeal of Seltzer's work lay in the way she positioned herself
between America's two races, black and white: She claimed to be a
half-white, half-Native American girl growing up poor in a
dysfunctional black world. In fact, she is the daughter of a white,
upper-middle- class California family. And her story is only the most
recent in a long line of literary narratives, entertainments and
ethnologies in which white people put on blackface to act as
messengers to their white brethren, telling them what life is or was
like in the 'hood or on the plantation. The messages they bring back
are of black dysfunction, crime and violence, but also of black
sexuality, athleticism and soulful musicality. These stories may then
reaffirm white audiences' perception of black dysfunction and allow
them to use blacks as a negative counterpoint for their own images of
normalcy and to affirm their sense of superiority.
Stories written by blacks about blacks, on the other hand, don't seem
to offer the vast white reading public that same sense of well-being.
Like Seltzer, I write about dysfunction. My own memoir, "That Mean
Old Yesterday," actually mirrors some scenes that Seltzer described
in her bogus book -- being sexually and physically abused, carrying
my possessions in trash bags from foster home to foster home,
enduring painful hair-braiding rituals, handling illegal guns.
But unlike hers, my book was scrupulously vetted by my publisher. I
was asked to provide police reports, medical records, witness
statements and the names of social workers and foster parents. And
unlike Seltzer, I actually had to sit down and meet my editor in
person. Nothing I wrote was taken at face value.
When Seltzer lied about being a mixed-race foster child reared in a
dangerous neighborhood by a black foster mother, she seemed to be
revealing her own secret admiration of and desire for blackness while
catering to prurient and voyeuristic consumer appetites. She tapped
into that long-standing white fascination with blackness whose roots
stretch back to the 1600s and that reached its apotheosis in the
minstrel show.
Those shows, in which white performers with their faces caulked black
sang, spoke and acted like African Americans, rose in popularity in
the 1850s and '60s. As issues surrounding the abolition of slavery
intensified, the performances allowed whites to portray blacks as
stupid, lazy, sexual and unfit to participate in democracy,
reinforcing and cementing dominant views about black inferiority.
These racist spectacles played before mostly native-born and
immigrant working- and middle-class white male audiences. They were
most popular with Northern laborers, many of whom had never seen or
interacted with blacks.
"Blacking up" as a widespread form of entertainment held sway into
the turn of the 20th century but began to die out by the early 1920s.
But the popular minstrel stereotypes -- the lazy coon, the dandy, the
happy darkie, the mannish mammy, the wanton jezebel, the watermelon
and chicken thief and the pickaninny -- all moved to comics, radio
and film.
These images influenced the music and films of Al Jolson, who
performed in blackface singing songs such as "My Mammy" and "Swanee."
Listeners were captivated by the famous "Amos 'n' Andy" radio show,
featuring the voices of white actors Freeman Gosden and Charles
Correll. Singers such as Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby and Judy Garland
appropriated black cultural aesthetics into their acts.
The most familiar expression of white fascination with blackness was
Elvis Presley. Though most widely known as "The King," he was also
referred to as "The White Negro" by detractors who feared that his
lyrics and bodily gyrations were a corrupting influence on white
middle-class youths.
Throughout the 1950s and '60s, Bob Dylan and others would also borrow
from black music. To make themselves sexually alluring, white female
singers including Mae West and Janis Joplin mimicked the styles of
black performers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.
Most of these white artists made undeniable contributions to American
popular culture, and their gifts and the value of their work, unlike
Seltzer's, are not in dispute. At the heart of the matter, though,
lies the question of whose voice should speak about and interpret the
black experience in America -- and whose voice white America wants to
hear.
As a member of Generation X, I've witnessed the trend of whites'
embracing and interpreting black culture for white audiences continue
with the likes of Eminem, the discredited rapper Vanilla Ice and,
more recently, the white character "Buckwild," a.k.a. Becky, from the
modern-day coon show "Flavor of Love." Even Paris Hilton put on
blackface to transform herself into a black woman on an episode of
her reality show "The Simple Life."
Today it appears to be cool for white middle-class youths to spit rap
lyrics, wear sagging jeans and call each other variations of the N-
word. It's cool to act black without having to live with the reality
of actually being black in America. Blackness has become a commodity,
along with crime, violence and other kinds of social dysfunction. And
even black artists and writers have trafficked in black dysfunction,
seeing that they can make money by using the stereotypes in their own
work. Think of gangsta rap, or former Washington Post reporter Janet
Cooke, who had to return a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for concocting a
story about an 8-year-old black heroin addict.
At the same time, the black middle class has persistently challenged
white depictions of its experience with counter-narratives of its
own. Black leaders and their communities have emphasized
respectability, thrift, domesticity, hard work, religion and
education. But positive images of blacks and their aspirations have
been largely written off or ignored by the white media and
entertainment establishments. Uplifting depictions of black progress
apparently aren't very marketable to white audiences, while black
failure, pathology, sexuality, criminality and music-making continue
to fascinate.
The folks at Riverhead Books seem to have embraced Margaret Seltzer's
minstrel act because they thought it would sell. I can imagine that
the idea that a vulnerable white girl had operated in a black
community must have appeared to the publisher to be a new and sexy
variation on an old theme -- something it might not have if there
were more diversity in publishing's editorial ranks. Those of us who
do circulate in the kinds of worlds that Seltzer imagined would have
seen the red flags and challenged the veracity of her story.
Unlike Seltzer, I didn't write my memoir purely to win literary fame
and strike financial gold. I wanted to tell the truth about my
experience, the experience of a world I lived in and was part of. I
wanted to give voice to the thousands of anonymous foster children
and abused children who slip through the cracks, and to effect some
kind of change so that they, like me, might find a way out of their
world of dysfunction and sorrow.
That Seltzer appropriated their story makes me angry. But that white
America appeared ready to lap it up as an "authentic" account of a
world it knows so little about is what I find really troubling.
info.meanoldyesterd ay@yahoo. com
Stacey P. Patton is a PhD candidate in African American history at
Rutgers University. |
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