White Boy: A Memoir
By Mark D. Naison, Ph.D., Professor of African and African-American Studies and Director of the Urban Studies Program at Fordham University. 256 pages. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 2002. $19.95.

For those who came of age in the 1950s and early 1960s, Mark Naison writes, "part of becoming American was becoming culturally 'black.'"

In this engaging and tough-minded memoir, Fordham's first white professor of African and African-American studies skillfully blends vivid storytelling with keen sociological analysis to discuss his career as an educator-activist, and to question all facile assumptions about race and identity.

Naison lovingly recalls his youth in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, where, like many of his peers in the then largely Jewish and Italian neighborhood, he admired black athletes and musicians without "seeing their blackness as socially significant." What was significant, of course, was Naison's budding fascination with black culture and history, an interest that inspired him to join Columbia University's chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) as an undergraduate and to get his first taste of success as an activist while organizing tenants in East Harlem.

As racial tensions in New York and throughout the country escalated during the 1960s, Naison became increasingly interested in civil rights and antiwar activism, joining Students for a Democratic Society and participating in marches, sit-ins, and several student takeovers of buildings on the Columbia campus. Without falling prey to cheap nostalgia or sentimentality, Naison expresses the apocalyptic character of the time—the threat of destruction and the possibility for transcendence, the rage and the hope that fueled his participation in these events.

Naison also reflects on his personal relationships. While at Columbia, he met and fell in love with Ruthie, a black woman, at a time when interracial relationships were more transgressive—and the target of more antagonism—than they are today. He relates the joys and trials of their six-year relationship, which served at once to bring him closer to the black community (he and Ruthie taught inner-city high school students during the summers, and her extended family welcomed him unreservedly) but further away from his parents (who, Naison laments, did not acknowledge the relationship and were part of the "white flight" from Crown Heights in the late '60s).

At times throughout White Boy, especially when discussing the Black Power movement and its effect on his work and personal relationships, Naison takes a critical look at his interest and identification with black culture. He also writes, sometimes self-critically, about the shortcomings of activist strategies that failed to promote "interracial solidarity."

After a brief and tumultuous involvement with the ill-fated Weathermen, Naison writes, he eschewed that group's more violent and confrontational tactics and gradually transformed himself from a "street-fighting revolutionary" into a serious academic with a steadfast commitment to social justice and community activism. He found in his research on the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, a group of white and black sharecroppers who joined forces in 1930s rural Alabama, an instructive parallel from which to draw hope and the patterns of his own resistance to racial polarization.

Naison writes: "Increasingly, I found that African-American history helped give me perspective on current issues. ... I was determined to stay suspended between black and white worlds and share what I learned with anyone who wanted to listen."

For more than three decades, since joining Fordham's fledgling Afro-American Institute in 1970 as one of the program's first professors, Naison has pursued his dual calling as an urban community activist and a scholar of African-American history. In the book's last three chapters, he recounts the history of black studies at Fordham, including the political challenges he and his colleagues faced in building the institute (which would become in 1976 the Department of Afro-American Studies) as well as his own personal anxieties and the tension he felt from those who were naturally skeptical of a white man teaching black studies. Readers interested in the University, or in the general development of higher education, will find this account inspiring.

Eventually, Naison came to understand his lifelong attraction to black culture as the necessary reclaiming of a suppressed part of his (and his country's) identity. That is the understanding he continues to share with his students. He writes: "Because we were willing to listen to many voices, and to see race from multiple vantage points …we created an environment where fighting racism, and exploring the meaning of racial differences, became a moral and political imperative and the center of a vibrant intellectual community."

Naison's shrewd and entertaining memoir is a soul-searching meditation on a quintessentially American subject.

—Ryan Stellabotte