“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man”
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Vintage, $15, 226 pages
The recent arrest of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. by Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley (charges were dropped) is called a teachable moment, but what is the lesson? Gates’ collection of essays, published in 1997, leads us some of the way, showing us that yet again, perception reveals the perceiver and that understanding is a continuous, and illusory, process. The title of this book, inspired by Wallace Stevens’ brilliant poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” is intended to convey this issue of multiple, and contradictory perspectives on the black man — from Louis Farrakhan, who “turned blackness into a cult, and something of a masculinist cult at that,” to writer Anatole Broyard, who “turned racial identity into an elaborately subtle game of peekaboo.” These essays, several of which appeared in “The New Yorker,” really call for better listening in a world of ambivalence and anxiety.