Busted in New York and Other Essays by Darryl Pinckney

 buy it from abebooks.co.uk   

I ordered this having read Pinckney’s novel Black Deutschland, and many of the themes of that work are also central to their essays.

Zadie Smith provides a foreword and addresses the pessimism that many can feel about the situation of black people in America, and wants to recognise the contribution that activism has made so “that the lives we are able to live today, however imperfect, are precisely not the same as they ever were.” Zadie Smith was writing in 2018 and it feels the last 5 years have been characterised by the opposite of progress – George Floyd shone a light on how far from perfect America is. Pinckney explores sexuality alongside ‘blackness’ and LGBT+ rights in America seem to be under active and open attack. That we are in a battle to defend rights that our forefathers, foremothers, and gender-diverse ancestors didn’t dare imagine validates Zadie Smith’s comment – but it is thin comfort. We were watching a programme about Pet Shop Boys at the weekend which included a clip of them playing in Red Square, and I think there was a tear in Neil Tenant's eye as he said he doubts they will ever go to Russia again. People forget how bright the world seemed in that decade between the fall of the Berlin war and 9/11, and so maybe don’t quite see the contrast with how bleak it seemed today.

Pinckney repeated drills into the fact that the identities that define us, that divide us, are largely fictions – “Baldwin stressed that the Negro problem, like whiteness, existed mostly in white minds” (p194). But just because these are essentially figments of the imagination it doesn’t means they lack real power, harmful power.

He touches a nerve when he quotes Margo Jefferson saying “The white world had made the rules that excluded us; now, when it saw fit, it altered those rules to include a few of us.” (p208) The straight world made the rules to exclude us, and has seen fit to include a few of us, many white, middle class, gender conforming, monogamous, ideally male – and ticking many of those boxes it is very tempting to join the club and bring the draw bridge up behind you, or risk ‘others’ rocking the dock and us all getting kicked out. But I am increasingly aware that I need to be using my privilege as an “acceptable” gay to make space for those that are not yet accepted.

Pinckney engages with many voices from the past as dialogue patterns which is a key part of the richness of this collection, but James Baldwin is a someone he engages with, wrestles with, perhaps the most. There is a trio of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin – there was a moment when they were giving their particular expressions of the same struggle and then two of them were dead – we can celebrate Baldwin’s contribution, specific to a moment in history, while being honest about the questions we need to ask now that go beyond what he said then.

The deeper awakening to black experience in America that this collection has given me has been important – I knew the facts but the lived reality was brought uncomfortably close...