#read a book on this history of racism

[heartru]

some of u guys are defending a billionaire company a bit toooooo hard

[haridraws]

Excuse the format (I made this for instagram since that's what the publisher wants, rip) but this is basically a shorter, easy-to-read version of the history section at the back of my new book.

(Part 2 || The book)

---

Disclaimer: I'm extremely not an expert, and this is only scratching the very surface of complex topics that are hard to simplify. I mostly made this to EXTREMELY rec these books and podcasts, and would urge you to go check them out if you're not familiar!!

This stuff might seem obvious to some of you, but let me tell you, I do NOT think it's widely known in the general UK population.

Imo a lot of the general (especially white) public think that the Windrush generation - Caribbean migrants brought in to help rebuild postwar Britain in the 50s - were the first Black communities in the UK. And yet there's deliberately not much focus on why the Caribbean has links with northern europe. HMMMM

(Britain loves, for example, to celebrate the abolition of slavery without mentioning WHAT CAME BEFORE IT - Britain being the biggest trader of enslaved people, with more than 1 million people enslaved in the British Caribbean. They literally just did it overseas.)

Telling the truth about history or British imperialism gets this massive manufactured backlash at the moment. There are so many ideas prevalent in UK politics - anti-Black, anti-refugee, anti-trans - based on going ‘back’ to some imaginary version of the past. Those are enabled by a long tradition of carving parts out of the historical record, and being selective about whose histories get told and preserved. Even though the book I was making is a fun rom-com, by the time I finished researching, I decided to make an illustrated history section at the back too (this is a mini version). My hope is that readers who haven’t come across these histories might get an introduction to them - and some pointers of what they could read next to get a clearer view of our past.

[charlesoberonn]

"How We Win The Civil War" by Steve Phillips is a really good history/political book about how confederates and their successors have continued to promote white supremacy in the US after officially losing the war, and how the advocates of equality and a multi-racial democracy can finally win the war for real.

Very accessible and interesting throughout. Very well sourced as well. Highly recommended.

[murfpersonalblog]

IWTV Musings: Racism & Intersectionality, in Hollywood and in Fandom Spaces (Pt1: The Raceswaps)

This is in response/support of @adamnablelittledevil's post on this very subject:

"Hopefully people would finally understand nobody is making it up or exaggerating and it is indeed real and worse than they probably think."

Folk try to act like certain problems don't exist, especially when it concerns Black & Bipoc people in predominately white spaces with a KNOWN history of racism. People love to gaslight & be dismissive & rewrite history with revisionist narratives--especially to impressionable people & fans who are NEW to certain fandom spaces or racial dynamics/demographics, and DON'T know the history of the spaces they're entering, or the convos taking place--which is PRECISELY how we wound up with non-Black IWTV fans who ended up in the actual NEWS for prancing around an IRL plantation in 2024, acting like they never heard of slavery, ffs.

At some point, the venn diagram of accidental/willful ignorance, careless/irresponsible tone deafness, and active/passive-aggressive racism actually does intersect.

Incidents like this reflect a fandom steeped in problematic behavior that's too-long gone unchecked by the fans & network alike--who are also at fault for constantly mishandling its own project.

Contrary to poorly researched articles like USA today that denied/handwaved racist backlash against IWTV (a MUCH smaller & younger fandom compared to the LOTR & Amazon's Rings of Power adaptation), from its very inception, as early as the cast announcements, TVC's white fans were PISSED about the raceswaps & outright accused AMC of being woke/DEI (a la Bridgerton) when Jacob Anderson was cast as Louis DPDL.

A Quora thread from 2021:

A Reddit thread from July 2022: (Wayback Machine)

A Reddit thread from 2022 (circa Ep5): (Wayback Machine)

And boy oh boy did this one on Facebook in 2021 age poorly: 💀

Book fans constantly treat AMC's IWTV like performative colorblind trash, rather than as color-conscious prestige tv show that treats historical racism, colorism, classism, sexism, & homophobia seriously. They DGAF what showrunner Rolin Jones had to say about perpetuating the glorification of slaveowners, and just want a 1:1 adaptation of the books, when that was NEVER Rolin's intention.

There's fans who to this day refuse to see/accept Delainey!Claudia, and apparently there's colorist trends on Twitter (cuz ofc 🙄😒) about seeing her as Armand's daughter instead of Lestat's, just cuz of her skin color, which WTF??? (x x x):

Book/film fans hypocritically complain constantly about Bailey Bass (18-19) AND Delainey Hayles (25) playing 14y/o Claudia; but then gush about Vampire Diaries & Twilight & other shows on MTV & CW--who have all casted full grown adults as teenagers. Critiques like this are interesting (x x):

Cuz they specifically mention the Romanian kids and how Claudia supposedly "cannot at all pass for a child." However:

Some of those actual children ain't exactly tiny little toddlers & tykes either! 😅 Cuz age is a spectrum, not a monolith, imagine that.

And laaaawd don't get me started on Armand, and the BS that was happening on Reddit a few years ago (x x):

THIS is the kind of fandom we've been dealing with since DAY ONE.

And yet white fans have the nerve to whine about how tired and pissed they are whenever Bipoc fans call out the racism in the fandom/network, or god forbid look too-deep in the actual racially sensitive/relevant context of the show itself.

But I'll save my thoughts on all that for another post.

[campgender]

a Black fem (Arlette) & stud (Jodi) on racism from white butches & fems in the 1950s

from Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeline D. Davis (1994)

excerpt 1:

“When we started going in there, we found out how really prejudiced other white gay kids were. They didn’t even want to talk to us, and they looked at us with resentment. … Well at Bingo’s we would always sit in a booth. They would have the bar, a lot of them would look at us and roll their eyes. So we decided that we were going to get some of these to be our friends no matter what we had to do. One thing that drew them was the fact that we would get up and dance. Then some of them would say, ‘Hey, I like that, teach us how to do that.’” (Arlette)

excerpt 2:

Jodi remembers that the presence of Black studs made many white butches nervous: “Some of the stuff that happened was so typically racist, it was so ridiculous. I mean it was like Black studs were coming into the bar, people would just kind of put their arm around their women … [as if] they were just coming in there to snatch up their women.”

excerpt 3:

White lesbians also attended [house parties] but not in large numbers. This was resented by those Black lesbians who wanted a racially mixed community. “White kids started coming. Now they come up with, ‘that neighborhood,’ which I resent. Because there’s no such neighborhood that anybody’s gonna attack you. I get mad at that. ‘Well where do you live? I don’t want to come over there.’ What do you mean you don’t want to come over there?” (Arlette).

[the-blueprint]

The list of banned young adult (YA) books by Black authors above, was retrieved from PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans (July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022). In addition to the book titles and authors, the document lists the state, district, type of ban, date of challenge/removal, and origin of challenge. The document is being updated periodically, so check for new books added. Visit the PEN America link above for a detailed definition of a school book ban.

bcbooksandauthors.com

[canichangemyblogname]

Your National Anthem in Above Ground by Clint Smith

[barnbridges]

The Secret History by Donna Tartt // De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period by JD Salinger

[southernmermaidsgrotto]

Do you think love and light spirituality is toxic?

Definitely yes.

Now some of you will run away just from reading those two words, let me elaborate: It's not just toxic, it's actively harmful and racist, ableist, it's white cis hetero male supremacist in every way. Completely rooted in naz1 ideas from the very beginning of it. You just gotta look at the history of the whole movement and there's flaming red flags everywhere.

But even if you don't know the history and social context of how it came to be and popularized (which you should, do your research), just by looking at these people and how they move through life you can still clearly see the issues with it.

I have 3 main problems with the whole "love and light" thing that a lot of new age people spread, the first and biggest for me is spiritual bypassing. New Age "love & light" culture is not only completely incorrect (the dark is just as important, real and necessary for balance as the light, really, I'm saying it as someone with 10+ years of experience and a whole family background in ancestral traditions. The dark shit is Important and necessary, to understand all aspects of life, spiritual and not, to grow as a person and as a practitioner, to protect yourself and yours from both material and spiritual things and to fight either if needed.) but the whole "good vibes only" ends up being delusional at best and straight out abusive at worst, many times gaslighting people and denying racism, colonialism, oppression of all kinds, spiritual and physical illness, mental illness, basic history and science, all things that can have very real, physical consequences on people's mental health, overall health, and safety in general, not to mention the wider effects on society as a whole (having people running around with the emotional inteligence of a clam shell, scratch that, even clams are better than that lmao and spreading misinformation and harm like wildfire). The Second big mess is how much it promotes the complete lack of literacy and rational critical thinking. People will learn a new fancy thing and just run with it without knowing the full history and correct use of things and words, without questioning the source and context of the whole situation. Misinterpreting the little knowledge they have, either because it's something they overheard, or read in 1 book and never bothered to dive deeper into it's roots and history and true meaning, having the most shallow and incorrect "knowledge" of things, etc. It goes hand in hand with the 1st problem to create the 3rd issue: straight out willful malicious ignorance. They don't know any better and they can't be bothered to learn any better either. It's not just laziness or disinterest, it's straight out conscious denial of truth, repression of their own feelings and thoughts and identity even in some cases, to just be able to keep this facade of "love & light" that's killing them from the inside, hurting themselves and hurting anyone they come into contact with aswell, all to serve their selfish purposes and their own agendas.

All these three things feed off and enhance each other in an endless loop, that gets even worse in the kinds of conspiracy theory echo chambers these people move in. The ignorance and immaturity combined with someone who doesn't do any introspection at all and is straight out lying to themselves and others, either from a place of delusion, or in the case of most white people, priviledge. It's a huge system that only feeds white supremacy and keeps people of color disconnected from their true feelings and health, personal identity, culture and community, taking people away from any and every possible source of real power. It's keeping the priviledged in power and the disenfranchised in misery while denying the whole situation, spreading misinfo to confuse, divide and put the blame on the victims instead of the actual victimizer.

Priviledged people spread misinformation and lies because they don't know and don't care + actively benefit from keeping you in the dark, all while screaming from the top of their lungs that they have your best interests at heart and will "shine light on truths" while their actions are the complete opposite of that, then hide from the results of anything harmful they do under the "love & light positive thoughts only" thing to avoid conflict and consequences. It's bullshit. Call them out on their bullshit everytime.

[hotsugarbyglassanimals]

it drives me nuts how much suffering we force people to go through to meet some arbitrary idealized standard vs something that'd actually help. they're making my 60 yr old mom with fibro take pain management classes because they're too scared to put her on the prescription pain meds that she was already on before. i just read about someone with adhd talking about how the only med that works really well for them without making them depressed when it wears off or causing anxiety is desoxyn but doctors are too afraid to prescribe it to them because it's technically methamphetamine. the drug war is a complete burden on society

[aahsoka]

this is what i imagine taylor swift was thinking of when she said 1830s without the racism

[robotvitamins]

"Rhythm and blues was too good to remain a black secret for long and as the fifties dawned, certain musically adventurous white DJs started to add it to their playlists. By 1956 a quarter of the best-selling US records would be by black singers. This move was accelerated by the dramatic commercial success of some of the new black stations, exemplified by WDAI in Memphis - since 1948 the first black-owned radio station - which, as well as being home of DJs BB King and Rufus Thomas (he of the 'Funky Chicken'), was extremely profitable.

In adopting this subversive music, white DJs also started adopting black slang. This 'broadcast blackface', as Nelson George calls it, let them speak (and advertise) to both the black community and younger whites. Dewey Phillips of Memphis's WHBG was so successful at integrating his audience that the wily Sam Phillips of Sun Records chose him to broadcast Elvis Presley's first single.

The idea of the 'white negro' was still born of racism, however. George recounts the amazing tale of Vernon Winslow, a former university design teacher with a deep knowledge of jazz, who was denied a radio announcing job on New Orleans' WJMR simply because he was black. After what seemed like a successful interview, Winslow, who was quite light-skinned, was asked, 'By the way, are you a nigger?' Denied an on-air job merely because of his race, Winslow was hired for a most extraordinary job. He was to train a white DJ to sound black. Winslow had to feed a white colleague - now christened Poppa Stoppa - with the latest local slang, teaching him to say things like 'Look at the gold tooth, Ruth' and 'Wham bam, thank you ma'am'. The show became a smash. One night, frustrated by his behind-the-scenes existence, Winslow snuck a turn at the mic. He was fired immediately. WJMR kept the Poppa Stoppa name and continued using a white man, Clarence Hamman, to provide Poppa's voice. (Winslow had his revenge, though, as Doctor Daddy-O on New Orleans' WEZZ where he would become one of the country's top ten DJs.)"

- excerpt from Last Night a DJ Saved My Life by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton

[coridallasmultipass]

TW for racism and genocide of Native Americans

Today I learned that the original "The only good _, is a dead _," was "The only good Indian, is a dead Indian." And it really sucks that now I know this information.

Looks like it's speculated to be attributed to one specific Union general due to his actions, but it was more likely just a common anti-Native sentiment of the time held by a lot of the settlers, not just one person.

Like I know I hear 'the only good snake, is a dead snake' most often since I love being in snake discussion groups, which also sucks because I love snakes, and they shouldn't be killed.

But I've also heard like 'the only good Nazi, is a dead Nazi.' And like, I So agree with that, fuck Nazis, but I don't want to think about the original phrase being reclaimed like that for a laugh, no matter how much I agree that Nazis suck.

It should stay as horrifying and sickening as 'the only good Indian, is a dead Indian' in my opinion. I think we should retire the phrase entirely and just note that, that was the origin of it - the continued genocide of Native Americans during the 1800s when settlers were eager to get rid of us so they could claim property for themselves while forcing us into insufficient reservations as US America expanded westward.

This book I'm reading describes that the usual retaliation for the theft of a cow would have been the execution of an entire Indian village. One specific horrifying example given, is from accounts of a traveler that joined a group of Mexicans pursuing Indians (Chumash) in possession of stolen horses. They come across a group of some old Indians, women and children, drying the horse meat. Every last one was killed, and their ears cut off as proof for the priests that they made every effort to retrieve the horses.

This shit is so sickening. They were hungry and trying to survive.

It also describes how the accounts of Indians from my tribe before the mission system were all about how generous and welcoming they were. (Though, it was through the lens of the Spanish who saw us as ideal candidates for conversion because of this.) Then after the collapse of the missions and post-assimilation, the accounts simply describe the Indians' drunkenness and disorder. What did you expect???? You assimilate a group of people so they're entirely reliant on you (the rigid structure of the mission system and the dismantling of their previous tribal villages), and then suddenly turn them out to a world without their previous villages and social order. Of course they're going to struggle and suffer and abuse the drugs (alcohol) you introduced them to.

I hate this so much.

The book also mentions how, during the mission period, anyone who ran away from the missions to go back to their original tribal lives, would be dragged back to the missions and cruelly punished with restraints, lashing, or stocks, and they couldn't understand why because punishment was exceedingly rare before Spanish rule.

Ugh. Anyway.

I'm going to bring this up any time I hear anyone mention that phrase, because the horror of that time period should not be diminished in its modern reclamation. ('Diminished,' because I, a 30yo Native American, did not even know the origin. I thought it was a modern phrase. Our local Native history was always glossed over in school to focus on the mission system. I didn't even learn of my tribe's revolt until like 2016 when I went to a lecture my tribe held.)

I get that reclamation is supposed to be like a good thing, to take away the power of its original use, but I personally don't think that's appropriate for this phrase that was used as a rally for genocide.

Maybe I'm just being a sensitive baby, though, who knows! I'm crying while reading a history book about my tribe. This shit really hurts deep, though. It always has.

[nerdby]

So you guys might have heard me mention this thing called Operation Ajax. Operation Ajax -- known as Operation Boot in the UK -- was a coup carried out against the 1953 Iranian prime minister by the US and UK governments. You can read about it in the book All The Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer, but I just found this meme and it really drove home what an absolutely disgusting racist Dwight Eisenhower -- the US president behind the coup -- was.

Cause it feels like the name Operation Ajax was chosen to show how he thought white Christians were stronger than Muslims and South-East(?) Asians.

Fun Fact: Operation Ajax served as the inspiration for Frank Herbert's scifi book series Dune -- the plot is a metaphor for oil wars🙃

[murfpersonalblog]

Jfc it FINALLY breached containment. 👏

Hopefully AMC sees the ramifications of what egregiously tone deaf & historo-culturally ignorant & racially insensitive behavior looks like in this fandom.

Crap like this is what Black fans in particular have been going through for the past 2 years since S1--ever since Jacob Anderson's casting was announced.

And AMC hasn't helped, when their press coverage by journalists & influencers & even the cast members themselves have deliberately skirted around topics of race, and how that affects public perceptions of not just the present IWTV adaptation, but also its 1994 predecessor.

Rolin Jones said multiple times that he didn't want his project associated with that disgusting period in American history, cuz "who the f**k wants that?" What on earth would possess someone to think it was a good idea to prop up a fictional slaveowner's effigy at an IRL plantation in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests that worked so hard to dismantle and take DOWN images that celebrated slaveowners & KKK members in this racist country? Even the UK had HUGE BLM rallies in the midst of the 2020 pandemic that went viral online & in international news--British protestors even shoved a public statue of a British slave trader into the harbor! So why are y'all UK fans acting brand new, as if y'all never heard of plantations & slavery before!? Cuz you're LYING! You just don't CARE!

This is what happens when no one is encouraged to actually sit down and THINK about what it means to have a story about a 150yr-old gay Black man; who was born barely a decade after the Emancipation Proclamation; who lived during Reconstruction, the Black Laws & Jim Crow.

No, it's not AMC's job to educate y'all about the history of slavery, racism, Jim Crow, race riots & lynchings; or how that all affected the lives of the Black diaspora of NOLA's Storyville--let alone its permutations in 1940s Paris. Read a dang history book before you come to someone else's country & step in some mess that could land you in a effing news article. Google & Wikipedia are free.

AMC, let this be a lesson to you. This is what happens when Louis de Pointe du Lac is WRITTEN color-consciously on the show, but TREATED color-blindly by the network, journalists, and fandom.

[kammartinez]

Of all the books in the 10th-grade curriculum, the class set of The Great Gatsby was what we teachers most coveted. Short enough to cover in one quarter, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was also packed with symbolism—Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes on the billboard, the green light at the end of the dock, the cars, the music. And it was weighty enough to support multiple readings. I imagined my first year of teaching bursting with rich discussions. But to start any conversation, I had to secure the books before the other teachers got them. 

I succeeded, only to be deflated: My students fought Gatsby from the beginning. The teenagers in my classroom—all children of color living in an impoverished rural community in South Florida, many of them first-generation Americans whose parents had come from Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, or Guatemala—simply did not understand a majority of the words on the page. Any appeal I made to the sheer pleasures of the text fell flat. “Surely,” I’d say with as much enthusiasm as possible, “you think this part is funny!” And I’d launch into a reading of Nick Carraway’s opening narration: “Frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon.” Silence. Eventually, one brave soul would raise a hand. “What’s ‘feigned’?”

More advanced readings, I realized, would have to be tabled. I shouldn’t have been shocked. I, too, had struggled with Gatsby when I first read the book—and I had been a junior in college. Fitzgerald’s coupling of lyrical passages with a minimalist plot, full of fits and starts, proved too great a challenge for me. Like my students, I hadn’t been prepared by my public education for such a text. (One of my high-school teachers read Roots aloud to us for 45 minutes each class period—we made it through all 888 pages.) Stymied by the structure and language of Gatsby, I couldn’t get a handle on the characters either. If I hoped to pass my upper-level literature course, I needed to find a way in.

I turned to the secondary literature and found a chapter that offered an unexpected perspective on Gatsby’s race in a 2004 book titled The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination. In it, Carlyle Van Thompson, a professor of African American and American literature at Medgar Evers College, argues that Fitzgerald “guilefully characterizes Jay Gatsby as a ‘pale’ Black individual who passes for white.” I read this sentence twice, feeling like I had finally been granted license to enter the novel, to see myself in it, to make my way through the prose and develop my own interpretations. I was a 20-year-old English major, concentrating in African American literature at a historically Black college, and I still needed that permission.

In America, we are taught that canonical literature foregrounds the experiences of white people. Rarely do we question the racial identities of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s characters, or Herman Melville’s, or Willa Cather’s. If the race of an American character is not specified, we assume the character is white. This is especially true in reading older texts, but we do the same with contemporary ones. Take Celeste Ng’s best-selling 2017 novel, Little Fires Everywhere, which revolves around the lives of two American mothers. Ng, an Asian American author, makes clear that Elena Richardson, one of the mothers, is white. Ng says nothing about the race of the other, Mia Warren, leaving many readers to imagine her, too, as white. In the adaptation of the novel for the small screen, the casting of Kerry Washington, a Black woman, as Mia delivered a jolt, adding a new dimension to the series that Ng welcomed. Toni Morrison challenged our imaginative assumptions in a different way. In “Recitatif,” the only short story she wrote, her goal was to expose the binary expectations that most American readers bring to texts—and to confound them. As she revealed in her critical study Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, the story was “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.”

Stumbling on Thompson’s analysis of The Great Gatsby was like finding a door propped open, and I rushed through with questions. What if the novel’s focus on class and ethnic tensions obscures a racial drama that readers have read right over? Early in the novel, Tom Buchanan’s eugenicist warning to “look out” or “the white race will be ... utterly submerged” is loud and clear. Thompson’s claim, by contrast, requires careful scrutiny of the text. He sets out to prove that a Black person is skillfully placed in the novel’s foreground. Preoccupied with the obvious clash between old money and new money, we just haven’t seen him, or the threat of miscegenation he represents. Fitzgerald was wrestling with the idea of America as a place of self-​making, where radical reinvention is at once celebrated and feared. In doing so, according to Thompson, he struck upon the most illusory of American self-​transformations—Black passing as white—revealing “how intrinsically American literature and the American Dream are racial.”

Thompson’s interpretation—picking up on Morrison’s call, in Playing in the Dark, to recognize an “Africanist presence” at the center of the nation’s 19th- and 20th-century literary canon, a presence that serves as a foil for ideas of whiteness, freedom, and more—sent me back to Gatsby, this time to meet with an intellectually charged experience. To read the novel without presupposing any character’s whiteness is to discover which characters are identified as white and which are not. As I searched for any possible references to Black or brown characters passing as white, eager to assess the racial ambiguities that Thompson finds so telling, I was alert for more clues than his chapter supplies. Nick Carraway, the first-person narrator, is of Scottish descent. His maid’s Finnish identity is referenced seven times in the novel. Meyer Wolfsheim is a “small, flat-nosed Jew.” Tom Buchanan, a self-identified Nordic, includes Nick as a fellow member of the master race. But as Thompson notes, he pauses before adding Daisy Buchanan—Nick’s second cousin “once removed”—to the list, and then interrupts her when she begins to describe her “white girlhood.” “Don’t believe everything you hear,” Tom tells Nick.

Jordan Baker, Daisy’s best friend and Nick’s love interest, makes it onto the Nordic list. Yet I noted that she is given a “slender golden arm,” a “brown hand,” “grey sun-strained eyes,” “fingers, powdered white over their tan,” and a “face the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee.” One explanation for these colorful adjectives could be that Jordan is a competitive golfer—tans are common in the profession. The use of “powdered white,” though, gave me pause; so did the fact that Jordan is never reliably identified as white. Nick’s assessment of her, even during their fling, is biting: “She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young.” Could it be that she and Daisy get along so well because they’re both women at the turn of the 20th century who might very well be passing?

Thompson trains his focus on Jay Gatsby, flagging what he sees as telltale physical traits—his “brown, hardening body,” in Fitzgerald’s words, and hair that “looked as though it were trimmed every day.” Thompson also has his eye out for an array of culturally evocative signals that “Gatsby is racially counterfeit.” Nick, for example, is struck by his “graceful, conservative foxtrot,” a dance modeled on the slow drag, a Black dance sensation of the period. He also notes that Gatsby’s mansion sits on 40 acres of land in West Egg, an allotment that has a particular valence for Black Americans.

Thompson gathers less subtle pieces of evidence too. When, at the Plaza Hotel, Tom lets loose his suspicion that Daisy is having an affair with Gatsby, he frames it this way: “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife … Next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.” To this, Jordan, the “incurably dishonest” one, responds, “We’re all white here.”

And what is one to make of the insinuation that Tom hurls at Gatsby in the heat of his anger upon learning of Daisy’s infidelity? “I’ll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of [Daisy] unless you brought the groceries to the back door.” Throughout the scene, Fitzgerald emphasizes that Tom is “incredulous and insulting,” impatient, sharp, and explosive. To be sure, Tom’s fury might be expected, regardless of Gatsby’s identity. But, combined with Tom’s possibly veiled racial observations, could the outbursts suggest that something more is at stake than his marriage and social standing among the old-money elite? Could Tom here be venting his fears about miscegenation?

Of course, not everyone buys the Black Gatsby reading. Matthew J. Bruccoli, the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference, perhaps the most comprehensive study of the novel, dismissed the idea when he heard about Thompson’s interpretation: “If Fitzgerald wanted to write about Blacks … he would have made it perfectly clear in April 1925.” Perhaps. But if Fitzgerald intended to write simply about white people, why did he plant so many cryptic descriptions? A scion of the Scribner family, whose firm published the novel, said the reading wasn’t supported by any correspondence between Fitzgerald and his editor, Max Perkins. Yet Janet Savage, in Jay Gatsby: A Black Man in Whiteface (2017), explains that the initial title for the novel—Trimalchio in West Egg—refers to the former slave in Petronius’s novel, The Satyricon. Upon gaining freedom and wealth, Trimalchio throws lavish parties. Though Fitzgerald chose another title at Perkins’s request, the link between Gatsby and Trimalchio remains. When Gatsby finally reconnects with Daisy, he has no need to keep hosting big parties. “His career as Trimalchio,” Nick observes, “was over.”

Thompson himself said, after delivering the paper that inspired The Tragic Black Buck, that his students weren’t all prompt converts to his view, and in the end, I couldn’t, and still can’t, endorse his confident assertion that Jay Gatsby is Black. What I do claim is that Jay Gatsby is unraced. And that seems to me more important, because it opens the door wider than stark revisionism does. The ambiguity of Gatsby’s race and ethnicity shatters the Black-and-white framework we reflexively impose on so many classic texts.

This reading of Gatsby, I went on to discover when I scratched my initial lesson plan and started over, certainly gave my diverse class a way in. Gatsby’s American identity is so ambiguous that the students could layer on top of it any ethnic or racial identity they brought to the novel. When they did, the text was freshly lit. This was the fall of 2012, and the Baz Luhrmann film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, with a score produced by Jay-Z, had not yet been released. But the trailer was available, and I projected it onto my whiteboard. The students, immediately recognizing Jay-Z and Kanye West’s song “No Church in the Wild,” sat up. When Gatsby finally appeared, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, I paused it.

“Why is Gatsby white?” I asked them.

“Because that’s what the book says,” they answered, in near unison.

“Does it?” I asked, pretending to be confused.

Suddenly they were invested. They began scouring the novel for evidence of Gatsby’s race. They were forced to look up words they didn’t know, in the hope that those words would yield more clues. The students parsed intricate sentences down to their essence to extrapolate a clear meaning. And soon they began probing for deeper interpretations.

The conversation then, and in classes since, took off. “What about the two eggs?” students have asked, referring to Fitzgerald’s description of East and West Egg. “Could they represent Black and white people?” They’ve pointed to Daisy’s upbringing in Louisville, Kentucky, and wondered, “What about this section on Daisy’s past? Could all this whiteness point to what Gatsby was really after? Is whiteness what he wanted to capture?” They delved more deeply into The Great Gatsby than they did into any other text I taught during those years—more deeply, according to some, than they did into any book in any school year. In sifting through pages and pages of textual evidence, they found room for themselves in one of America’s greatest novels—indeed, in American culture.