The Last Plantation: Color, Conflict, and Identity: Reflections of a New World Black. - book reviews

Reason, Feb, 1998 by Itabari Njeri

In 1991, while most of the nation was caught up in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings and the Rodney King phenomenon, Itabari Njeri, then a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, was gripping her notebook throughout a tense murder trial. On March 3 of that year, Korean immigrant Sun Ja Du fatally shot a 15-year-old African American named Latasha Harlins. Harlins and Du had argued over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice in Du's Los Angeles grocery store.

It is this shooting and its aftermath that Njeri, a veteran chronicler of racial tensions, explores in The Last Plantation. She uses the story to argue that it's time for America to end its obsession with race. Njeri wants to redefine American identity for a post-racial age, and her provocative ideas will likely inspire some readers and infuriate others on both the left and right.

Njeri takes her readers on a MacGuyver-like chase through an L.A. whose every aspect seems racially charged, from its courts to its politics to its grief. This is a world populated by vivid characters, including Du's deal-making defense lawyer Charles Lloyd, calculating California assembly candidate and convicted extortionist Patricia Moore, fuming multiracial activist Velina Hasu-Houston, scholars Ibrahim Sundiata and Cornel West, and Latasha's little brother Joshua, who grows worrisomely quiet after his sister's death. Njeri often lets her characters tell the tale, quoting long conversations and entire segments of court testimony. But she also brings her own biography to bear.

A Brooklyn-born African American (she prefers the broader term "New-World Black"), Njeri is the offspring of a Guyanese-Jamaican-African mother and a father from the state of Georgia. Like many African Americans, she has a mixed heritage: African, East Indian, English, French, and Arawak. For almost a decade, as a reporter for The Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times, she has written about color conflict, particularly between African Americans and a new generation of self-defined "multiracial" Americans, many of whom want political power and public funds of their own. Many African Americans, Njeri says, cleave to a "pure" definition of the black race and try to stomp out competing movements as a matter of political survival.

For her part, she concludes that the multiracial movement is just the latest manifestation of our unhealthy racial obsession and regards the attempt to add a multiracial category to the 2000 Census as not worth supporting. Indeed, Njeri hopes we can eventually do away with all racial categories. She italicizes the word race throughout her book to remind readers of her view that race, a concept that emphasizes differences, doesn't account for our daily miscegenated American experience. Nowadays, she argues, there isn't a single American black without white blood; a single white without black blood, and so on. While this may not be biologically true, as a metaphor for describing our mixed culture, it's useful.

Njeri is a staunch opponent of what she calls the "Li'l Dab'll Do Ya" school of racial thought, which assumes that even a drop of black blood makes an individual racially black. But Njeri carefully distinguishes her own hopes for America's cultural future from the old melting-pot myth, which she criticizes as a one-way street toward homogenized "Anglicization." In place of that cultural dead end, she joyously envisions "four-lane boulevards everywhere, with traffic in both directions and stylish cultural jaywalkers always making their mark."

But Njeri would have done well to examine that vision for contradictions. While espousing a culturally mongrelized society on one hand, she insists that African Americans must maintain cultural integrity on the other. There must be a way to do both, she says, but she never quite elucidates how. Doesn't "traffic in both directions" undermine the legitimacy of "cultural integrity"? Later, Njeri blames the "White Establishment" for using racial differences as a means of defining power and privilege. But she spends her whole book showing how people of other races do the same thing, demonstrating that people of any color can assume labels when it serves their interest.

Finally, when defendant Du is put on five-year probation from a 10-year sentence in a state prison, she concedes that the sentence is fair. But she later asserts that during the trial, it was Latasha who had been tried for her own death and found guilty, victimized by class biases and stereotypes of the "model minority" vs. the "shiftless Black."

The author isn't the only one contradicting herself when it comes to sticky racial issues; so do many of the activists and citizens she interviews. For example, Georgia state Sen. Ralph Abernathy III, sponsor of the Project RACE bill enacted by the state legislature in 1994, which recognizes a multiracial designation, calls for a colorblind millennium in one breath but in another declares, "I feel it is important that every race of people be acknowledged in their independent right." These contradictions highlight the competing human impulses at the center of the race debate - which is often less about color than it is about class or culture: We tend to associate with those whom, for whatever reason, we perceive as similar to ourselves. But we're also attracted to difference. So, what to do?