Busted in New York by Darryl Pickney
It's popular to compare any contemporary Black essayist to James Baldwin—perhaps because many reviewers simply haven't read enough Black essayists, and don't have much to compare them too. Admittedly, some of these comparisons are apt. Perhaps most famously, Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me invited lots of comparison between him and Baldwin. It became such a popular talking point that in 2015, Vincent Cunningham wrote "Why Ta-Nehisis Coates Isn't Our James Baldwin." Cunningham points to the ways that Coates's perceived "negativity" is the result of the gap of time between his writing and Baldwin's, and Coates's focus on "corporeality," the body—something that now seems prescient, or perhaps more aware than most white people in the U.S. in 2014, many of whom doubtless still wanted to see the murder of Trayvon Martin as a tragic anomaly—distinguishes him from Baldwin. However, the comparison persists.
It's something of a feat, then, that Daryll Pickney's collection of essays, Busted in New York, resists any comparison to Baldwin, I think. This, despite the fact that the titular essay has something in common with part of Baldwin's famous "Equal in Paris," at least insofar as they have shared the all too common experience of being unjustly detained while / because of being Black.
Busted in New York has a distinct voice. Where Baldwin is often conversational and writes on the page very much as he spoke in interviews, Pickney often sweeps back to take on historical content in a way that reserves judgment, that leaves you feeling like you are seeing great swathes of history pass you by—until Pickney swoops back in to make sense of it. His account of the rise and fall of The Black Panther party is required reading for exactly this reason; often in America, we are used to seeing the Black Panthers painted through either an entirely negative (conservative) or positive lens, but Pickney steps back to provide a history of the party, its politics—and then returns to describe what he sees as fatal flaws in its leadership's gender essentialism.
His writing is concerned not just with politics but with what we might call Black intellectual life. Some of the writings in Busted in New York could be classified as reviews, of films and books and art. Even here, Pickney is careful to ground his own interests in relation to history, to where things stand now and where they have stood in the past. It's a terrific book, in part because it is so eclectic, collecting his work from across almost three decades. One early essay speaks passionately about the 1995 Million Man March, reporting its rhetoric and what Pickney sees as some of its failures. 1995 seems like a very long time ago, but Pickney's work makes it immediate and visceral.
This week, millions of Americans took to the streets to protest systematic racism, more specifically regarding anti-Black police brutality. They risked the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, as well as increased violence from various police forces. I don't know if I can add much to that conversation, aside from pointing to others who have said it better. If you're hoping to make a difference, I can point to Campaign Zero, which works to stop police violence. (Link here: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/). Others have made lists of readings and resources, all widely available online. I can say, with others, what shouldn't need saying, but very much does, as evidenced by the murders of Georgy Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others—that Black Lives Matter, and our policies need to be remade to reflect that. But the conversation here should be led by Black voices, which have been ignored for far too long. White people need to listen...and then to be very, very vocal to our public officials.
But I can't stop thinking about Pickney's book. I wish I had something more articulate to say about it, aside from the observation that his writing is beautiful. But what his work really gave me was this: Pickney is a talented writer, and a gay Black man living in America writing about Blackness, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to compare him to Baldwin for those reasons. But Pickney is not like Baldwin. His review of Moonlight, for whatever reason, is more willing to dish out unqualified enthusiasm than I think I've ever read in a Baldwin essay. Pickney's willingness to sift through historical intrigue and forego commentary for pages at a time is another distinguishing factor. In short, the comparison only works if you're not paying attention, if you're reading these authors as boxes to be checked off, if you're not appreciating their individualism, their nuance. It's too easy.
I think that lesson has widespread application. Because it's easy, too, to say their names—and to stop there. It's easy (for many white people, at least) to see the numbers and mourn the tragedy of anti-Black police brutality in this country as a system, as an unfortunate reality that requires reform—and to stop there. But it's overwhelming and important to remember that people are more than names, more than their news clippings, more than obituaries. Every person is an individual world, all their own. Thinking about that allows us to see writers for who they are, in all their peculiarities and nuance. More importantly, it allows us to see those who have been killed, those we have lost, and too appreciate the scope those tragedies. Only once we stop stereotyping and imagine what it's like to be on the receiving end of racist police violence can white people understand the need for immediate action, for bold and systematic change that acknowledges and honors what people have been saying, in writing and out loud, for so long: Black Lives Matter.
