Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989.

Stanley Crouch, former Village Vioce critic, is a hard man to pin down. Is he liberal, neo-liberal, neo-conservative, or what? Whatever he'd call himself, bet it's not conservative, so why am I writing about his Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews 1979-1989 Oxford University Press, 296 pp., $22.95) in Right Books"? Well, judge for yourself.

Mr. Crouch claims we're living in the Age of Redefinition, and that he, as a black writer disillusioned with much of the contemporary Afro-American ethos, is part of an "undeclared lost generation." Such descriptions suggest a writer in transition, and the 37 pieces in Hanging Judge confirm it. Stanley Crouch's thoughts are unsettled, but his book may provide at least a sense of an American community that right-wing white folks are unlikely ever to know.

Crouch wants blacks to be judged by the same standard applied to every other group-nothing more or less. Racism is not a justification for the ideology and politics of victimhood. Thats a contrarian position for a black commentator, Thomas Sowell and Walter Wilhams excepted. And when writing about the politics of race, Crouch's literary voice can seem strained, world-weary. Much of his best writing (his clearest phrasing and most poetic imagery) is about jazz. The universality of music excites the Crouch imagination, whereas the particularity of black politics occasionally depresses it.

In Rome for a shindig called Umbria Jazz, Crouch awakens one morning to await the glorious Italian sun.

All of the notes, timbres, rhythms, and harmonies of the festival ... the feelings of awe and mystery, blood sacrifice and integrity that resonate from the cathedrals and museums of Perugia, Assisi, and Florence were moving from my memory to my spirit, and it was fully an hour and a half before dawn.... [Men] ... loading a white newspaper truck . . . spoke in the sleep-laden, grumbling, dictatorial-even celebratory-Italian that makes so much of vowels that the most mundane order can sound like kindling for an aria.

But let's talk about the unharmonious Spike Lee. Crouch's review of Lee's Do the Right Thing ("Do the Race Thing"), which caused a furor when it appeared in The Village Voice, remains the most devastating critique of that dishonest movie by anybody, white or black. Acknowledging Lee's technical ability and sense of comedy, Crouch goes on to attack the filmmaker's intelligence and sensitivity, and to call Lee a propagandist," the movie "the sort of rancid fairy tale one expects of the racist . . ." Don't even imagine such comments didn't cost Crouch a lot. And he was just getting warmed up:

Intellectual cowardice, opportunism, and the itch for riches by almost any means necessary define the demons within the black community. The demons are presently symbolized by those black college teachers so intimidated by career threats that they don't protest students bringing Louis Farrakhan on campus, by men like Vernon Mason who sold out a good reputation in a cynical bid for political power by pimping real victims of racism in order to smoke-screen Tawana Brawley's lies, by the crack dealers who have wrought unprecedented horrors, and by Afro-fascist race-baiters like Public Enemy, who perform on the soundtrack to Do the Right Thing. Hard as he is on Spike Lee, Mr. Crouch is not nearly hard enough on Jesse Jackson, whom Crouch calls a leader in the mold of a Kennedy or a King. (But, Stanley, those men had jobs!) Crouch recognizes Jackson's weakness for self-mythologizing, and quite properly notes the perennial candidate's ability to motivate young people to commitments for politics and against drugs, but he fails to see that Jackson is a motivational speaker, not an executive in the making. Other essays take the reader inside continents of black experience both dark and bright, often in surprising ways. I recommend African Queen," a review of West with the Night and a tribute to its author, Beryl Markham. I don't know where Crouch is heading in his muddled pieces about homosexuality, and I don't recommend them. But Crouch really hit his stride in "l, the Jury," in a sense the books title story.

Bernie Goetz shot four black muggers and seemed, Crouch writes, "to have become the Gerry Cooney of urban America, the white hope on whose shoulders rest the burdens of contemporary Caucasian uneasiness" about black crime. Other black intellectuals simply saw another example of white racism, but Crouch saw more. Citing recent examples of blacks lionized by whites, Crouch maintains white people aren't troubled by Negroes per se. Their nemesis is the violent criminal who is too often construed as emblematic of the black underclass." I haven't space to quote them, but Crouch details the facts and illusions, black and white, about crime and poverty in the inner city. Rather than despairing and looking to city hall or to Washington for solutions, Crouch embraces-and quotes other blacks in support-a black work ethic that rejects "the defeatist sneering at destiny rather than wrestling with it."

Over the years, I've noticed that black subway riders tend to read three kinds of literature: the black press and authors, tabloids like the National Enquirer, and the Bible. Here's hoping I'll be seeing less of Frantz Fanon, less about Cosby's daughter's drug problems, and more of Stanley Crouch. There can never be too much Bible reading.