In his new book, Bunk, a cultural history of hoaxes in America, the poet Kevin Young argues that the popularity of the Sun’s story “owed much to its re-creating on the Moon what many white readers believed could be found at home.” With the hoax’s distinction of ethnic groupings among the bat-men, he says, “it is tempting to see the lunar humanoids as hierarchical in the ways white eugenicists characterized races on earth.” For Young, the implication of race at the center of what is sometimes described as America’s first great hoax is no accident. As he proposes near the end of Bunk, “You could go so far as to say that the hoax is racism’s native tongue.”
One afternoon this past summer, I met Young in the lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, which he has directed since 2016. It was a cloudless day, hot enough that I was sweating under my sport coat. Young, more intelligently, was wearing a plaid shirt rolled up to the elbows. On one arm he wore an Apple Watch, on the other a leather cuff.
Like Bunk, which was longlisted for the National Book Award two months before its publication, next week, Young has had his share of precocious success. He won an award from the American Academy of Poets during his freshman year at Harvard, and the poems he wrote to satisfy his thesis requirement were selected for publication in the National Poetry Series. Now forty-seven, he possesses a résumé that reads like a passport stamped on a Grand Tour of institutional high culture, with stops at Harvard, Stanford (a Stegner Fellowship), Brown (an MFA), Emory (a named professorship), and the Schomburg. He has published ten collections of his own poems, edited eight volumes of others’, and, with Bunk, written two massive volumes of nonfiction. Capping off this run, he has just taken over as the poetry editor of The New Yorker.
And yet while Young has accomplished enough, quickly enough, to suggest a man in a hurry, in person there is nothing rushed about his manner. As we headed out into the gentrified neighborhood around the Schomburg in search of a late lunch, he walked slowly, his weight on his heels, and took the time to point out local landmarks with the proprietary authority of an alderman.
After settling into a red banquette at a local African-French bistro, Young ordered a pork chop with haricots verts and a sweet fruit mocktail. He told me that he’d started thinking about Bunk before Donald Trump merited a joke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, let alone a desk in the Oval Office. He traces his interest in hoaxes to a boss he worked for in college who was later implicated in a number of scams. Back then, Young had shoulder-length dreadlocks and a goatee that traversed his upper chin in a narrow strip before unfurling in a rakish inverted plume. He maintained the dreads into his thirties—“It was important to have them and have them be a fact,” he said—but by 2001 they’d gotten “heavy on the head” and he lopped them off. (An inveterate collector, he still has them in a box somewhere.)
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