Soulstrut catnip post #572983

prof_rockwell

It's A White Thinghttp://www.newsweek.com/id/109582

drewnice

Yeah, I read this article a few days ago. Thanks for sharing it. It's pretty insightful and addresses an issue on the underbelly of what we do here, but don't talk about.

If you can't get through the whole piece, this sums it up pretty well:

Hamilton showily claims that the "Delta blues" was actually born in the 1940s in a Brooklyn YMCA room, where an eccentric record collector named James McCune educated a circle of acolytes to appreciate Patton, Johnson and others as "voices that were untainted by the modern world." ... "All of them set out to find an undiluted and primal black music," Hamilton writes. "Behind that obsession lay an emotional attachment to racial difference dating back at least to the mid-nineteenth century, to abolitionists' enchantment with the peculiar power of black singers, their uncanny ability to allow their white listeners to experience an unimagined transcendence, a level of emotional intensity otherwise out of their reach." At their best, she grants, "they enriched understanding and broadened white horizons." But at their worst, "they fed on a faintly colonialist romance with black suffering, an eroticization of African-American despair."