Was Jay Gatsby Black?

Was this what Jay Gatsby looked like? Gatsby is also suspected of rape.

“A new way to read Gatsby”

“F. Scott Fitzgerald never explicitly states Jay Gatsby’s race.”

By Alonzo Vereen

Alonzo Vereen is the author of historically black: American icons who attended hbcus .

february 1, 2023

the atlantic

“… my students fought Gatsby from the beginning. the teenagers in my classroom—all children of color [sic] living in an impoverished rural community in south florida, many of them first-generation [sic] Americans whose parents had come from haiti, cuba, mexico, or guatemala—simply did not understand a majority of the words on the page. …

“and I’d launch into a reading of Nick Carraway’s opening narration: ‘Frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon.’ silence. eventually, one brave soul would raise a hand. ‘What’s “feigned”?’ …”

Steve Sailer writes: “Although Fitzgerald was already a huge celebrity in 1925, The Great Gatsby was a dud … until during WWII the government gave out hundreds of thousands of free copies of it to military men. For reasons that are still not well-understood, it galvanized young men worried about dying, and they came home to assign it to high school students.”

black supremacist fraud Alonzo Vereen then cites another black supremacist fraud, “Carlyle Van Thompson, a professor of african American and American literature at Medgar Evers college,” and author of the classic, 2004 work of black supremacist pseudo-scholarship, The Tragic black buck: racial masquerading in the American Literary Imagination, in support of his hoax.

Alonzo Vereen then cites a third black supremacist intellectual fraud, Janet Savage, in Jay Gatsby: a black man in Whiteface (2017). Savage’s jacket blurb follows below:

“What if Jay Gatsby is a black man passing as a White one? Jay Gatsby: a black man in Whiteface expounds upon the thesis that Jay Gatsby, the much beloved hero of The Great Gatsby, is a man of mixed black and White parentage who pretends and appears to be a White man. Through a close examination of the text, a review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life and letters, and a discussion of the racially charged climate of the Jazz Age, the book explains how America’s troubled conscience about race laces through the novel and that Fitzgerald wrote from his conflicting racial beliefs and his insider/outsider status to support the novel’s central theme: the doomed pursuit of the American Dream. Fitzgerald himself said that even the most enthusiastic contemporary reviewers failed to understand what the novel was about. It is often referred to as a novel where much is said by implication and ellipsis which must be weighed and measured to appreciate its artistic grandeur. Jay Gatsby: a black man in Whiteface does the weighing and measuring to see what we may have missed in a direct and fun prose style and provides easily accessible supporting annotation and bibliography so you can follow along.”

By Kylie
February 8, 2023

@Woodsie

“‘Reading challenging work is not to be shied away from in high school; expanding the vocabulary of students is what education is all about. And besides which, The Great Gatsby is short, anybody short of a moron should be able to plow through it.’”

“With all due respect, have you spent much time around young people and/or non-whites?

“It is shocking to an older person like me how ignorant they are. Even worse, by pandering to them as this moron does, any sense of curiosity they have about others unlike themselves or the past (i.e. pre-2000) is deadened or stunted. Making students feel good about themselves as the unformed and uninformed little ignoramuses that they are is the focus of education today. That and hating Whites of accomplishment.”

By Kylie
february 8, 2023

@Known Fact

Known Fact: “‘My wife annually taught Gatsby to inner city teen girls and it was a challenge, but she threw in tons of audio-visual stuff about the fashion, music, architecture and gang warfare of the period to bring it all to life.’”

“Exactly the way it should be taught to those students.

“I was replying to Woodsie’s comment:

“‘…The Great Gatsby is short, anybody short of a moron should be able to plow through it.’”

“I strongly disagree with this statement. I took to it like a duck to water but I was already reading H. James so sophisticated prose was not a problem for me.

Woodsie would do well to recall the first two sentences of this lovely novel:

“‘In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”

N.S.: I had no trouble reading it in 1982, and I hadn’t had any advantages.

N.S. to @Kylie

What garbage. It’s the banality of contemporary gutter culture, starring black megalomania. (Steve: Your royalties are in the mail.) the atlantic, the new yorker, and new york magazine all simply truck in dnc talking points.

The earliest instance of this game I’m familiar with—blackifying White characters in fiction—was of a White woman who wrote a “thing,” Was Huck black?, in 1993.

In the early 1980s, during my university days in West Germany, I was homesick, so I read lots of American fiction and listened to lots of Aaron Copland. That period included reading The Great Gatsby, “the great American novel.” However, I can recall very little of it, except that I was underwhelmed by it. But the notion that Gatsby was black is ludicrous.

The problem here is that Medgar Evers is a black supremacist craphole, and black supremacist, affirmative action “scholars” are not held to any intellectual or moral standards. And so, they just make up stuff, as do their White “allies” in support of them.

I found Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, unreadable.

However, I have loved other works by Scotty Fitzgerald. At SUNY Stony Brook, my philosophy professor, Lee Miller, had us read Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Four Fists” in a senior seminar on “Love and Death.”

It was about how a snobby young man had become a wise, rich, middle-aged one, thanks to four men who had straightened him out, along the way, by punching him in the face. (I’ve tried the same thing, more or less, but with little success.)

I also saw Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976) in English at the German-American Institute, but found it awful. The next day, I borrowed Fitzgerald’s eponymous, unfinished novel. (It was about Irving Thalberg (1899-1936), who was MGM’s official number two man during the 1930s. Thalberg held writers in contempt, but was good at charming them, as he did Fitzgerald, making them think he cared about them.)

Fitzgerald was about halfway through the book when he died of a heart attack. The version I borrowed included a rich section of the author’s notes. I concluded that Fitzgerald had painted himself into a corner, and could not satisfactorily finish the ms., which may have killed him. The problem with the picture was that the studio had hired an Englishman, Harold Pinter, to write the script. Although many of the phrases came straight from Fitzgerald’s ms., Pinter knew the words, but not the music.

Thanks: Kylie