Making an indisputable if sometimes obvious case for non-white influence on American culture, Wynter, an NPR commentator and former Wall Street Journal
columnist, here joins a chorus chronicling the dissolution of America's once-clear racial delineations into a "transracial" culture. With vivid, witty prose, Wynter carefully explicates the influence of black musical idiom on mainstream ragtime, jazz and Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s; the black roots of rock and roll and disco; the multiracial casting in the 1997 Disney TV special of Cinderella
(following the sharp increase in the 1980s of corporate marketing along ethnic and racial lines); MTV's 2000 "hip-hopera" based on Bizet's Carmen; the emergence of black-urban-inspired clothing, such as the FUBU (For Us, By Us) line in major department stores; and many more object lessons in cultural exchange. The downside of "transracialism" is "the steady erosion of black identity as the organizing principle for community development," but Wynter concludes that "the future is not about black people leading black people [but] about black people leading all Americans, especially black Americans" through popular culture and the commercial marketplace, which, for better or worse, he sees as the motor of race relations. (On sale Aug. 6)
Forecast:Along with Richard Rodriguez's
Brown (Forecasts, Mar. 11), this will be seen as the answer book to Pat Buchanan's bestselling
The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, decrying the decline of whiteness. If pundits can find a way to integrate questions of race into "the war on terror," look for these three books to come up frequently.
