BOOKS
147
arrested in 1982 for shooting out the windows of more than a thousand
parked cars.
Race Matters
and
Culture Matters
similarly attempt to stir
up the repair business by unnecessarily smashing things.
If
our aim is to
understand the world in its full complexity, we do not need more and
more arguments on the priority of particular social factors. Yes, race
matters, but not by itself. Rather it matters as part of a society with
extraordinary wealth and social mobility, an independent judiciary,
complicated regional differences, a dominant two-party political sys–
tem, and many other factors. To title one's book
Race Matters
is to
declare at the outset a turn away from the complicated reality in favor
of an illusory simplification. The same applies,
mutatis mutandis,
to
Culture Matters
and all the other
My Theme Matters
titles.
The titles are perhaps sometimes imposed by publishers with their
eel-like attraction to the carcasses of dead ideas and rotting tropes. Still,
an author bears some responsibility for the title of his work, and the "X
Matters!" title sometimes seems a fair gauge of authorial self-impor–
tance. For Mr. West to title his book so after two hundred years of other
books that aimed to establish how much, for better or worse, race mat–
ters in American life demonstrates some insouciance. Clearly the title
implies
Mr. West Matters!
For Mr. Harrison and Mr. Huntington to
declare
Culture Matters,
is to teach the anthropologists of the last two
hundred years a lesson in humility.
How best to hasten this vogue to its overdue end? Perhaps by remind–
ing writers that few things matter so much as a good title.
As to
Race Matters,
the most thought-provoking page in the book is
the flyleaf that notes, "Cornell West is Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., University
Professor at Harvard University." That a writer as blithely indifferent to
historical accuracy and as determined to push a racially divisive agenda
as Mr. West should occupy such a chair is worth pondering.
Peter W. Wood
