Shelf Space - Blackface Robbin’ the Hood

Adam Mansbach has me all self-referentializing and shit, so give me a sec while I figure out how a white guy like me, who nevertheless presumes to cover the B-boy scene, flubs handshakes at Apache Cafe and riffs on the four tenets of hip-hop, is going to write about this white author/hip-hop journalist and his masochistically self-critical novel about the “downest white boy in history.”

The book is Angry Black White Boy, or, The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay. Macon, a Boston ‘burbs white boy with a thin claim on Judaism and a nasty segregationist skeleton in the ancestral closet, has spent much of his life trying to be the baddest black power B-boy since John Brown raided Harpers Ferry.

Now entering Columbia University - his raised, clenched fist pumping the heart of Harlem - he’s coming into his own: out-creding his black studies professor, calling the Malcolm-genuflecting Black Student Union to task for its lack of revolutionary conviction, and playing a racial Robin Hood in a taxi cab. And all that’s just a warm-up for what’s to come.

Though Angry Black White Boy is a novel of high-minded absurdity, Macon is not a joke, or at least not just a joke. He’s an early, awkward Eminem of the circles he runs in. (His roommate’s name? Dre, of course.) He’s a mess of painfully self-aware hypocrisies and grandiose contradictions, but also of great conviction and genuine hip-hop erudition. Whether that’s enough - whether he will, in the final analysis, do more good than harm - is one of the novel’s central tensions.

Mansbach slides a little too easily into the South, often without a compelling plot motive, whenever he wants to show really ugly racism (and I know it’s all ugly, but not all of it leaves visible marks). It’s as though the worst that New Yorkers could ever produce is a dismissive Wall Street yuppie or a misguided liberal white weenie.

But on the whole, Mansbach has written a smart, merciless story of cultural appropriation, racial justice and individual authenticity that should have even the most complacent melting potheads of the colorblind conceit squirming as he bellows the coals beneath the catbird seat.

thomas.bell@creativeloafing.comAngry Black White Boy, or, The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay by Adam Masbach. $12.95. Three Rivers Press. 335 pages.

Other Worthwhile Words

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, originally from Bogalusa, La., and Atlanta poet Natasha Trethewey read from their collections to benefit AIDS awareness. Fri., March 25, at the Carter Center, 441 Freedom Parkway. Free. Reception, 7 p.m.; reading, 8 p.m. 770-551-3019. www.gpc.edu/~gpccr.??