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ralowe's review against another edition
3.0
when these essays were written in the '60s murray was a maddeningly inscrutable commentator, inscrutable to me at least because i'm stubborn and know he was a tuskegee airman who continued to serve in the US air force after the bomb dropped, and published the first of these essays around the time of malcolm x's assassination. all these things were spinning around and despite the strength of his voice he introduces trouble to the reception of a number of black freedom ideas opening up in that moment. his suspicions feel eerily similar to my own but i flinch because i'm unsure of where he's coming from exactly. i mean he strikes me as conservative but i love for example his term "survey technician" articulating his distrust of social science. one claim i have no problem dismissing is his suggestion that social science is merely bad science. but as far as i'm concerned all science is bad science. murray passed in 2013 and i wonder what his thoughts were about these essays later on in life. his embrace of US statehood and nation is the side of what all makes me uncomfortable in probable coeval hortense spillers embrace of "american." i wonder what he thought of trayon martin, #blacklivesmatter and these cyclically resuscitated (tragic) projects for failed incorporation.
moustaki's review against another edition
5.0
This should be required reading, especially in 2020. Id give it 6 stars if I could. There's a couple essays that seem to not fit, like the short one on Harlem architecture, but the good stuff here is REAL good.
ostrowk's review against another edition
4.0
In The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture, Albert Murray issues spirited “counter-statements” to what he sees as troubling strains of culture and politics in the 1960s and 70s. He takes to task, for example, the Afrocentrism then popular in Negro communities. The problem, Murray believes, is that Americans mostly misunderstand American identity. Murray’s arguments build on the work of cultural critic Constance Rourke. In the “incontestably mulatto” species of homo Americanus (22), Rourke names four component parts: Yankee, backwoodsman, Indian, and Negro; she recognized in each a “mood of disseverance” (16): the willingness to break from a given constraint in search of something better. She writes, “Their comedy, their irreverent wisdom, their sudden changes and adroit adaptations provided emblems for a pioneer people who required resilience as a prime trait” (16, emphasis mine). For Murray, these characteristics of play define what it means to be an American because America is at its core an experiment—democratic tinkering toward the promises of life, of liberty, of happiness and its pursuit. And experiments, in his view, require the kind of improvisational “idiom that reflects [an]...open, robust, and affirmative disposition to diversity and change…smoothly geared to open-minded improvisation…Improvisation after all is experimentation” (53). Murray finds this idiom nowhere more fully or elegantly realized than in the history and present of Black life and art—particularly the blues and jazz.
val_halla's review against another edition
2.0
The title of this book really piqued my interest, but I ended up being very disappointed. Described as a collection of essays on black history and culture (as it is American history and culture, of course), I had assumed the essays would each cover a different event or issue. Instead, the book read more like a rant, one that was interesting for the first section, but ended up repeating the same points over and over. I had hoped to learn more about the hidden history of American minorities, but instead I had to suffer through yet another textbook-style monologue. To be fair, I gave up reading thoroughly after the first third of the book, and simply skimmed the rest to see if Murray ever brought up some new information (he didn't).
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