At The End Of His Rope

By Jack E. White

NOTES OF A HANGING JUDGE

by Stanley Crouch

Oxford University; 275 pages; $22.95

Stanley Crouch is the latest black social commentator to work a vein first excavated by the journalist George S. Schuyler during the 1940s: the scold posing as a voice of intellectual integrity. A self-proclaimed defector from the black nationalist excesses that he blames for the collapse of the civil rights struggle, Crouch likens himself to the freebooter Henry Morgan, "who sent many of his former pirate buddies to the gallows, certain that they deserved what they got." In this collection of essays and reviews, however, the former Village Voice staff writer too often allows his insights into the self-victimization that has come to dominate the black, women's and homosexual liberation movements to degenerate into viperish personal attacks.

Thus Crouch dismisses black filmmaker Spike Lee as a "middle-class would-be street Negro." He puts down Toni Morrison's moving novel Beloved as no more than an effort "to enter American slavery into the big-time martyr ratings contest." He castigates James Baldwin for undermining the moral basis of the civil rights movement with essays that "transformed white America into Big Daddy and the Negro movement into an obnoxious, pouting adolescent demanding the car keys."

When he is able to restrain his rhetoric, Crouch argues cogently that blacks imprison themselves when they view their history as one mainly of oppression. He sees things white observers often miss: Jesse Jackson is most convincing when he demands "the best of those who live in the worst conditions"; Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitism appeals to many blacks because they envy the clout of Jews; such artists as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and writer Albert Murray have blended the traditions of Africans, Europeans, Native Americans and Asians into "the rich mulatto textures of American culture." When he sticks to the issues, Crouch is a provocative social analyst. But when he sets out to make his enemies walk the plank, it is Crouch who goes overboard.