Book Review: Manchild in the Promised Land

In which I get re-traumatized by a classic work

The book ‘Manchild in the Promised Land’ is a classic of American literature which traumatized me when I was assigned to read it in middle school. It is a literarily important work, using a style of hyperrealism which was innovative at the time and eventually lead to reality television and youtube channels which have full staffs but go out of their way to make it appear that the whole thing was produced by a single person. In parallel it also was part of the rise of the blaxsploitation genre. The author and most of the books ardent followers claim that it proves that black people in the US are that way due to the oppression of white people. It’s also been claimed to be oppression porn, and to glorify drug use and criminality. I’ll get to whether those things are true, but first there are some things I need to explain.

The book is an autobiography about the author’s growing up in Harlem, how he was a involved in all manner of criminality when he was younger, and eventually managed to get out of it, go to law school, and have a respectable career. What struck me when I was younger was that it was the first depiction of the interactions between men and women I’d ever seen which wasn’t propaganda bullshit. Back in the 80s the depictions of dating in sitcoms and movies were stagey and dumb, but worse than that they’d alternate between christian moralizing and juvenile fantasizing of the writers. Even back then I could see transparently through them. This book was different. It depicted people in actually uncomfortable situations, doing things you weren’t supposed to talk about, and having normal human reactions. The thing which caused damage to my impressionable young mind was that most of these interactions involved pimps and hos and present a very dark side of humanity.

There’s something I now need to admit. I haven’t, and most likely won’t, be able to force myself to finish re-reading this book. I know that’s a bit hypocritical when writing a review, but there’s something I realized early on re-reading it which recontextualized everything in it and made not able to cope with reading it any more. And that is that it’s all made up.

It was the homophobia which gave it away. All the gay people are presented as aggressive creepazoids, with not much motivation other than to fulfill the role of creepazoid in this literary universe of general oppression. Such people do exist in real life, but they tend to have the good sense to not openly go after people they don’t know and have no reason to think will be receptive, especially back when homosexuality was downright illegal and getting beating someone up for being gay wouldn’t land you in any trouble at all (The story is set in the 1940s). The logical conclusion is that the author didn’t know any real out gay people and was making them up as characters in a story using a common trope of the time. Looking into the author more, everything falls apart. He comes across as a dweeb in interviews, not someone anyone would take seriously as a pimp. None of the characters other than him mention seem to ever have been mentioned. He conveniently claims to have been a lawyer but then stopped practicing because he could make more money giving talks, but there doesn’t seem to be evidence that he ever practiced or passed the bar, attended law school, or got into law school in the first place. (I’m guessing he did some but not all of those.) Most ridiculously the timing doesn’t work. Either he was hustling soldiers on leave from WWII when he was eight years old, or that was somebody else’s story. In an interview with NPR they said it was a novel but written as an autobiography, which is surprising given that nearly everything referencing it claims unambiguously that it’s simply an autobiography. My guess is that they did some actual journalism and politely let him fall back on ‘it’s a novel’ when they called him out on his lies.

One may ask whether this matters. Does a work of art’s meaning or import depend on the artist who created it? In general I lean towards saying no, that the truth of even a claimed personal experience is less important than whether that experience is prototypical of that of many others. But in this case the context and meaning are so completely changed based on whether it’s real that I have to go the other way. If it’s a real story it’s about someone who was once a pimp, came to the realization that hos are real people too, changed his life around and is bringing a laudable message of inclusion. If it’s made up then it’s a loser fantasizing about having been a pimp. That doesn’t mean that this isn’t an important and influential book, but it does man that if you’re going to teach it you should include the context that it’s a seminal work of incel literature.

All that said, being a work of fiction doesn’t mean that there’s nothing about reality which can be gleaned from a work. I truly believe that the stories in this book were ones told to or observed by the author involving older, cooler boys and were either true or at least demonstrations that such stories could win you social status. A lot of it jives with things which I personally witnessed in the 80s and 90s growing up in walking distance of where the book is set. So now let’s get to critiques of the book and whether they’re true or not. The first question at hand is: Does it show that black americans are kept where they are via oppression from white americans? Well… not really. It’s complicated. A lot of the white people in it are very personally charitable to the author, helping him get through school and better himself. That’s the opposite of oppression. Where it does show a lot of oppression is from the police, both in the form of under- and over- policing. Police brutality is commonplace, but the cops won’t show up when you call for them and actually need them. This is definitely a real problem, thankfully less so now than the better part of a century ago, but there’s still a default assumption in the US that when the cops show up they’ll make the situation worse. Maybe over the course of my lifetime that’s been downgraded from an assumption to a fear, but it’s still a very real hangover and the war on drugs isn’t done yet. What the book most definitely shows is the black community oppressing itself. People in the ghetto are mostly interacting with other people in the ghetto, so it’s to be expected that crimes which happen there also have victims from there. The depictions of drug dealers intentionally getting potential customers addicted and of men forcing women into prostitution are particularly disturbing, but are things which actually happen.

That leads to the other big question, which is whether this book glorifies criminality. Yes it glorifies criminality! Half of it is the author fantasizing about being a badass pimp! He claims cocaine isn’t addictive! Gang rape is portrayed as a rite of passage! (The one thing which the author seems to really not like is heroin. This was before crack.) What’s puzzling is how this book is held up as a paragon of showing greatness of black culture. Saying ‘There’s a lot of glorification of criminality and misogyny in black culture and that’s a bad thing’ is something one isn’t allowed to say in polite company, or can only be said by black academics who obfuscate it with layers of jargon. While I understand getting defensive about that, it might behoove people who want to avoid the issue to not outright promote works which are emblematic of those trends (by, say, making them assigned reading in school). It doesn’t help to fall back on ‘this has a deep meaning which only black people can understand’ when the obvious problems are pointed out, as the author had a penchant for doing in interviews.

This brings me to the most central and currently culturally relevant aspect of what’s real in this book. The (very different, not at all bullshit) book ‘We Have Never Been Woke’ by Musa al-Gharbi makes a compelling case for the claim that woke worldview is a largely self-serving one of intellectual elites who claim to speak for underprivileged people but don’t. That book is from the point of view of someone who is himself cringily woke and can point out the hypocrisy and disconnect from that end. The other side of it is that when underprivileged people who woke claims to speak for say they are not you should believe them. This book is an example of that. So is all of gangsta rap. It is not productive to pretend a culture is something it is not just because you think it should be different. And there I think Manchild gets some amount of redemption: It claims to be a work which shines a light on cold, hard, unpleasant reality, and for all its faults it does, only not with the meaning the author intended.