This fascinating autoethnography is by turns revelatory, recondite, ambitious, challenging, and uncomfortable. Anthropologist J. Lorand Matory has written an intensely personal meditation on the dilemmas of identity-fashioning that “ethnic Blacks” face in confronting the American racial hierarchy. Whether of recent African or Caribbean immigrant origin, or of Louisiana Creole, part Native American, or Gullah/Geechee ancestry, Matory sees all of these groups struggling to distinguish themselves from a white-defined, dysfunctional African American “constituent Other”—which is ironically the same respect-seeking strategy historically pursued by the Black middle class, who may increasingly be lumped among the stigmatized, Matory fears, as W. E. B. DuBois’s twentieth-century color line gives way to what he calls the twenty-first-century “ethnic line.”
Having grown up in the heyday of 1960s–70s Black Power, Matory initially expected that various African-descended groups would tend toward political unity in confronting the American racial binary, but that notion proved disappointingly unfounded. Instead, he...
