NONFICTION - June 18, 1995

TESTIMONY: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity edited by Natasha Tarpley (Beacon Press: $40 cloth, $16 paperback; 304 pp.) It’s been 40 years since John Howard Griffin darkened his skin, traveled the South, and attempted to embody for fellow whites, through the 1961 publication of his searing book “Black Like Me,” the black experience in America. Times have changed, to be sure, but it’s as hard today as in Griffin’s era for a member of one race to imagine himself in the shoes of another. That’s where books like “Testimony” come in--allowing readers of any color to see that the apparently vast differences between races and cultures often mask a deeper, all-too-human similarity, namely the drive to be recognized as an individual. In “Untitled,” for example, hip-hop journalist Toure describes his journey to the conviction “my community is myself”; ostracized by other blacks at college for socializing with fellow prep-school graduates, he writes that African Americans “share a history but react individually: there have been as many Black selves as Black people, all valid, all Black.” Tarpley has gathered a wide-ranging collection of views, ranging from New Age-ish to militant, thoughtful to tender, guilt-ridden to just plain angry, but most are ultimately concerned with the tension between individual and group desires, among rights, wrongs and responsibilities. The black child of white adoptive parents is cold-shouldered for being insufficiently black in culture; a dark-skinned woman is presumed Native African; a light-skinned man presumed ready to pass for white; a middle-class black is mocked for speaking differently; an independent-minded black for failing to toe the expected party line. That’s black behavior with regard to other blacks; add some of the ordinary white-on-black experiences recounted here--stopped by the police for carrying one’s computer home at night, looked at suspiciously by whites numerous times a day--and you know why growing up black in this country can never be easy. “Now I’m a poet,” writes Minkah Makalani, college and prison graduate: “slicing air with words/painting lives college and cosby/said to forget./but what would you be/had you weaved through that/asteroid belt of 9mm slugs?”