A few weeks ago I mentioned the latest memoir revealed to be a fraud, “Love and Consequences: A Memoir for Hope and Survival,” written by Margaret Seltzer under the name Margaret B. Jones. The memoir portrayed a multiracial girl surviving cinematic mean streets; Seltzer grew up in affluent and banal Sherman Oaks.

The publisher recalled the book, but John Gorenfeld at Alternet managed to obtain a copy.

Gorenfeld calls the book “cartoonishly racist,” and from his excerpts it’s easy to see where he is coming from:

Seltzer places herself in a ghetto battlefield that could have been a video game mission in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. “We were smoking niggas,” she concludes, after spilling a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor for a dead comrade, “sending them to heaven every day.”

Tipping the 40: almost every under-35 hipster, stoner, or frat boy on a liquor run has at one time trivialized important social problems by joshing about this fabled street rite. Here this Caucasian joke is made flesh, as the amber liquid burns Jones’ throat. A “big homie smiled at me,” she recalls, “and then slipped the remaining cups over the neck of the Hennessey bottle …”

Read the whole article; it’s full of crap like that. Gorenfeld also points to some pretty funny non-racial tells:

Another chapter begins with a dead giveaway to any native Los Angeleno. An August day is being “cooled” by a “touch of Santa Ana wind.” I can understand why a New Yorker would miss it. But as we know out here, these “devil winds” are hot. They “make your nerves jump and your skin itch,” Raymond Chandler once wrote, and “every booze party ends in a fight.” Now that’s what an L.A. underworld should sound like.

As a 38-year veteran of Southern California I have to wonder what kind of moron who grew up in Sherman Oaks could write that.

The publishers loved it. Pre-release reviews loved it. The New York Times, prior to breaking the hoax story, gushed. Why? Was it really gripping? Or did it simply confirm the preconceived notions these cultural elites had amassed? You can spin it liberal (the affluent and whites are trained by a racist culture to view African-Americans as violent and criminal) or spin it conservative (liberal race guilt makes dupes of us all), but the bottom line is that until very late in the book’s marketing nobody in the worlds of publishing or journalism seemed to be willing to exercise critical judgment about a story ostensibly written by a person of color. Why?

Via Racialicious.

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