White Negro Research Articles

Love and Money, Ecstasy and Death: A Conversation with James Toback

Hardly anyone has ever burst into American filmmaking with quite the combination of unlikely background and brash command of James Toback. After a life which veered through university teaching, compulsive gambling and huge debts, a shortlived marriage into an aristocratic English family, and an offbeat collection of literary efforts, among them a pseudonymous porno novel called Substitute Gun, Toback broke into movies with his semi-autobiographical screenplay for Gambler. Under Karel Reisz's direction, this magisterial film became one of the most powerful nightmare visions of the seventies, still incomprehensibly neglected. But Toback surmounted its commercial failure in America to write and direct Fingers for, of all people, George Barrie, whose Brut cosmetics company was taking a flyer in movies. This seething, hallucinatory study of Jimmy Angelelli (Harvey Keitel), a baroquely tormented New Yorker striving to become a concert pianist, like his ethereal, mad mother, but in thrall to his bellowing gangster father as a brutal debt collector, bucked weak advertising and many hostile reviews to find limited American audiences, much of which it jolted into bewilderment with its garish yet elegant explosions of oedipal trauma, sexual longing, and criminal viciousness. Yet a growing number of viewers know it as the most thrilling American debut film (along with Badlands) of the past decade. Intoxicated with the flamboyance of self-destructive seekers after richer, deeper feelings than life seems able to offer in more than tantalizing glimmers, both films also bear the mark of another, often disconcerting Toback work, Jim: Author's Self-Centered Memoir on the Great Jim Brown, a book which grew out of an assignment from Esquire to write an article about the former star fullback for the Cleveland Browns. Instead, Toback ended up sharing Brown's Hollywood high life for around a year-parties, sexual bouts, promotion of black businesses, edgy collisions with a racist-tinged Los Angeles sheriff's department. An undoubted descendant of Norman Mailer's The White Negro, the book is full of pronouncements about blacks as America's true sexual outlaws and sources of psychic power and Toback's obsession with penetrating what he considered an exotic and dangerous world-partly as an initiation rite into manhood, partly as an exorcism of the white's dread of darkness. Later, the book boomeranged against Gambler and Fingers when some critics noticed blacks as emblems of dread and swaggering sexuality in the first and Jim Brown himself in the second, playing a scary stud, Dreems, who, in one shocking scene, clouts the heads of his two white mistresses together. Now comes Love and Money, trailing a different brand of controversy-the announcement that Pauline Kael was leaving her critic's post at New Yorker to work on it under the aegis of Warren Beatty, who was going to star in it, then her departure from the project, even though she and Toback were known to be friends. But, as it turns out, he ascribes their break-up to differences of opinion, about which he is nonspecific. We remain very friendly, he notes. would say, probably in terms of sheer obstinacy, that I would be a lot guiltier than she. In Love and Money, a young Los Angeles banker, Byron Levin (Ray Sharkey), chafes against his job and his happy yet elusively dissatisfying domestic life with his girlfriend Vicki (Susan Heldfond), a dealer in rare books, and his grandfather (King Vidor), a former tycoon forever bantering with him in a senile, yet airily witty, track-jumping conversation. (Vidor took the role after Harry Ritz, of the Ritz Brothers comedy team, fell ill after one day's shooting. Toback's original choice, Henry Miller, was too feeble physically to take it on.) When Frederick Stockheinz (Klaus Kinski), a silver magnate brusque with the swollen power of multinational conglomerates, offers Byron $1 mil-

The Origins and Development of Racial Anti-Semitism in Fascist Italy

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Origins and Development of Racial Anti-Semitism in Fascist ItalyGene BernardiniGene Bernardini Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 49, Number 3Sep., 1977 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/241596 Views: 122Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1977 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Valerio Antonelli, Raffaele D'Alessio, Stephen P. Walker Operationalizing expulsion. Jewish accountants in Fascist Italy, 1938–1943, Critical Perspectives on Accounting 1 (Apr 2022): 102462.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2022.102462Luca Michelini, Terenzio Maccabelli Economics and Anti-Semitism: The Case of Maffeo Pantaleoni, History of Political Economy 47, no.11 (Mar 2015): 91–118.https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-2847327Giulia Barrera Mussolini's colonial race laws and state-settler relations in Africa Orientale Italiana (1935-41), Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no.33 (Nov 2010): 425–443.https://doi.org/10.1080/09585170320000113770Maria Sophia Quine An Italian Social Revolution?, (Jan 2002): 289–302.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919793_11Neil MacMaster ‘Black Jew ‐ white Negro’ anti‐Semitism and the construction of cross‐racial stereotypes, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 6, no.44 (Dec 2007): 65–82.https://doi.org/10.1080/13537110008428612Andrew M. Canepa Half‐hearted cynicism, Patterns of Prejudice 13, no.55 (May 2010): 18–27.https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.1979.9969540

John Barth's Chimera and the Strictures of Reality

Although many contemporary American novelists have rejected the straightforward representation of social reality in fiction, this rejection may occur for a number of reasons. In Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs it stems from a fear that the inanimate world is somehow superseding the animate, the sovereignty of the individual is being threatened. John Hawkes refers to the novelists ‘ who hope for more in the novel than trying to build brick walls of brick ’, and suggests that ‘ the true purpose of the novel is to assume a significant shape and to objectify the terrifying similarity between the unconscious desires of the solitary man and the disruptive needs of the visible world ’. Norman Mailer also remarks on this relationship in his essay ‘ The White Negro ’:The second world war presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of superstates founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it was nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?

An Investigation of Personality Characteristics of Negroes Attending a Predominately White University and Negroes Attending a Predominately Black College

An Investigation of Personality Characteristics of Negroes Attending a Predominately White University and Negroes Attending a Predominately Black College

Free Colored West Indians: A Racial Dilemma

Free Colored West Indians: A Racial Dilemma David Lowenthal Slavery WAS SCARCELY a racial issue in the eighteenthcentury West Indies; it was a racial fact. Seventeenth-century Eu­ ropean entrepreneurs established tropical plantations in the Carib­ bean with African slave labor; their successors universally pre­ sumed all slaves to be black and all whites to be free. West Indian whites never seriously questioned the virtues of slavery as an insti­ tution until Europe forced emancipation on them in the nineteenth century. West Indian contrasts with the North American colonies are striking. During the eighteenth century, more and more Ameri­ cans considered slavery morally repugnant and socially dangerous. By the time of the American Revolution, most of the northern colonies had abolished slavery, and many southerners, themselves reluctant slaveholders, sought to limit its scope and to abolish the slave trade so as to promote eventual emancipation. Most Ameri­ cans viewed the "peculiar institution" as a source of unmitigated evil.1 But in the West Indies, slavery was not a peculiar institution, it was a universal one. There were ten slaves to every non-slave, and few free men of any complexion regarded Negro slavery as immoral or unjust. Notwithstanding the ubiquitous character of West Indian Ne­ gro slavery, two kinds of people constituted categories outside the system: whites who were not free, and non-whites who were free. Emigration soon eliminated the first: a hundred thousand white indentured servants, made redundant by African slavery on the sugar estates, streamed out of the Caribbean to the Atlantic sea­ 335 Racism in the Eighteenth Century board of North America and elsewhere. The few thousand poor whites who remained endured general contempt for ways of life little distinguishable from those of slaves; indeed, many called them 'white Negroes.” West Indians who were free but not white were a more serious and pervasive anomaly. These were of two kinds. Some were slaves who had fled plantation servitude to the mountainous and wooded hinterlands, whence they sporadically raided towns and estates while avoiding recapture. Two substantial groups of runaways and rebels, the Maroons of Jamaica and the Bush Negro tribes of Surinam and French Guiana, resisted all efforts to subdue them; colonial regimes and European empires had to treat with them as self-governing black enclaves, which have maintained their auton­ omy up to the present time. Rebel slaves in French St. Domingue went much further: they brought down the plantocracy and ex­ pelled the whites. Even in the smaller islands, some runaway slave hideouts survived for generations, a remote but ominous presence of which slaveowners always had to take notice. Rebel and runaway slaves remained essentially outside the West Indian social order, however, when they did not entirely over­ whelm it; they constituted a force to be reckoned with, not one that invited intimate commingling. The opposite was true of the free colored—those set free or born free, often the offspring of planters and slaves. Free colored West Indians were an integral part of the social order, and they accepted its regulations and internalized its values, even the perspectives that denigrated them. The free colored population grew slowly until the middle of the eighteenth century and thereafter became increasingly numerous. By the time of emancipation they outnumbered whites everywhere but Jamai­ ca, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands. This essay discusses the conflicts between racial theory and prac­ tice engendered by West Indian acceptance of this free colored element, ambiguously positioned between black and white. I shall refer primarily to British, French, and Dutch colonies in and around the Caribbean, 'where large-scale plantations and African slavery were generally more pervasive and came earlier than in Latin America and mainland North America. But this framework 336 Free Colored West Indians is at once too narrow and too sweeping. The non-Hispanic West Indies, which included most of the islands and Guiana in South America, developed patterns of culture and society that set them off from Latin America.2 But in contrast with the slave states of North America the condition of the free colored in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the Spanish American mainland in many ways re­ sembled that in the West Indies.3...

Contraceptives and cervical carcinoma.

The authors express reservations similar to those expressed by others relating to the recently published rates of carcinoma-in-situ in women using the diaphragm as compared with those using contraceptive oral steroids. Data from the Planned Parenthood Clinics in New York City compared 3 ethnic groups: white Negro and Puerto Rican. All were shown to have variations in incidence rates for invasive cervical carcin oma possibly due to such etiological factors as early sexual activity multiparity and low socioeconomic status. Those using oral contraceptives were 78% of the possibly high risk groups and therefore might be expected to have more cervical carcinoma. The simulataneous random matching procedure employed may have reduced the differences somewhat. Larger groups on an international scale and over extended periods of time are needed for study. It is suggested that the proposed coital mutagen may have gained entry during adolescence or before the use of either a mechanical barrier or oral contraception.

Stanford-Binet and Goodenough-Harris Test Performances of Head Start Children

The characteristics of revised Stanford-Binet (S-B) and Goodenough-Harris protocols (GHDT) were investigated for 188 culturally disadvantaged children. These children scored in the low normal level of intelligence, girls were superior to boys, and whites were superior to Negroes. Further, a race and sex analysis indicated white females showed functional superiority relative to Negro male and female children while there were no differences between white male children and Negro male or female children. Also, the S-B and the GHDT did not correlate highly, suggesting that different skills are required by the two tests. An item analysis of the S-B suggested that for this population most of the items are correctly placed for age.

The White Negro and the Negro White

The White Negro and the Negro White

White Colleges and Negro Higher Education

White Colleges and Negro Higher Education

PERCEPTUAL DEFENSE TO RACIALLY SIGNIFICANT STIMULI<newline>

Previously it was demonstrated that many of the handicaps of percepmal defense smdies could be overcome by pairing the critical and neutral pictures to two-digit numbers and then using the learned numbers as the critical and neutral stimuli in rhe perceptual defense experiment (4). In many such studies, the critical or taboo stimuli have been sexual words, picrures, etc. In the present smdy, racially significant stimuli were used, the hypothesis being that Ss will demonstrate perceptual defense to racially critical stimuli significantly more than to racially neutral stimuli. The critical stimuli were 2-in. color transparencies of a Negro man and a Negro woman, Negro man and white woman, and white man and Negro woman. The neutral stimuli were 2-in. color transparencies of a white man and a white woman. A11 of these pictures showed the man and woman facing each other, separated by approximately 24 in., in a pose which suggested conversation. As before (4) the picmres were paired with twodigir numbers mounted on blank 2-in. transparencies, using the paired-associate learning technique, and the numbers were subsequently used as the critical and neutral stimuli. Ss were 20 female Caucasian volunteer college smdents. After reaching the criterion on the paired-associate learning sequence of one correct trial through the four pictures, the numbers were presented tachistoscopically below threshold at a constant rate of exposure. Numbers of exposures to recognition and GSRs were recorded. Using the MannWhitney U test (5), significant differences obtained for number of exposures to recognition for critical and neutral stimuli (numbers) (U ~138, p = .05) and the GSRs to those stimuli (U = 137, p .05). Using the Sherif-Hovland card-sort technique (2) as a measure of ~rejudice against Negroes, the group was divided into an anti-Negro group (using a restricted number of categories, two or less) and a pro-Negro group (using an extended number of categories, more than two). Comparing the number of exposures to recognition for he pro- and anti-Negro groups, significant differences were found for the pro-Negro group between the neutral and crirical stimuli (U = 18, j~ < .01) and the neutral stimuli and numbers associated with the Negro couple (U = 16.5, p < .01). No significant differences were found for the GSRs of these groups or on either measure (GSR and number of exposures to recognition) for the anti-Negro group. It appears that the Sherif-Hovland instrument measures a type of reaction unrelated to perceptual defense or that it measures sensicization to threatening stimuli (1, 3) rather than repression of these stimuli.

Faculty in Predominantly White and Predominantly Negro Higher Institutions

Faculty in Predominantly White and Predominantly Negro Higher Institutions

INCIDENCE OF FATAL CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE IN CHARLESTON, S. C.

A series of 2,066 consecutive autopsies performed by the staff of the department of pathology of the Medical College of the State of South Carolina from Jan. 1, 1928 through May 1938 has been reviewed by us as a statistical study of cardiovascular disease in the South, particularly among American Negroes. Instances of trauma to the heart or vessels have been excluded, but all other cases are included. During this period all the autopsies done in the County of Charleston were performed by a member of this staff, including investigations authorized by the coroner in cases of sudden death. Furthermore, since most of the cases prior to about 1935 were from the charity services of the Roper Hospital—a general county hospital for white persons and Negroes—there has been little or no migration of patients, and the results as given here can be taken as representative of fatal cardiovascular disease in

On the arrangement of the superficial veins of the cubital fossa in American white and American negro males

On the arrangement of the superficial veins of the cubital fossa in American white and American negro males

VI. An account of the white negro shewn before the Royal Society: In a letter to the Right Honourable the Earl of Morton, President of the Royal Society, from James Parsons, M.D. F. R. S

My Lord, The white boy, who was brought before this learned Society on Thursday last, came to me with his matter on Sunday afternoon; and according, to the desire of your lordship and the gentlemen present, I made the necessary inquiry into the several circumstances relative to his being born of black parents, and find the following notices very satisfactory; to which I have added some observations which, I hope, will not be foreign to the subject.