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In 'Bunk,' Kevin Young explores uniquely American, uniquely racist hoaxes

"Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News" by Kevin Young
"Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News" by Kevin Young (Graywolf)

Most people probably know that the word “bunk” is short for “bunkum,” meaning insincere talk, claptrap or humbug. Fewer people are likely familiar with the word’s etymology, coined out of racial unrest in 1820 in relation to the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri as a slave state. That year, on the floor of the 16th Congress, even though an immediate vote had been called, North Carolina Rep. Felix Walker insisted on filibustering in favor of Missouri’s slave state status in the name of Buncombe, his home county.

If there’s bunk around, then it probably needs debunking, and Kevin Young does the job admirably in “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News.” Drawing on incidents and etymologies such as the one above, he anatomizes the lengthy American and international history of entertaining deceptions — from P.T. Barnum to Rachel Dolezal, from Edgar Allan Poe to Nasdijj, from the Hitler Diaries to Jerzy Kosinski — and does so in a way that reveals and critiques the racist underpinnings of many such notorious fabrications.

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Young acknowledges various European hoaxes while raising the central question: “Is there something especially American about the hoax?” Exploring the answers, he continually returns to the multifarious ways in which “an eighteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment, with its mistrust of science and history of hoaxes, could actually join with the Enlightenment and its love of systems to spawn the pseudosciences of the nineteenth century — particularly those that sought to create not just taxonomies but hierarchies between the races.”

Young — the author of 11 collections of poetry, as well as the nonfiction book “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness” — serves as the poetry editor of The New Yorker and the director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His copious research, his talents in literary analysis and his associative skills as a poet are on acrobatic display as he argues convincingly that the hoax is all too often an underrecognized mechanism for maintaining white — and to a concurrent extent, male — supremacy.

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He writes, for instance, about Joice Heth, the black woman that P.T. Barnum exploited for an act in 1835 in which “she pretended to be George Washington’s nursemaid, which would have made her 161 years old,” and points out later how, “Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, often through the very body she supposedly nurtured and wet-nursed with, Heth stands as one of a long line of black women forced to prove their womanity.

Throughout, Young makes elucidating comparisons across the ages, such as how the “penny press,” which fanned the flames of hucksterism in the 1800s, finds its parallel in the internet today insofar as “it too implements chaos as a going concern.” Or how the fraudulent “girl wonder” Opal Whiteley — who self-published “The Fairyland Around Us” at 22 and “dressed as an obligatory ‘Indian’ ” in the 1920s — has her parallel in the plagiarism case of novelist Kaavya Viswanathan in the early 2000s.

Admittedly, hoaxes are a shaggy subject, yet one wishes that Young’s book were a bit more trim, as he turns and returns to subjects across chapters in a nonlinear and at times perplexing and repetitive fashion. As a result, brilliant as its parts are, Young’s book as a whole comes off as less of a spotlight illuminating its dim-by-design subject in a cohesive glow and more of a sparser set of Christmas lights — bright spots placed along a strand with perhaps a bit too much murkiness in between for the pattern to come through as clearly as might be desirable.

Nevertheless, his profound assertion that “the hoax changes history and also the future” shines through; he writes: “It’s the worst kind of twofer: the hoax is ultimately a matter of life and death.”

Young’s groundbreaking study of spectacles and spectacular falsehoods reaches its audience roughly one year after the election of Donald Trump. Obviously, Young was hard at work on this book well before it became clear that a man who routinely denigrates minorities and women and blithely dismisses inconvenient aspects of reality would hold the highest office in the United States.

Although the book doesn’t center on the Trump presidency, Young does analyze how significant portions of Melania Trump’s 2016 Republican National Convention speech were stolen from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech at the Democratic National Convention, and how Mrs. Trump’s status as an immigrant from Slovenia was “championed in a way the candidate would explicitly deny Muslims and Mexicans.”

As we enter the second year of the Trump administration — with its railing against “fake news,” its failure to unilaterally condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville and its assertion that climate change is itself a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese — this book could scarcely be more timely or useful.

Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel ‘Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.’

‘Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News’

Kevin Young, Graywolf, 480 pages, $30

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