PositiveThe New YorkerGayle, drawing on his experience of growing up Black in Oklahoma, offers an account that celebrates African American success ... Gayle’s response to these challenging questions amounts to a series of oft-asserted maxims: one can be both fully Black and fully Creek; white supremacy is the causal force that drives the histories he presents; telling Black Creek stories today can help us see the American racial landscape differently. And so Austin’s family story appears in the heroic mode we’ve come to associate with school lessons focussed on Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. It’s a celebratory case for Black Creeks, alert to the practical benefits of Muscogee citizenship and the Oklahoma opportunities for Black migrants from the South. Indian Territory provided a range of Black people what the United States could not: a secure place for a new American dream..Absent from the celebration, though, are non-Black Muscog.ee people, with their own tangle of beliefs and ambitions. The few who appear in Gayle’s book stand on the wrong side of racism ... Just get past that white supremacy, Gayle suggests hopefully, and everything will be well. It all sounds like a progressive move toward an anti-racist alliance. Yet white supremacy offers up multiple forms of negation—targeting Blacks, Jews, Natives, immigrants—that can be pitched against one another. And Native arguments and attitudes can’t be reduced to a photocopy of an overlord’s ideology ... Gayle is not wrong to name Claude Cox and Alexander Posey as anti-Black racists. The more interesting question, however, is how their racism was shaped by concerns for their people, their polities, and their dwindling land.
