New York's urban neighborhoods are full of young would-be emcees who aspire to "keep it real" and restaurants like Sylvia's famous soul food eatery that offer a taste of "authentic" black culture. In these and other venues, authenticity is considered the best way to distinguish the real from the phony, the genuine from the fake. But in "Real Black", John L. Jackson Jr. proposes a new model for thinking about these issues - racial sincerity. Jackson argues that authenticity caricatures identity as something imposed on people, imprisoning them within stereotypes: an African American high school student who excels in the classroom, for instance, might be dismissed as "acting white." Sincerity, on the other hand, as Jackson defines it, imagines authenticity as an incomplete measuring stick, an analytical model that attempts to deny people agency in their search for identity. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in and around New York City, Jackson offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that directly and indirectly address how race is negotiated in today's world - including tales of book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost. Jackson records and retells their interconnected sagas, all the while attempting to reconcile these stories with his own crisis of identity and authority as an anthropologist terrified by fieldwork. Finding ethnographic significance where mere mortals see only bricks and mortar, his invented alter ego, Anthroman, takes to the streets, showing how race is defined and debated, imposed and confounded every single day.

About the Author
John L. Jackson Jr. is assistant professor of cultural anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Harlem-world: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews
"Expertly weaving theory with analysis, Jackson discovers that identities built around race and class in the quintessential black American neighborhood are far less monolithic than even Harlem residents believe." - Publishers Weekly "Jackson convincingly makes the case that precisely because race and class can be 'done to people,' his behavioural model is 'the only real grounding on which hierarchical notions of race in the United States can ultimately stand.' " - Mireille A. L. Djenno, Times Literary Supplement"



Book Information
ISBN 9780226390024
Author John L. Jackson Jr.
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 23mm * 16mm * 2mm