The Secret Lives of Used Books (The Omni-Americans, by Albert Murray)
I suspect Albert Murray would have found it entirely too typical that my copy of his Omni-Americans (1970) and of E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie (1957) are discards not from a mainstream public library or from the central branch of a university system but from the library equivalent of ghettos (the California School of Professional Psychology — Fresno, and the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, respectively).
A cultural critic, social observer, novelist, jazz patron, retired Air Force officer, and longtime Harlemite, Murray was a spirited foe of ghettoization of every sort, whether physical, intellectual, political, or artistic. When writing The Omni-Americans, Murray saw a virtual ghetto industry sweeping the nation.
“Providing the American public with images of black experience has become over the past decade a major source of income and public and sometimes academic status . . .” he wrote. “While the quest for the illusive black image may never provide the sort of dependable data that can be of practical significance to the well being of the total national community, it already seems to have created a new job category: the Two-finger Pig-Latin Swahili Expert, an image technician who files survey-safari reports on Ghettoland, U.S.A.”
Such reports, according to Murray, not only added up to “a folklore of white supremacy and a fakelore of black pathology” but also trafficked in what he called “social science fictions” and demonstrated that many Americans, “including most American social scientists, don’t mind one bit what unfounded conclusions you draw about U.S. Negroes, or how flimsy and questionable your statistics, or how wild your conjectures, so long as they reflect degradation.”
Of fellow black social observer Kenneth B. Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1965), Murray found that its “emphasis on black wretchedness . . . easily exceeds that in most of the books written by white racists to justify segregation” (italics in original). Of white poverty bureaucrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s (in)famous, solicitous 1965 report on the Negro family, Murray, giving as much benefit of the doubt as possible, wrote that, “Good intentions notwithstanding, Moynihan’s arbitrary interpretations make a far stronger case for the Negro equivalent of Indian reservations than for Desegregation Now.” The report having been commissioned by the Department of Labor, Murray argued that it should have focused on the deleterious effects of exclusionary labor practices and on discrimination within unions instead of attributing pathologies to the matriarchal structure of many black families. To Murray, this was very close to confusing causes and effects.
Murray was just as dismissive of black protest fiction, which tended to “degrade U.S. Negro life to the level of the sub-human in the very process of pleading the Negro’s humanity.” He continued:
If you . . . reduce man’s whole story to a series of sensational but superficial news items and editorial complaints and accusations, blaming all the bad things that happen to your characters on racial bigotry, you imply that people are primarily concerned with only certain political and social absolutes. You imply that these absolutes are the sine qua non of all human fulfillment. And you also imply that there are people who possess these political and social absolutes, and that these people are on better terms with the world as such and are consequently better people.
Murray rejected racial essentialism of every sort, considered himself first and foremost an American (both proud and critical), celebrated America’s mongrel origins (hence the title of his book), and counted among his friends everyone from Ralph Ellison, Romare Bearden, and Duke Ellington (who called him “the unsquarest man I know”) to New York intellectual Alfred Kazin and Southern Agrarian Robert Penn Warren (contributor to 1930’s I’ll Take My Stand). Murray felt fortunate to have inherited, by birth, cultural, social, and artistic traditions that were a cosmopolitan blend of white European, black American, and Native American influences (among others). To try to cut this inimitable whole into a segregated sum of parts was fanatically wrongheaded to him — dull at best, damaging to the entire country at worst, and impossible regardless, given the mutually dependent, reinforcing weave of it all.
The Omni-Americans begins tellingly with an epigraph from André Malraux, which reads in part: “The individual stands in opposition to society, but he is nourished by it. And it is far less important to know what differentiates him than what nourishes him.”
