The Pleasure of Not Being Respectable

Arthur Johnson—a.k.a. the Galveston Giant, a.k.a. the Big Smoke, a.k.a. Jack—the son of former slaves and first black heavyweight champion of the world, checked into a room at the Seal Rock House in San Francisco. The hotel’s tolerance of a colored man, even a great and laureled one, was not to be presumed in the fall of 1909. The primary concern, however, was not the champion but his female companions: Belle Schreiber and Hattie McClay, two white women who were competing for his attention. Johnson, literally an outsize figure, all sinew and ripple, black as a power outage, was singularly free, having concluded that his capacity to whip white men in the ring emancipated him from the other mythologies of white dominion. He would keep company with whomever he chose. Both of them.

It was striking but predictable that this kind of freedom—any kind, really—unsettled the whites and therefore had the same effect among the more cautious blacks. Booker T. Washington— titan, college president and ex-slave—criticized Johnson for his indulgences, for needlessly provoking white men whose anger that a man like him could even exist would surely be displaced onto the shoulders of the rest of the colored people. Having survived the travail of slavery and the onset of Jim Crow, the race, Washington thought, would most assuredly be laid low by some ratio of whiskey, ignorance and the pursuit of white women’s vaginas.

This nation has never lacked for scolds, but its black ones have the additional credibility of claiming to offer solutions to a troubled and besieged community. Washington’s gospel—the creed that had made him famous and powerful and beholden to white robber barons—held that Negroes were at all times to avoid incurring the anger of white men, that they were to remain outwardly subordinate as a means of surviving in a world not made for them. Johnson, posted up in the Seal Rock, might have asked: If those were the terms, what was the point of surviving at all? The story of the two men is trivial save for the ways their exchanges distilled something bigger and maybe even profound about who we are and how it is we get through our days.

At the heart of the various hierarchies in American life is a kind of tiered access to pleasure. Whatever its form—carnal, narcotic, culinary, aesthetic—pleasure is either more easily attained at the higher social altitudes or its indulgence is far less stigmatized there. It’s nearly preordained that these scales of joy and indulgence would be bound up in the tangles of race in ways that are both illuminating and contradictory. No wonder then that the Reefer Madness–era prohibitions against marijuana deployed the stigma of interracial sex as part of their fearmongering. It’s predictable that the recent trend toward marijuana’s legalization followed the path of its mainstreaming by white Americans—a pleasure whose consequences always fell asymmetrically along racial lines. The American proscriptions against interracial sex literally predate the nation itself, taking root in the colonies a century before the Revolutionary War. Yet the same architecture of law and custom meant to wall the coloreds off from the joys of American life also made black life obscure, curious and exotic.

The archives of slavery are replete with bullshit rationales coughed up by white men who were forever running up to the slave quarters at night, most often projecting their basest desires onto black women. In the 1920s, white voyeurs overran Harlem, raving that black people and their passionate primitivism were the antidote to the sterility of modern life. In the 1950s, Norman Mailer looked to black people, their jazz, their sex, their etceteras, and found a kind of loose-limbed counterpoint to the uptightness of white American culture. This kind of exoticism tumbled down to the present, manifested in a landscape of interracial porn that turns old ideas on their heads: that black male sexuality can exist as a vicarious thrill, mostly for white people, most of them men. The deepest ancestral prohibition proliferates on the internet, one click beneath the digital surface, in ways that reinforce the old ideas. The attempt to outmaneuver race in this society is not unlike a gambler trying to beat the house: The odds are stacked in the house’s favor, and even its losses tend to serve a bigger, long-term victory.

The result is a kind of crossroads effect in American life. The classics of American literature (Portnoy’s Complaint, Howl) and film (Easy Rider, The Graduate, American Beauty) have tended to fixate on the rejection of suffocating societal norms and puritanism. Philip Roth lampooned the sterility of the American suburb, but Lorraine Hansberry centered her most famous play on the struggle of a black Chicago family trying to get a shot at that kind of boredom. For black people, gaining access to the camouflage of mediocrity and normalcy has just as often been the whole point. One side finds heroism in the pursuit of pleasure; the other shrugs it off as a luxury—a thing that might cost you more than it was worth. We Americans approach the matter of pleasure from differing directions.

All this brings us back to the matter of Jack Johnson. He shot back at Washington, clowning him for being beaten over the head in a red-light district where he’d purportedly sought the company of a white woman. Johnson would be beholden neither to white men’s fury nor to black men’s fears. Life is finite, and pleasure is the balm that makes this fact tolerable. And how you negotiate the terms of that deal, the particulars of your indulgence, is nobody else’s business. The logic of Johnson’s thinking still holds up more than a century after whatever went down in that hotel room. When confronted with a moral quandary, the wisest course of action is sometimes to simply stop giving a fuck.