A review by ralowe
Black Bourgeoisie by Franklin Frazier

5.0

i was always on my guard the whole time i was reading this. perhaps frazier might not be interrogating his fundamental internalized racism as much as i imagine myself to be, but his bigger point in the grand scheme come incredibly close to my own. maybe his writing is just an example of how critical black study in public discourse invokes an awkward interiority that unseemly blurs subject/object. just go with it. the alternative ain't appealing, and is the primary (a)social problem. but he doesn't seem to be going that deep into psychical master-slave dialectics, and i think i might have only hallucinated a gesture to psychoanalysis early in. he nails the biggest obstacle facing blackness in the political realm-- the inability for the existing order to ever establish a black subject. that subject that is somehow a product of history as well as an agent unhindered to play and compete in the democratic sphere is wholly a myth. rappers on tv. yet this maddening game, its cruel optimism, are desperate claims for internal coherence. frazier goes over how these protestant thrivings were programmed in the crucible of slavery and i know that when i finished this book i need to go back and get through to the end of dubois' 'black reconstruction.' god, the set-up. saidiya hartman's 'scenes of subjection' captures so well the life built to fail. dreams of success under a state of terror. can we blame ourselves? and the impossible necessity that this myth be dispelled.